0:00:002017 Personality 01: Introduction
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:14well you might as well start by writing down that URL I'll show it to you again0:00:23at the end of class that's where the syllabus is the syllabus will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the class the there's a text this0:00:38is it it consists of readings from a larger text I use it because it's old but a lot of the theorists that we're going to talk about are also old and so0:00:53I found this particular text accurate and many of the people that we're going to talk about are very a very sophisticated views of personality and I0:01:10think that it does you a disservice unless you read something that's sufficiently sophisticated so that you actually understand at least to some0:01:21degree what the people that were going to study we're talking about we might as0:01:30well start I suppose with a definition of personality it's hard to define something that's that general because when you're speaking about human beings0:01:43it's not that simple to figure out what constitutes personality and what constitutes something else but so I'm going to hit at it from a couple of0:01:55different perspectives and while I'm doing so I would like you also to consider the nature of what you're going to learn a human personality is0:02:11essentially unfathomable human beings are unbelievably complicated and and we're nested in systems that are also unbelievably complicated there are more0:02:21patterns of connections between neurons in your brain then there are subatomic particles in the universe by a substantial margin you can look up Gerald Adelman if you want to find out about that and so it's0:02:36not unreasonable to point out that you're the most complicated thing we know of by many orders of magnitude and the probability that you can understand0:02:49yourself in anything approaching totality is extraordinarily low so this makes the study of personality something very daring and hopeless and complicated0:03:08now we're going to cycle through a very large number of theorists and what you'll find is that although there are commonalities between them there are0:03:17market differences and so then you might ask yourself well what's the point of0:03:26studying this sequence of theorists and ideas if there's no point of agreement between them and I would say first there are points of agreement between them0:03:39although personality hasn't advanced to the point where I would say that we have a homogeneous theory that's free of internal contradictions but I would also0:03:51say that personality is a hybrid discipline it's partly science but it's0:04:03partly engineering the clinical element of it I would say is more like engineering and what engineers do is try to do things they try to make something0:04:13happen and they are informed by theory but the point is still to build something and when you're working as a clinical psychologist and most of the0:04:23initial fears that we'll discuss for the first little more than a third to a half of the course or clinical theorists they're trying to build something and0:04:33they're dealing with very very difficult conceptual problems because they're either trying to cure mental disorders or maybe even0:04:45unhappiness and trying to bring about health and the problem with that is that it's not a straightforward thing to define a mental disorder from a0:04:57scientific perspective because what's healthy mentally and what's not is partly social judgment and it's partly socially constructed and it partly has0:05:11to do with norms and it partly has to do with ideals because you might also say that to be healthy is to be normal but you could also say that to be healthy is0:05:22to be ideal and then of course you run into the problem of having to conceptualize an ideal and it isn't self-evident that science is capable of0:05:36conceptualizing an ideal because ideals tend to fall into the domain of moral judgments say or philosophical judgments rather than scientific judgments per se0:05:48so what I would say to you is that it would be worthwhile to approach this0:05:58course as if you were an engineer of the human spirit an engineer of your own spirit to begin with but also an engineer of the spirits of other people0:06:12because as you interact with other people you inevitably tell them what you want and what you don't want when they give you what you want and what you0:06:25admire you respond positively to them you pay attention to them you smile at them you focus you focus your thoughts on them you interact with them and you0:06:36reward them for acting in a particular manner and when they don't respond the way that you want then you punish them with a look or by turning away or by0:06:48rejecting their friendship or when you're a child by refusing to play for them play with them and so we're engaged in the co-creation0:06:57of personalities our own and others and that also brings up the same question0:07:06what is it that we are all collectively trying to be and trying to create I0:07:17suspect that you all have the experience of falling short of the ideal an ideal that you hold for yourself or an ideal that other people hold for you I suspect0:07:28that you all feel the negative consequences of falling short of that ideal Freud would conceptualize that as the super-ego imposing its judgment on0:07:43the ego you being the ego the super-ego being a hybrid I suppose of external0:07:53forces and also your internalization of those judgments and forces now0:08:04personality per se I would say has these elements of ideal and has structural0:08:15elements of the way as well and we're going to talk about those more in the second half of the class the structural elements can be lined up and outlined0:08:25more scientifically the second half of the class concentrates more on physiology brain physiology and on statistical approaches to the0:08:37description of personality I suppose you might say that that outlines the territory the course is called personality and its transformations0:08:48because we have personalities that's who you are now but our personalities are also capable of transformation of change I mean obviously we think about that is0:09:02learning some of that might be regarded as factual learning and some of it might be regarded as learning how to perceive and0:09:14behave and I would say that the clinical psychologists that will cover to begin with are much more concerned with the nature of the implicit structures that0:09:30shape your perceptions and also the implicit structures that shape your behaviors and how they're integrated in relationship to your negative emotion0:09:43health and well-being whereas the thinkers in the second half are more concerned about laying out the structural elements of those features0:09:54and relating them to underlying se mechanistic phenomena making the Assumption which seems warranted that there's some relationship between your0:10:05personality and the manner in which your brain functions I'm going to try to provide you with a meta-narrative that will help you unite these different0:10:18theories I've often found it useful when I'm trying to remember something to have a story to hang the facts on otherwise you're faced with the necessity of doing0:10:28nothing but memorization and it isn't obvious to me that memorization actually constitutes knowledge what constitutes knowledge is the generation of a0:10:39cognitive structure that enables you to conduct yourself more appropriately in life and so I suppose you might say that of course in psychology you could argue0:10:51that a course in psychology especially in personality is a course in Applied wisdom as well assuming that wisdom is in part your capacity to understand0:11:02yourselves so that you don't so that you don't present too much of an intolerable mystery to yourself and also to understand others so that you can0:11:13predict their behavior understand their motivations negotiate with them listen to them and formulate joint games with them so that you can integrate0:11:27yourself reasonably well with another person and with a family and in society0:11:38well the structural elements of personality might be regarded as the implicit structures that govern your perception and that tilt you towards0:11:50certain kinds of behaviors I can give you some examples we can talk about the Big Five model just briefly the Big Five personality model is a statistical model0:12:00which we'll cover in detail trade by trade partner partly during the second half of the course the way that the Big Five was generated was that its tread0:12:13being generated over about 50 years that personality psychologists gathered together adjectives with in the English language first that were used to0:12:22describe human beings as many adjectives as they could collect and then subjected them to a process called factor analysis and what factor analysis does is enable0:12:34you statistically to determine in some sense how similar adjectives are to one another so for example if you gave 1,000 people a list of adjectives to describe0:12:48themselves with and one of the adjectives was happy and another of the adjectives was social you'd find that those who rated themselves high unhappy0:12:58would also rate themselves high on social and those who rated themselves low unhappy would also rate themselves low on social and by looking at those0:13:08patterns of covariation you can determine what the essential dimensions are of human personality one of the dimensions is roughly happiness that's0:13:19extraversion another dimension is neuroticism it's a negative emotion dimension so if you ask someone if they're anxious and they score high say0:13:31on a scale of 1 to 7 they're also likely to score on another item that says that they're sad and it turns out that negative0:13:40emotions clump together and so that people who experience more of one negative emotion have a propensity to experience more of all of them there's0:13:49another dimension called agreeableness and agreeable people are self-sacrificing compassionate and polite if you're dealing with an0:14:00agreeable person they don't like conflict they care for other people if you're dealing with an agreeable person they're likely to put your concerns0:14:10ahead of theirs they're non competitive and cooperative it's a dimension where women are women score more highly than men on agreeableness across cultures0:14:22including those cultures where the largest steps have been taken towards producing an egalitarian social circumstance like Scandinavia actually0:14:31the gender differences in personality there are larger than they are anywhere else another trait is conscientiousness conscientiousness is an excellent trait0:14:42if you want to do well in in school and in work especially if you're a manager an administrator I can't say we understand a lot about conscientiousness0:14:52although it it reliably emerges from factor analytic studies of adjectives groups across different countries conscientious people are diligent industrious and orderly they're orderliness tilts them towards political0:15:04conservatism by the way because it turns out that your inbuilt temperament your inbuilt personality which constitutes a set of filters through which you view the world also alters the manner in which you process0:15:18information and influences the way that you vote and so you might say and I do believe that this is true or we've been doing a lot of research on this as of0:15:27late the more accurate a measure you take of someone's political beliefs the more you find that personality is what's predicting them and I think that's a0:15:39reasonable thing to think about because you know you have to you have to figure out ways of simplifying the world right because you just can't do everything and so people are specialized they have0:15:50specialized niches that they occupy you can think about them as social niches can niche is a place where your particular skills would serve to maintain you and so if you're extroverted you're going to look for a0:16:02social niche because you like to be around people and if you're introverted you're going to spend much more time on your own and so if you're an introverted person for example you're going to want a job where you're not selling and where0:16:14you're not surrounded by groups of people who are making social demands on you all the time because it'll wear you out whereas if you're extroverted that's just exactly what you want and so the0:16:23extrovert sees the world as a place of social opportunity and the introvert sees the world as a place to retreat from and spend time alone and it turns0:16:33out that both of those modes of being are valid that the issue at least to some degree is whether or not you're fortunate enough to match your0:16:42temperament with the demands of the environment and I suppose also whether you're fortunate enough fortunate enough so that you're born in an era where there actually is a niche for your particular temperament because it isn't0:16:54necessarily the case that that will be the case imagine that all of these temperamental dimensions vary because of evolutionary pressure right so there's a distribution of extraversion a normal distribution0:17:06most people are somewhere in the middle and then as you go out towards the extremes there are fewer and fewer people and what that means is that on average across large spans of time there have been environments that match every0:17:21single position on that distribution with most most of the environments matching the center because otherwise we wouldn't have evolved that way and so sometimes being really extroverted is going to work well for you in a minority0:17:33of environments a minority of niches and sometimes it's just going to be a catastrophe I suspect for example that if you live in a tyrannical society0:17:42where any sign of of personally oriented activity is likely to get you in trouble that being extroverted and low in neuroticism would it be a very good idea0:17:54because you're gonna be mouthy and happy and saying a lot of things unable to keep your thoughts to yourself and you're going to be relatively fearless now I don't know that for sure because we've haven't done the studies0:18:06that precisely match temperamental proclivity to environmental demand but you get what I mean so conscientious people anyways0:18:16conscientious people are industrious and orderly we know a little bit about orderliness it seems to be associated strangely enough with disgust0:18:25sensitivity which I suppose isn't that surprising you know if you take an orderly person then you put them in a messy kitchen they respond with disgust0:18:34and want nothing more than to straighten it all out and organize it and clean it and there's tremendous variability and orderliness and as I said orderliness0:18:44predicts political conservatism it's not the only thing but it's certainly one of the things the correlation between conscientiousness and and grades is0:18:56about 0.4 it's about 16% of the variance it's it's the second best predictor of university grades after intelligence and we'll talk about intelligence during0:19:06this course too intelligence is actually a relatively straightforward concept I don't think I'll get into it today but conscientious people they're0:19:15industriousness and they're orderliness makes them schedule their time so they make efficient use of their time they use schedules and that sort of thing we haven't been able to figure out anything about the underlying biology or0:19:27psychology of industriousness we've tried really dozens and dozens of tests attempting to find a laboratory measure on which industrious people do better0:19:38and we failed completely and there's no animal models of industriousness either and so I would say it's a great mystery that remains at the heart of trait psychology and maybe it's a human specific category you know I mean you0:19:51can think of sled dogs maybe of being industrious and maybe and maybe sheep dogs and animals that work like that but of course they've been trained by human beings so but it isn't obvious that animals are industrious the same way we0:20:04are I mean industriousness involves sacrificing the present for the future something like that and you seems like you have to be able to conceptualize time in order to sacrifice the present0:20:16for the future one of the things that I would recommend that you do as students in this course and maybe in every course speaking of industriousness is come up0:20:27with a plan of attack for the course and use a scheduler you know if you treat your university career like a full-time job you're much more likely to succeed0:20:37and if you keep up on the readings and you keep up on the on the essays and all of that then you're much less likely as well to fall into despair when you get0:20:48too far behind using a Google Calendar or something like that to organize a schedule for the entire semester at the beginning of the semester can be0:20:57invaluable especially if you're not very industriousness very industrious because it can keep you on track and one of the things we know about industrious people0:21:06is that they are very good at using schedules and at planning the use of their time and so I would like to say that you should all be smarter but I0:21:15don't know how you could be smarter we don't know anything about how to improve intelligence and I suppose we don't really know anything about how to improve industriousness either but I can tell you that people who are industrious0:21:27come up with a strategy for solving the problem that's ahead of them and then they do whatever they can to stick to the strategy and so for example if you sat down today or tomorrow for a couple of hours three hours and you filled in a0:21:42google calendar whatever you happen to use with a strategy for studying and a list of when all your assignments are due and all of that and when you're0:21:51going to sit down and study then you won't be in a position where you have to cram for 10 hours a day hopelessly right before you know an important exam it's0:22:01also a very ineffective way of studying by the way I mean first of all people who cram for 10 hours say they're studying for 10 hours but they rarely are because well I can't study for 10 hours I don't have the power of0:22:15concentration that would enable me to do that for that prolonged period of time I can manage about three hours of intense intellectual activity before I'm pretty done and it's also the case that if you study and then sleep and then0:22:27study and then sleep and then study and then sleep you space it out then you're much more likely to remember it's also much more likely that you're you're much more likely to remember if you try to recall0:22:38the material and so highlighting and that sort of thing isn't very useful but reading closing the book summarizing what you've read without opening the0:22:47damn book that's useful and the reason for that is that you're practicing remembering and that's what you have to practice if you're practicing memorization you have to practice remembering you don't just go over the0:22:59thing over and over that'll help you with recognition memory but some but it won't help you with recall memory so anyways the last trade0:23:08is openness openness is a creativity trait it's also associated with intelligence in that intelligent people and I'm speaking technically of IQ tend0:23:17to be higher and tend to be more creative which is hardly surprising creative people are more likely to be liberal politically by the way they like0:23:28novelty they like aesthetics they like fiction they like movies they like art they like poetry there is something about them that grants them an aesthetic0:23:38sensitivity and and that's a that's an inbuilt trait and it's not the case by the way that everyone's creative in fact far from it we've used the creative0:23:49achievement questionnaire to to measure people's creativity I'll talk to you about that later in the class and the creative achievement questionnaire takes0:23:5813 dimensions of creativity so you know writing dancing acting scientific investigation entrepreneurial activity architectural activity cooking there's a0:24:11there's a handful of others singing etc you know the sorts of things that you would assume that people could be creative about and then it asks people to rate themselves on a scale from one to ten on their level of achievement0:24:24with regards to all those creative domains with zero being I have no training or proficiency in this area and 70% of people score zero across the0:24:35entire creative achievement questionnaire a tiny proportion of people are outliers way out and they're creative in many dimensions simultaneously and it exceptionally creative and it turns out0:24:46as you'll find out that that pattern which is called a Pareto distribution where most people stack up at zero and a few people are way out on the creative end characterizes all sorts of distributions like the distribution of0:24:58money for example which is why 1% of the people have the overwhelming majority of the money it's a different 1% across time it like it churns and you're much0:25:11more likely to be in the 1% if you're older logically enough because one of the things you do as you age is you trade youth for money if you're0:25:21fortunate I don't think the trade is really worth it but that's the best you've got so anyways those particular traits you can think of those as ways0:25:31that you simplify the world right there's lots of different places that you can act in the world and there's lots of different ways you can look at it and survive that's why you can be a plumber and a lawyer and an engineer and0:25:44those all work right even though they're very different modes of being and you can have different personalities and survive as long as you're capable of0:25:54finding the place where your particular filters and behavioral proclivities match the demand of the environment and a huge part I would say of successful0:26:04adaptation is precisely that now there are other elements of personality too one of the things that I've been struck by and this is actually one of the0:26:14criticisms I have of the psycho analysts and the clinicians in general even though I have great admiration for them and would say that what they have to say is very much worth listening to is that it's not obvious that your personality0:26:27is inside you you know what you think you know a human being is a strange multi-level thing and you might ask yourself well for example0:26:37know is your mother more a part of you than your arm or maybe even more precisely is your child more a part of you than your arm it's certainly people0:26:48will do drastically self-sacrificing things to maintain the lives of their children and so you're you're a person and you're made out of all sub0:26:58sort of subcomponents of a person none of which you could see when you look at a person all the complicated machinery inside you that makes you who you are and then outside of that of course you're nested in all sorts of complex0:27:10systems so you're part of a family and and you're part of a community and that's part of a province and that's part of the state and that's part of an international consortium of states and that's part of an ecosystem and how you0:27:23make a distinction between you and the systems that you're embedded in is also of extraordinary difficulty and when it and one of the things that you have to0:27:34do as a clinical psychologist for example if you're trying to diagnose someone with depression you think you think well this person's dreadfully unhappy well you can think about that as a problem with their psychological0:27:45adjustment you know the way that they're looking at the world but if you look at the epidemiological literature for example one of the things that you find0:27:55is that very many people have a first depressive episode after something genuinely terrible has happened to them right they've lost someone or they've0:28:05become injured or or they've become unemployed because unemployment is a terrible shock to people and it's not precisely self-evident that you can0:28:14consider someone who's unhappy and desperate because they no longer have a job depressed they're certainly sad and they're not doing very well but the fact0:28:26that they no longer have an income is actually something with dramatic practical consequences and treating that as if it's a mental disorder seems to be0:28:37counterproductive it's also the case for example that if you're if someone comes into you to talk to you and they're very upset and they may manifest the signs of0:28:47say an anxiety disorder or again depression or other other clinical features for that matter you have to do a careful analysis of their manner in0:28:57which they're embedded in their family because and this is something that we'll talk about quite thoroughly when we come to discussing Freud is that well you0:29:07know it's not like everybody's families are necessarily particularly happy places to be you know I mean human beings are very dependent we have a very long period of dependency partly because we're so0:29:18cortically hyperdeveloped it takes a very long time to program us into something that's vaguely capable of maneuvering on its own and that produces0:29:28of course the very tight familial bonds that we all that we all desperately require because who wants to be alone in the world but it also it also exposes us0:29:39to the probability of becoming entangled into even multi-generational family pathology and it isn't obvious always uncertainty hasn't been to me when I've0:29:50seen my clients that the fundamental problem with the client is the client sometimes the fundamental problem is is the family and and perhaps that person0:30:05has been identified as the problem person it's rather convenient for everyone who's involved to make that presupposition it's also the case that0:30:14this is the Freudian idea fundamentally this is the Oedipal idea that it's very easy for people to become over dependent on their parents and and for the parents0:30:24to facilitate that and then for the primary developmental problem for the individual in fact to become free of the interfering elements of the family so0:30:38that they can exist as independent individuals well and then of course there are cultural variations in that that make that proposition complex but0:30:49that's a fundamental tenant say of Freudian psychology a lot of the clinical psychologists all of whom that we're going to study have a pronounced0:31:00Western orientation one of the fundamental presuppositions is that part of the hallmark of positive psychological development is the0:31:10creation of an individual that's capable of acting independently and that's I would say an implicit ideal that lurks at the bottom of the clinical0:31:20presuppositions of all the theorists that are classic psychologists so now it's a very old picture it's Jonah0:31:35emerging from the whale it's a variant of a myth the myth is the dragon myth I suppose the dragon myth is that there's a dragon that lives under the ground0:31:48that's eternal and now and then it rises out of the ground to threaten the state and someone within the state determines to go confront the dragon voluntarily0:32:02and does so and then brings back something of great value sometimes if the the the hero is generally male sometimes the thing of great value is a0:32:14female that the dragon has kidnapped that's a st. George story and sometimes it's gold another treasure like in the story of The Hobbit and story that you0:32:26all know very well it's a classic hero story and the hero story is another fundamental element of the clinical theories I would say it's predicated on0:32:37the idea that you learn through voluntary contact with that that frightens or disgusts you and that's a hallmark of psychoanalytic theory Jung,0:32:50Carl Jung who we'll discuss in detail said his primary dictum was“In sterquiliniis invenitur” which I'm sure I'm0:32:59massacring because it's Latin but it meant ”in filth it will be found” and one of the hallmarks of the clinical theories is that within the confines of0:33:09everyone's experience and you can think about this as experience out in the world or experience in the unconscious mind there are dirty little secrets0:33:21let's say and skeletons and dreadful old fears and remnants of abuse and memories0:33:32of pathological behavior and failures of courage that you leave you undeveloped perhaps out of avoidance and that the psychoanalytic process is precisely the0:33:47careful encounter with those forgotten and and repressed elements of the self in the hope that a clear encounter will redeem them unites them with the0:34:01remainder of your personality and make yours make you stronger in consequence and I would say that that's just a variant of the manner in which human0:34:11beings learn and we'll talk about this more in relationship to Piaget because you always learn when you're wrong which is very annoying now what do you learn0:34:22when you're correct you you're walking in the world you're operating in the world you have a sense of what you want to have happen you're always looking at0:34:31the world through this sense of what you want to have happen you're acting so that what you want to have happen will happen and when it happens well then0:34:41you're happy because well first of all you get what you want and that's good maybe depending on what you want but it's also good because if you get what0:34:50you want when you act then it turns out that your model of how to act is valid right the outcome that you get what you want indicates no error on the part of your model but it's very frequently the case0:35:03that when you act to get what you want you don't get what you want and then that's unpleasant because you don't get what you want but it's even more0:35:14unpleasant because it brings with it the hint of a suggestion that the manner in which you're construing the world is incorrect at some indeterminate level so0:35:25for example if you tell a party tell a joke at a party you presume that people will attend and then when they hear the joke they will laugh and then if you0:35:38tell the joke and it goes flat or even worse disgusts and offends people then you're going to be taken aback and that's partly because you didn't get0:35:48what you want and that's not so good but it's but it's more because there's something wrong with the way you conceptualized the situation and then0:35:57you're faced with a problem and the problem is the emergence of a domain of the unknown it's like well what kind of mistake did you make maybe you're not as funny as you think you are not that could be a big problem0:36:10maybe you're not around people that who are the way you think they are maybe they don't like you as much as you thought they liked you I mean the0:36:19potential for various paranoid thoughts of increasing severity to come welling up at you in a situation where you make even a trivial social mistake is quite0:36:30broad and when you make an error of that sort you have to face it and sort through all the possibilities so that you can find out what it was that you0:36:41did wrong and how to retool it so that in the future you don't make the same mistake and that requires well that requires in some sense what you might0:36:50describe as a journey into the belly of the beast the beast being that place where things have fallen apart and where you're overwhelmed with negative emotion and chaos and confusion and that's a very old story that's the story of the0:37:03journey to the underworld and the hero is the person who makes the voluntary journey to the underworld to collect what's been languishing down there and that's the basic motif of psychoanalytic theory I would say it's the basic motif0:37:17in some sense of clinical practice because one of the things that you do as a clinician is find out what people are afraid of and what they're avoiding and0:37:29that can be in their past or in their present or in their future break it down into smaller pieces and help them devise strategies of approach and mastery and0:37:40that improves the quality of their personality and helps develop them into people who won't make the same mistakes over and over again all right so well0:37:55why these this plethora of tools well I said in some sense being a personality0:38:04psychologist is like being an engineer you're trying to build better people when you might say that if you're a carpenter or a mechanic that your0:38:15ability to fix a vehicle or build a house is dependent on your proficiency with regards to the use of a multitude of tools and so then you might say well0:38:26the more tools you have at your disposal the more likely it is that you're going to manage things properly and so what I would like to offer you is the0:38:37possibility that what you're going to encounter in this course is a series of sophisticated conceptual tools that will help you understand yourself better and0:38:49therefore better orient yourself in the world I regard this course as intensely practical and that's because I believe that you have nothing to rely on in your0:39:00life that's more crucial to your success as you move through life than your character and your personality that's what you bring to every situation and0:39:12the more sophisticated you are in relationship to yourself and others the more you understand people the deeper you understand the nature of your own0:39:23being the more likely it is that you're going to proceed through your life in a manner that will make you pleased to exist rather than displeased to exist0:39:36I've collected the writings of people that I regard as of incomparable brilliance they're difficult to understand their concepts are complex0:39:48but it's not surprising because the subject matter is complex and vital and so it requires work and I would say try to keep up on the readings if you would0:39:59it's going to make the course much more much richer for you and I would say because people often ask me well how should I read for this course because0:40:08there's a lot of reading and the answer is read as if it matters that's the right answer don't be thinking about how it's going0:40:18to be tested if you do the readings and you come to the lectures then the tests aren't particularly difficult but you should read the readings as if0:40:27the person is writing about you and you should try to understand what the person says because it's another tool for you to use and I would say well with my0:40:37clients you know I used the approaches of one theorist for one client and the approaches of another theorist for another client it seems to me to depend to some degree actually on the temperament of the client I found for0:40:49example that people who are very high in openness which is the creativity dimension are quite amenable to a Jungian approach whereas people who are0:40:58more practical conscientious lowe and openness are much more amenable to a behaviorist approach we don't really know enough about psychology yet to0:41:07match treatment to temperament but those are the some of the things that I've experienced ok practicalities well there's a website I gave you the URL0:41:21I'll put it up again at the end of class the URL lists all the readings that aren't in the textbook and so the textbook contains the classic readings0:41:30readings from people like Jung and Freud and Piaget and so forth Rogers and as I0:41:39said I picked that particular textbook because I believe that the author did a very credible job of summarizing what's very difficult to summarize so and then0:41:49also on the website there are links to papers because much of the more modern material that pertains say to neuroscience and also to trait0:41:59personality I think it's better just to read the original papers and I'll detail them out with you as we go through and that'll also give you some familiarity with original psychological papers which are again there's a there's an idiom0:42:14that you have to master in order to understand them but you might as well practice it especially if you're interested in continuing with psychology0:42:23in your educational practice or as a career it's good to get accustomed to it so0:42:33there again is the URL for the class if you go to Jordan be Peterson comm which isn't too hard to remember assuming you can remember my name then0:42:43classes are listed on the left hand side you can just find the syllabus there alright so here's what we're going to cover well today obviously this is the0:42:56introduction and overview the class is a little strange this year because one day it's an hour and the next day it's two hours so not exactly sure how we're going to negotiate our way through that but we'll figure it out0:43:09historical perspectives mythological representations well I told you that I would try to provide you with a meta-narrative that might enable you to link the theories that we're going to talk about together so I'm going to0:43:22describe to you what you might regard as a conceptual language and as far as I can tell it's that imagine imagine that there are two kinds of things that you0:43:31need to know and I believe this to be the case I believe that you need to know what the world is made of and I suppose that's the proper domain of science but0:43:41then you need to know how to act and that's a whole different thing and you need to know how to act that's the thing you need to know most of anything anything because of course you're a living creature and action in0:43:54relationship to desired goals is is everything to you and you can think about that from a Darwinian perspective you have to act at least so that you can0:44:03survive at least so that you can find a partner that's that's life and so part of the question is well how does the world look if you think about it as a0:44:13place to act and the answer isn't a place of value free objects that's not what the world looks like and you can't act in a world of value free objects0:44:25because there's no way of choosing between them if everything has zero value why would you choose one thing over another you live in a world where0:44:35things present themselves to you as of different value and that's partly a consequence of your temperament although it's a consequence of other things and so what I'm going to try to do is to provide you with0:44:47schema that describes the world of morality roughly speaking which is how to act and tell you a little bit about what I think the languages which I think0:44:58was derived from Darwinian processes and I believe that it's within that structure that the clinical theories logically nest and so that'll give you a0:45:07way of linking one theory to another from a conceptual perspective without having to rely so much on sheer memorization then we'll talk about0:45:17heroic and shamanic initiation and the reason we're going to do that is because well people people used shamanic initiation for tens of thousands of0:45:26years all over the world and they have a particular kind of structure the paper by merchant Le ADA which is linked on the site is a very interesting one and details out some of these processes there have been intelligent commentators0:45:38like Andre Ellenberger Burge a who wrote the discovery of the unconscious which i think is an outstanding book who late the processes that the psychoanalyst0:45:48psychoanalysts uncovered in the late part of the 19th century an early part of the 20th century back to these more primordial rituals of personality0:45:58transformation and so we're going to situate ourselves in some sense in deep history talking first about the underlying mythological landscape then0:46:10talking about archaic modes of personality conceptualization and transformation and then moving from there into constructivism and and we're0:46:20going to concentrate mostly on Jean Piaget who is a developmental psychologist constructivists believed that you make yourself out of the information that you gather in the world so you're an exploring creature you0:46:32explore specifically when the maps that you're using in the world are no longer orienting yourself properly when they're producing errors so you go out and gather information and assemble yourself from the information that you discovered0:46:44then the depth psychologists Jung and Freud I think I'm going to with Jung I'm going to walk you through some films I'm not going to use the film's per se I'm0:46:57going to use Clips stills from the film but in you know the film so in in chronological order and I'm going to try0:47:06to explain to you how you might use Union presuppositions to understand what the films are about you know if you think about a film say like The Lion0:47:16King which is an extraordinarily popular film it's a very strange phenomena that you go and watch it right I mean think about it it's drawings of animated animals that in some sense represent you they're very0:47:31low resolution but you perceive them immediately as living things and you attribute to the motivation and and and motive power and understanding you do it0:47:42automatically without even thinking about it and there's a classic plot that lies underneath those stories and the plots are very very very very old and0:47:51that's why you can understand them and the reason you can understand them is because life has a plot or maybe it has a couple of plots a multitude of plots but life has a plot and if it didn't we wouldn't be able to understand each0:48:03other and so I'd like to illustrate that for you by analysis of some of these films I think it's the best way to understand someone as sophisticated as0:48:12young who is very difficult to get a handle on Freud I'm going to do the same thing all the way I'm going to show you a film with Freud I'm going to show you a film called crumb which is a documentary and it's about a very badly0:48:26enmeshed family and the attempts of the family members to I suppose escape that I'll talk to you about Freud I'll show you the film that should give you a sense of Freudian psychopathology which is a very difficult thing otherwise to0:48:38understand then there's a midterm a midterm is multiple-choice you'll do it in class you'll have lots of time to finish it it'll cover the material that0:48:48we took that we studied up to that point then we're going to talk about Rogers Carl Rogers who was a humanist Rogers has a body-centered philosophy I suppose0:48:59and he's interested as well in optimal personal development and the role that interpersonal communication plays in that Rogers hypothesis fundamentally and0:49:08it's a very interesting one is that honest communication between two people can produce personnel transformation and and you know you might think well you kind of know that already because there's something very0:49:20engaging about a deep honest conversation where you're able to say things that you wouldn't normally say where you're being listened to by0:49:29someone who's actually listening to you and you're listening to them and in the conversation you're moving both of you further to a different point that's different than a conversation where you're right and you're trying to0:49:40convince me or I'm right and I'm trying to convince you which I would say is the typical conversation the the healing conversation is more well what's up with0:49:49you you know how are you doing what how is your life going where what sort of problems are you facing what do you think about those problems can you conceptualize what a solution might be is there a way we could figure out how0:49:59to get there you know what's so it's a problem-solving conversation and it's predicated on the presupposition that the person that you're conversing with has the capacity to grow in a positive direction if they so choose that's the0:50:12fundamental that's the fundamental presupposition of Rogerian psychology man Frankel are also humanists all finish tell you what the rest of the the0:50:23rest of the material is the next time that we meet I should show you let you know a little bit more about the structure of course the second midterm is March 14th the and there's a final at the end as well so the mid the0:50:39multiple-choice tests are graded in that manner 25% 25% in 27.5% they're not cumulative each test only covers what you covered before since the last test0:50:52including the final you'll be required to write an essay of 15% it's a thousand words sorry not 750 words and you'll also do an online exercise a personality0:51:04analysis which is pass/fail all you have to do is complete it and show proof of completion it helps you do a modified Big Five analysis of your own0:51:14personality concentrating on your virtues and your faults so that so so it's a it's an active exercise in the application of personality theory to0:51:25personal development and so that's the that's the structure of the course I can tell you there's a sign-up sheet on the on the syllabus we I've broken the0:51:42essays down into multiple types across the entire semester I would highly recommend that you go there and sign up there are limited slots for each topic and the reason for that is well I don't want my TA to have to grade 200 essays0:51:54the last week of classes we have to spread them out across the year so figure out a topic and sign out please and please do that sooner rather than0:52:04later it's it's an industrious thing to do it'll help you organize yourself I'll post something that's quite useful about how to write especially a thousand word0:52:13essay and I'll close the essays are due one day before class I'll close by the way by telling you who shouldn't take this course okay first of all if you0:52:27didn't like this lecture and don't take this course because this is what the lectures are going to be like so and it's they're not for everybody0:52:36oh you used a lot of loose associations and try to gather them back in and I kind of wander around that way I can talk directly to you which I like doing0:52:45but I sacrifice a certain amount of organization for that but my sense is that it's worth the sacrifice the second thing is there's a lot of reading a lot0:52:56and a lot of it is I would say a lot of it's hard science the last half in particular but the first half of a lot of its philosophical in nature0:53:06philosophical / psychological and so if you're not interested in that like if you're a pure science type and you're not interested in the clinical0:53:16elements say of personality and in the end in investigating the philosophical underpinnings of those clinical theories then I would say this isn't the course for you and so you should take that seriously because the readings are hard0:53:29there's a lot of work involved in this course and it would be better if you took a course that you actually wanted to take so well welcome to psychology0:53:38230 and we'll see you in a bit you0:53:53you0:00:002017 Personality 02/03: Historical & Mythological Context
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:12now you know I used this picture to represent my class and you might not know anything about this picture it's0:00:22it's a picture of Jonah being thrown up out of whales belly after spending three days inside it it's an old biblical0:00:31story it's a myth it's a fairy tale that's that's one way of looking at it and and I don't mean that derogative manner we know for example that some of0:00:42the Grimm's brothers fairy tales are perhaps fifteen thousand years old they've been traced way back they're really really old and old stories are0:00:51strange and they're strange because well they've been told generation after generation after generation and so you could imagine that something retold over0:01:02such an expand of expansive time has been reduced to its gist many many times and nothing that's in the story anymore is superfluous it's all meaningful in0:01:12some sense it's sort of like a meta story that's one way of thinking about imagine that you took a hundred books hundred adventure books and you had to0:01:22extract out the central features of an adventure book now it's hard to do that it's like you're averaging across them or something like that0:01:31distilling them in some manner then you get a meta adventure and it would be like a myth upon which all adventures0:01:40are based and this story is actually one of those stories and I'm going to tell you what I think the story means and I'm not saying that this is all it means0:01:49because most stories of this sort are in some sense inexhaustible just like great works of art are inexhaustible there0:01:58there's more information in them than you can possibly articulate that's what makes them profound that's why you go look at them otherwise someone could0:02:08just tell you about the painting and that would be the end of that but that doesn't work so so that Jonah is being spit up by this whale and of course on0:02:19the face of it that's an impossibility because well you can't live inside a whale that's why0:02:28it's impossible now you may remember and likely do that you all know a story about someone who is inside a whale that's Pinocchio right and you know you0:02:40go to that movie maybe even as an adult you watch that movie and Geppetto is down there in the whale in his little boat you know it's big cavernous inside0:02:49you don't really care that that's there's a bunch of things you don't care about you don't care that those are drawings and not real people you don't care about that and you don't care that0:02:59the inside of a whale isn't a cavern and you don't care that Pinocchio is a puppet for that matter none of that matters to you at all and that's because0:03:08you're really strange creatures and you don't even notice when you're doing something absolutely absurd and that's one of those times when you are but if someone taps you on the shoulder and0:03:18says you know you're just watching drawings of a puppet puppets can't really move autonomously and now he's at0:03:27the bottom of the ocean you have no idea why he's going to rescue his father and you're just sitting there annoyed and you're okay with that and you'll say shut up because I want to finish0:03:37watching a movie and so that's interesting you see that tells you something about your unconscious if you're psychoanalytically minded because0:03:48you're doing something that you cannot account for now you might say well it's it it's enjoyable well that's deep man you're really really going a long ways with that the0:03:58question is a why is it comprehensible B why is it enjoyable see just exactly what are you doing there and you think0:04:09that whatever you are doing there is so valuable that you'll actually pay to do it weird very very weird and you know0:04:19when you read about let's say the archaic rituals of tribal people and you ask yourself just what are they up to0:04:29you might think well they're up to the same thing that you're up to when you go see a movie so and then you might also notice that the0:04:38most expensive artifacts or among the most expensive artifacts that human beings create our movies they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on them0:04:47and we consider that a good deal and you know it drives our technology to because the high-tech movies like the Marvel0:04:57movies that require so much computer animation they actually drive the demand for high-end graphics chips so our technological advance forward is0:05:06actually motivated in part by our desire to represent things fictional II in ever more spectacular manner so Jonah well0:05:19let me tell you the story of Jonah and I'll tell you why I'm gonna tell you it this is from Camille Paglia who's a critic of the modern University and a0:05:29very brilliant woman I would say very controversial incredibly rapid speaker and she can think so fast it's just unbelievable she's really fun to watch0:05:39if you like that sort of thing vicious adversary in an argument she says the number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but0:05:50ignorant professors who have substituted narrow expertise and theoretical sophistication a preposterous term for breadth and depth of learning in the0:06:00world history of art and thought art is a vast interconnected web work a fabricated tradition and over0:06:10concentration on any one point is a distortion here's here's a problem I had0:06:23I wrestled with this when I was trying to understand some of the things that I'm going to teach you about there's0:06:32some things that you kind of have to grasp as a whole you know sometimes you have a flash of insight and a bunch of things that you didn't know we're related fall together that that's supposed to happen in psychotherapy when0:06:42you link different disparate patterns of behavior together because you've linked them say with a single cause and you get this like excited feeling0:06:52of illumination and possibility and there are forms of communication that0:07:02require the simultaneously the simultaneous realization of a multitude of disparate phenomena like a movie can0:07:16be like that you know you you listen to a movie you watch movie and then you don't know what the hell is going on and then something happens near the end and bed everything0:07:25clicks together and it's cuz you've sort of seen the thing as a whole and a lot of the things that we a lot of the ways that we interact with the world that are0:07:35mysterious are like that there and this is what peg lay is referring to is that and this is a psychoanalytic proposition0:07:45I would say or a romantic proposition now the idea roughly is that way out in0:07:55the periphery of reality are all those things that not only do you not know but you don't even know you don't know right there you're completely blind to their existence and then there's unknown0:08:05things that you have some suspicions about and then there's unknown things that you can start to imagine and and act out and dramatize and so all of that0:08:17is on the periphery of our knowledge that's a psychoanalytic dictum where the thoughts come from well partly they're nested in dreams dreams are the0:08:27birthplace of thoughts fantasy it's not that surprising fantasy is the birthplace of ideas you know if you're thinking about what you're gonna do in the future0:08:36you enter into a reverie a dream state and you contemplate multiple possibilities and then you start thinking them through use your imagination to search beyond0:08:48where you are and the collective human attempt to do that is our mysterious0:08:57humanistic artistic tradition which is very difficult to justify from a formal articulate point of view0:09:06what good is dance like what is it that you're doing when you're dancing well you don't care because you like to dance why well you don't know what you0:09:17do it's built into you music musics a human universal cultures use music to organize themselves right they use music0:09:26to catalyze their identities they use music to unite around you know in in more archaic societies less differentiated societies let's say no a0:09:37mask that represents part of the family tradition will have a particular design and there'll be a particular song written for it and there'll be a0:09:46particular dance about it and the song and the dance or something like the symbolic representation of a mode of being in the world like maybe the mask0:09:56is a wolf mask and so you act out the wolf and there's music that goes along with that and you think well what are you doing when you're acting out the wolf and part of that is what you're trying you're trying to understand0:10:06wolves you know it's an image it's imitation in part and you know if you live in the natural world and if you hunt and if you're preyed upon then understanding0:10:15the things that you're hunting and preying upon is useful and there's also pull out perhaps useful things to learn from them and so we play this strange0:10:25symbolic game with the world like children pretending that's another way of thinking about it and we do that to act out and to begin to understand0:10:35things we don't understand like how to act that's now for me the most important question in life is not what the world0:10:48is made of and in fact I would say that's a relatively new preoccupation of0:10:57humankind you know we didn't really formalize you could say that the ancient Greeks originated laid the groundwork0:11:08for the emergence of an empirical science and then it emerged more formally with bacon and Descartes and Newton five six hundred years ago not0:11:22very long like a blink blink to the eye in human terms before that people were engineers they could build things and so0:11:32forth but they didn't know how to they weren't scientists they didn't really conceptualize the world as an objective place we do that automatically0:11:41because science has seeped so far into our set of presuppositions that doesn't make us good scientists by the way but0:11:50it does make us believe that the fundamental reality of the world is an objective reality and I'm not going to dispute that particularly but leaves one0:12:02set of questions unanswered probably by its nature because it wasn't designed to answer the question then that question is how should one conduct0:12:13oneself in the world and that's an important thing since you're alive and hypothetically you'd rather stay alive0:12:22and well you're alive you probably don't want to suffer any more than you have to and no more stupidly than you have to and it might also be good if some of the0:12:31things that you want it actually happened and so you know you're motivated to know how to act and and people are always telling each other how0:12:40to act we're sending each other information all the time about how to act we do that with our the expressions on our face and of course when we talk to people we always look at their face0:12:49and that's because their face tells you what they're up to you know if they're smiling and paying attention to you well then you can assume that you're doing something right0:12:59and if they're looking annoyed or disgusted that's a particularly bad one then you might think you might take a hint from that especially if you know three0:13:09or four people are doing it at the same time and so we're reflecting we're reflecting some ideal to one another constantly and the more attentive you0:13:20are the more likely you are to act in accordance with that ideal and the more like you likely you are to move towards0:13:29it you may not even know what the ideal is in an articulated sense in fact you probably don't you know you could come up with a well you know a good person is0:13:38nice and friendly and you know cooperative and yeah yeah you know that's all just cliche but you don't you know your conception might be very0:13:47Hollow it's very likely that it's very Hollow even though you may be able to act in a very sophisticated manner alright so anyways this is a story I'd say oh it's a meta story it's it's what0:13:59would happen if you collected a bunch of stories and then you extract it out a story from them and it's sort of a story about destiny and it's couched in a religious language but that's okay0:14:09because most of these distilled stories are form the foundation of religious0:14:18texts and religious texts and myth and myths and stories are as I said part of the outer perimeter of our society they0:14:27have a they have a coherent nature and it's all and they form a foundation and it's on that foundation that everything that you take for granted rests even if0:14:39you don't understand the foundation so I can give you an example there's a metaphysical idea that underlies Western civilization and that metaphysical idea0:14:48is that the individual has transcendent worth that's that's the idea from which the notion of natural rights is derived0:14:57and of course our legal system is predicated on the idea that you have certain natural rights they're enshrined in the Bill of Rights for example and in0:15:09the in the states when the bills Bill of Rights was being formulated when the legislation Ridge the legislation that found that the state was being formulated the formulators said we hold0:15:20these truths to be self-evident what does that mean they're axioms of faith right there they're propositions and there's no0:15:32proof for them there they're a mode of operation in the world and so the hypothesis is something like well if I treat you like there's something about0:15:42you that has transcendent value implicit intrinsic value whatever that might be and there are stories about that and we'll talk about that and you do the0:15:51same to me and then we set up a body of laws that recognizes the sovereignty of the individual so that the law itself has to act with respect towards every0:16:03individual even if that individual has done something reprehensible which is very weird if you think about it then our society will work better and0:16:13well perhaps that's true but for better or worse that is what this society is0:16:22predicated on and that's a very very very very very very old idea and it's an idea that people came to with great0:16:31difficulty because it was over thousands of years that people learned how to take their little tribal groups which are always squabbling with one another right0:16:41because there's human beings they're very violent and tribal groups are by no means civilized it's there's no noble savage like the Europeans thought if you0:16:50study tribal groups in the world today the murder the death rate by violence is unbelievably high so something unites a0:17:00tribe within a tribe it's often kinship but then tribes come together to form larger civilizations and they have to determine some sort of meta principle0:17:09that guides them so that they can cooperate and come together without destroying one another and they have to extract out a principle by which the society might function and that has to0:17:19work and then as societies get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger they have to bring more and more of these diverse traditions together and extract out something from them that has0:17:29power and functional utility and that allows people to unite and so this is one of the stories that0:17:39talks about that it's a story about individual responsibility and what happens when it's not heated so you know0:17:51because we could say you are a social creature right to the core and most of your environment is other people and those other people want something from0:18:01you and you want something from them so you're gonna play games with them you're either gonna be good at it you're gonna be bad at it but you're gonna play games with them and so the game might have0:18:13rules really sophisticated rules in fact and you'd expect that because as your behavior more and more approximates an ideal assuming such a thing exists then0:18:25you're more and more sophisticated and the nature of the ideal is perhaps more and more complex and and difficult to understand you get a hint of this though0:18:35you can get a hint of this because you will see if you pay attention to your own soul your psyche your unconscious0:18:45you'll see that there are people that you admire and that there are people that you have contempt for and that's and it isn't necessarily that you're a hundred percent accurate in your0:18:55judgment you know it's not such a bad idea to criticize your first impressions but those states exist and so there's a0:19:08reason you admire someone and there's a reason you have contempt for someone there may be multiple reasons and that's a hint to your intrinsic value structure it's a hint about your intrinsic value0:19:17structure right you wouldn't admire someone unless there was something about them that you valued and perhaps that you would also like to be able to do and he wouldn't despise someone or have0:19:28contempt for them if you didn't feel that something they were doing was wrong and that it would be wrong if you did it too and so you're bringing to bear on0:19:37the situation an implicit morality and you have to do that because as I said you can't act without a morality because0:19:47if you're gonna act you're gonna try to make things better that otherwise why bother and if you're acting to make0:19:56things better than some things have to be better and some things have to be worse and that's a value structure so you have one all right so Jonah he gets a call from0:20:11God and God tells them that there's a city Nineveh that's falling into moral disarray now what does that mean well0:20:22it's a universal story it's like all cultures are always falling into disarray it's their nature just entropy0:20:32does that right things change the world changes the environment changes and the culture doesn't keep up very well and then of course it has corrupt elements and so it's an interior eternal story0:20:43the individual is always placed in relationship to a culture that's somewhat corrupt and then the question is well what do you do about it and if0:20:54the answer is nothing well then it'll just get more corrupt and if the answer is be corrupt - then it will just get more corrupt so the answer has to be to0:21:05oppose the corruption because that's the only way it's going to stop now god threatens to destroy this city because0:21:16of its corruption and I don't think you need to presume anything particularly metaphysical about that to understand it0:21:25it's very straight forward that the more corrupt the culture is and the less Trust is possible between individuals the less productive of the culture is0:21:35going to be because why do anything if some corrupt person is just gonna come and take it you know it might even be that the culture is so corrupt that if you are good for something and you0:21:46produce resources you're actually more likely to get killed because you have something of value so like this just you're just not going anywhere with that and why would you work if you didn't0:21:56have any sense that you know you store up the value of your work for some reasonable time in the future so if the society is corrupt and there's no trust0:22:05its degenerating and you know it might live for a while but isn't it last very long and so that's the idea corrupt societies collapse that leaves open what0:22:18corruption means anyways Jonah thanks no no bloody way I'm not going to that City they can go to hell as far as I'm concerned and that's really what he0:22:27thinks and why in the world should I do anything about it anyways and these are good objections it's like why would you do that and you'll face this believe me0:22:37in your life you will face this in fact you already do always constantly continually in small ways perhaps when0:22:46you're interacting with people who aren't treating you properly and when you're acting and those might be your parents they might be your friends they might be people at your workplace they0:22:55might be professors they're playing a crooked game and you don't like it and you know it's crooked and so then the question is well what0:23:06should you do about it well if you know you're correct know it's crooked it's not so good to play along with it I mean we'll say that you know it's crooked by your own standard of values it D0:23:15degrades you to play along with it you're gonna stand up and oppose it well no probably not0:23:24you're probably gonna do what Jonah did jump on a ship and get the hell out of there and you know that's a logical thing to do but it doesn't solve the0:23:34problem and I think this has something to do with human ethical responsibility because there are other old stories and0:23:43I'll tell you one likely where the son of the king the Lion King the son of the king he goes off and he's some pathetic0:23:54adolescent and then he's shamed by the reappearance of his old girlfriend into turning into something vaguely useful and he opens his eyes and he goes back0:24:04and he fights scar and you know it's a scene of hell right because there's fire everywhere and he fights scar finds skaar killed his father he casts him0:24:15into the pit roughly speaking and then the rain comes and then you know the movie returns to its beginning fundamentally it's a paradise paradise0:24:26lost' Paradise Regained that's the movie and and I mean that's the story of human beings you know you're in a place that's0:24:35working out pretty well something happens to knock you off your perch you're down in the chaos for a good amount of time and maybe you never get out but maybe you learn something down0:24:45there maybe a strength in your character then you pop up to a new place and maybe it's better better aim better you now0:24:55I'm not being overly optimistic about this I know perfectly well that people encounter impediments during their life0:25:04that they find almost impossible to recover from but it's the best shot you have so anyways Jonah runs away but God0:25:15isn't very happy about that because it's actually Jonah's destiny it's necessary for Jonah to repair the city so God sends a storm and you know the waves are0:25:27high and and and I think what that means is because the water is often a symbol for the unconscious and that's because things lurk down there in the water and that you could pull up that that are0:25:37useful monstrous things that you can pull up they're useful you can fish for them you can go fishing in your own being for answers which is what you do when you try to think right you ask0:25:46yourself a question and you wait maybe an answer appears it's like where did that come from you didn't know what the answer was before it appeared but it0:25:55just popped into being out of nowhere who knows so you fish so anyways the0:26:05waves come and the boats gonna be knocked over it and that's what happens I think when you know when you know you should do something I mean everyone has the this experience I believe perhaps0:26:16you would be willing to put up your hands if this experience is foreign to you okay just part of your telling you you should do something and it's hard0:26:26to do it effortful and maybe you're afraid of it and so you don't do it you just procrastinate right and so how do you feel about that good I mean so what0:26:37do you feel that you're betraying yourself your anxiety actually gets worse not better even though you know you can put it off moment to moment but that doesn't help because every time you0:26:47put it off the anxiety just grows a little bit you're not proud of yourself you have a sense that you're making things more chaotic than they should be0:26:56you know and if you do that long enough and I'm sure many of you have had that experience if you do that long enough if that becomes habitual things will get so stormy around you that you'll fall right0:27:06into the into the chaos into the watery chaos and maybe you'll drown so it's not a very good idea to run from your0:27:16destiny let's say whatever that might be and you need a destiny you need a place to aim at because that's what gives your0:27:25life meaning and you need meaning in your life because life is hard so you know you need something to buttress yourself against that so anyways they0:27:36wake joan up and jonah says that's probably my fault because like i'm running away from something i'm supposed to do and you know god isn't very happy about that so why don't you just throw me over to overboard and the crew isn't0:27:46very happy about that but the waves are really starting to come up and joan is pretty insistent that he's the cause of the problem and so they draw they draw a0:27:57lot and and jonah is chosen and so they decided to toss him into the ocean and immediately everything's calm so he's a0:28:07center of chaos because he's not doing what he's supposed to do fine well then that whale comes up and swallows him and0:28:16then he's in the whale for three days now that's a weird thing the whale that's the way all that0:28:26Gepetto's ian that's a dragon it's the thing that you have to go out there and conquer to get something of value now0:28:37when you've made an error when you've fallen off the pathway when you deviated0:28:46from what you know you should do it produces a state of internal chaos and worry and concern you're you're thrust into the unknown you're thrust into0:28:55unknown territory and chaos you don't know what to do and that's often symbolized by the encounter with a with a monster like a dragon something that lives under0:29:06the water that's and I think the reason for that is as far as I've been able to tell is that human beings because we've been prey animals for forever in our0:29:15battle with carnivorous lizards for example and alligators and even dinosaurs because there were dinosaurs around at the time of our most distant ancestors there was even a cat at one0:29:25point that was that was adapted with teeth to pierce human skulls so it had a head that was exactly shaped to grab you0:29:34here and put a tooth through the back of your skull so like we've come through some rough times man and we have a system in our mind that's a threat0:29:45predator detection system that's the thing that makes little kids think about monsters in the dark right because well there is monsters in the dark parents0:29:55always say well there's no monsters in the dark it's like that's not true the dark is full of monsters there might not be any in your room right at that moment but that doesn't mean there aren't0:30:05monsters in the dark and crimes take place like criminals don't get up at 6:00 in the morning and like you know have breakfast and go rob a bank they do0:30:14it they do that sort of thing at night people do the things that are fit for the night in the night and lots of0:30:23predators are nocturnal and you can't see very well in the dark and kids aren't stupid you know they've evolved to stay pretty damn close to the fire because the kids0:30:35that wandered away from the fire got picked off by hyenas and lions and you know crocodiles and whatever else the0:30:44hell was out there to eat the unwary so the circuit that we use to to defend0:30:56ourselves against predators as we've evolved cortically that circuit has has come to represent what we don't know in0:31:05general because the Predators of course inhabit where we don't know and so evolution is a conservative force and we use the circuits that we've evolved to0:31:15represent new things and so the unknown the chaos is often represented by a monster that swallows you up and pulls you down and you know when you're0:31:26feeling terrible you don't say well I'm feeling up you say I'm feeling down well why is that well down is worse I guess0:31:36you're flat on the ground when you're down or you're in a hole or something like that you're hiding in a hole you know it's down and you're threatened by something you know maybe you're0:31:45threatened by your own inadequacy that might be part of it maybe that's partly what you imagine as a monstrous force because you know your proclivity towards0:31:54procrastination and your weakness of character is part and parcel of why you happen to be in the underworld and that's the underworld the mythological0:32:04underworld that's where you go when things fall apart and if you understand that if you know that that's what that0:32:13means then you have one of the keys that opens up ancient stories to you and you understand things you could live can be an organized going very well and then0:32:24something comes up and poof everything changes some axiom that you were living by and it might be the existence of a partner might be a job it might be your0:32:35health any of those things go on and you go somewhere when that happens you go somewhere it's a state of being you're0:32:45still in the same world but it's not the same at all anymore everything about it is different it's all negative and dark and you don't know what to do you're confused and so what0:32:55do you do down there in the underworld when things have fallen apart especially if oh if it's the worst possible case scenario and you0:33:04realize that you actually had something to do with your demise that's really annoying you know when something bad happens to you and then you know you grind yourself into bits trying to0:33:14figure out what the hell happened and then you realize that well you were playing a causal role now sometimes you're so depressed you assume you're0:33:23playing a causal role and you work it's not easy to figure out by any stretch of the imagination and it isn't that everyone who does something terrible is at fault for it but sometimes you find0:33:35that you are off the path somehow and maybe even that you knew it and they didn't attend to it and that's why all of this hit the fan and so then down0:33:44there in that chaos you decide that you're going to do what you're supposed to do instead and then maybe you get to rise up again renewed if you're lucky0:33:55and then you can go fix the city and that's what this story's about and that's why I picked the image to0:34:05represent the course because really what happens you see with the psychoanalysts the road due to health if you're not doing well which means that as you act0:34:16in the world you're not getting what you want there's something wrong with your the match between your presuppositions and your actions habitual and the way0:34:25the world is responding to you and so it's not turning out for you and the question is well what can you do about that and one answer might be to examine0:34:35yourself for presuppositions and action patterns that are not serving you well and to find out what they are and what to do about them and maybe some of that0:34:44is maybe you're not moving forward because of fear and maybe that fear is grounded in terrible experiences that you had in the past that you've never been able to understand and maybe one of0:34:53the ways of gluing yourself back together and expanding your personality so that you could in fact live properly in the world is to go back to those0:35:02terrible events and untie them and straighten them out and understand them and drop them and that's what0:35:12psychotherapy is about in large part psychoanalytic behavioral doesn't matter what are you afraid of what are you avoiding what are you failing to develop0:35:22maybe from fear maybe from avoidance god only knows maybe from disgust how can you get over it how can you reclaim those parts of your0:35:32self0:35:47now I said in the first lecture that I was going to try to provide you with a schema into which you could place the0:35:56theorists that we're going to discuss and it requires going down deep to do that and there are presuppositions in my presupposition and this is a0:36:05psychoanalytic presupposition it's predicated on a poetic tradition I would say don't an ancient tradition I learned0:36:14most of it from reading Jung it was Carl Jung that helped me understand that we're nested inside a dream that we have0:36:24to be because we don't know everything we have to take things as Givens and the things that we take it as Givens are0:36:33nested inside stories and we accept the stories as valid and then outside the stories is the absolute unknown you know0:36:43and that's partly the stories are tricky you know that one of the classic stories it's a variant of the the Jonas story I0:36:52would say is st. George and the dragon and that that story was represented in0:37:02during the Renaissance and during medieval times thousands and thousands of ways it's like the story of st.0:37:11Patrick who chased the snakes out of Ireland same idea and that the typical st. George story is the Hobbit or Harry0:37:22Potter so in the second volume of Harry Potter correct me if I have any of these details wrong you remember there's that snake the basilisk so this is Magic0:37:32Castle right you guys have no problem without Magic Castle no problem there's an or if he's an orphan he goes to the Magic Castle to learn how to be more than normal right the muggles he has a0:37:43muggle family we're not too happy with the muggle family like as representatives of normal people they they have some blacks now of course the0:37:52reason for that is that well that's what teenagers often feel about their parents right they fail Jesus these couldn't really be my parents I must have some other parents who are like0:38:01together those are like magical parents right parents that live in the sky and of course Harry Potter has earthly parents that's the muggles and Dursley I0:38:12think is the kid he's at one he's a wonderful piece of work and you know ill-formed a spoiled ill-formed0:38:21selfish very far from the ideal he's a foil for Harry and of course he's appreciated and doted on and Harry is actually punished for his virtues that's0:38:31a classic story right to to be punished for your virtues I mean if you look at the story the central story in Christianity the central story and Christianity is about someone who is0:38:41precisely punished in the worst possible way for the highest possible virtues that's what it makes it an archetypal story because there isn't anything more unfair than that and so it's a limit in0:38:51a sense you it can't be worse than that being punished for being you know unworthy it's like yeah yeah well at least makes sense but to be punished0:39:00because you have your act together and you're a good person that's real punishment and that's what happens to Harry so luckily he finds out that he's0:39:09magical which is quite convenient and off he goes to Wizarding school and you know that's actually like taking that's actually like going and studying the0:39:19humanities I mean it was when they still were you know because you it's through the humanities that you that you make0:39:30contact with the magic of your culture and that makes you more than merely the child of your parents because you are0:39:39more than merely the child of your parents you're the child of nature and you're the child of culture and until you understand what that means0:39:48understand that you have two sets of parents like the divine hero always has two sets of parents you you can't construe yourself properly as an0:39:57individual you're not situated properly in the world you don't know what your responsibilities are you can't orient your values properly and you will suffer0:40:06for that because as far as I can tell because life is so difficult you have to do something that's0:40:15truly worthwhile in order to justify it and so well that's what all these stories tell you that's what the story of Jonah is telling you it's like you0:40:25have an ethical duty to straighten things up and if you don't do it you're gonna be sorry and that stories echoed0:40:37everywhere while now st. George well let's go to Harry Potter well that's what we were talking about so he goes off to the Magic Castle and he's learning to be a wizard and he's kind of0:40:48an interesting character a because he's not really good and we find out I think that's because does he have a piece of gold amarti in him he's not what happens0:40:58yeah and that's what that means is that to be good truly good you can't just follow rules0:41:07that's that's very clear in the Harry Potter story and you also have to be able to understand and malevolence and in order to understand malevolence so that you can withstand it you have to0:41:17understand that part of you that's malevolent because if you don't you're naive and if you're naive you're easy pickings and so that's a union idea too0:41:27and the Union idea is that part of personality development is to understand your shadow and the shadow is those things about you that you do not want to0:41:37admit to and you can learn about your shadow by reading history you know you can read about Auschwitz you can read0:41:47about the concentration camps in Russia and you can imagine yourself as a guard instead of as a heroic rescuer of0:41:58unfortunate victims which would be very very unlikely and once you can imagine yourself as a guard which is a terrifying thing to do then you0:42:11understand something about yourself and I actually think and I think this is also from students studying young that you cannot have proper respect for0:42:20yourself until you know that you're a monster because you won't act carefully enough you know if you think well I'm a nice person I'd never do anyone any harm it's like you're no saint you can be0:42:31sure of that and the harm that you do people can come in many many ways and so if you regard yourself as harmless inoffensive nice well why do you have0:42:45any reason to be careful you're like a teddy bear sitting on a shelf even if you throw it at someone no one's gonna get hurt but that isn't what you're like because you're a human being and human beings0:42:54are some vicious creatures and there's utility in knowing that because it's also the case you know in the Harry0:43:03Potter series Harry could stand up against full-dome art and understand them and speak his language because he was infected by him to some degree a very very interesting idea anyways in0:43:13the second 10 the reason I'm telling you this and this is worth thinking about it's like how long were each of those books like 500 pages they're long eh and0:43:25there was how many of them seven and how many of them were sold I mean how many of you read every Harry Potter book0:43:34right that's how many of you read at least one okay how many you saw the movies it's like you're all in a cult0:43:44you are I'm telling you really that's the truth it's really the truth so in the second volume there's this snake0:43:54that's zip it around there the basilisk right and it lives in the underground that's chaos that's chaos and that's because wherever you are you're on thin0:44:03ice and underneath you're thin ice is chaos and here we are in this unbelievably civilized environment and everyone's getting along so perfectly0:44:12but you know we've got hot guard lights with electricity the sewage system is working no one's hungry it's like we can0:44:21be peaceful but if any of that fell apart and it could easily fall apart because it's a bloody miracle it ever works at all then the chaos that's just0:44:32underneath the surface is going to come up right now and it's useful to know that because it makes you properly grateful if you really understand it it0:44:41makes you proper be grateful for the bloody miracle that it is that you can be here in peace so anyways there's this snake that's0:44:50underneath the surface and it's you know no joke that thing it's big and it's ancient it's always been there and what happens if you look at it it turns you0:45:01to stone right it paralyzes you well that's the more that's the Gorgon that's Medusa the woman with the head of snakes and if you look at her it paralyzes you0:45:11what does that mean well you're walking through the jungle and big snake appears what do you do you freeze and no bloody0:45:20wonder because you're a prey animal and that's what they do when they see things that are going to eat them and so the snake well lots of people still die from0:45:32snakebite and our ancestors were and I mean our ancestors like you know tens of millions of years ago when they were0:45:41living in trees and weren't very big they made a nice snack for a snake and there's a woman named Lynn Isbell who's an anthropologist at UCLA who's correlated the presence of carnivorous0:45:52snakes with the acuity of primate vision and what she found was that the more snakes around the better the primates could see so and we're particularly good0:46:04at picking up patterns like snake camouflage in the lower half of our visual quadrant you know and people generally don't like snakes you can learn to handle them but no snake fear0:46:14appears to be an eight to Nate in chimpanzees and it tends to increase as you age rather than decreasing you can overcome it but well my daughter had snakes and one day her snake bit her it0:46:24was a fairly big snake and she hadn't paid attention to it for a while so it nailed her and from then on she had very0:46:34difficult time grabbing the snake it was like bitten once you know shy permanently she also told me years later0:46:43she had nightmares about snakes all the time when she had a snake in her room it's like you know and I think it was probably the smell so anyways so Harry0:46:54Potter decides he's going to go after the basilisk rake he's gonna go out there and face the thing that he's most afraid of so he does that wait out0:47:03in the depths so it's like Jonah going down into the depths and he faces the basilisk and it bites him and you know0:47:12that's a that's right because if you go down into the depths you can get bitten like it's no joke and this is a hero story but the thing about the hero0:47:22stories it's actually real the thing that you're facing is actually dangerous and even though facing it voluntarily might be your best bet and is likely0:47:31your best bet because that's the central story of humanity that doesn't mean you're going to succeed it's the real thing so anyways he gets bitten right0:47:40and he's gonna die now he's rescuing Ginny so that's the st. George story if you go after like dragon dragons like to capture virgins god only knows why I0:47:52think it's because I think it's because0:48:01one of the things that male humans have done from the beginning of time is chase the damn predators away and I suspect0:48:10that the males from god only knows how long ago who were particularly good at that were rewarded with female attention0:48:21and why the hell not so it's deeply rooted inside of us that idea of facing the unknown and freeing the woman so the0:48:30idea there is that if you it's a male idea and in large part I can talk about the central female myth and I will as we proceed the idea is that if you're this0:48:40sort of person who can stand up against the unknown and the frightening then you're also likely if you develop into0:48:49that sort of person then you're also likely to develop into the sort of person that other people will find attractive so you know and that's why0:48:58young believed that the inside the shadow was the anima which is like a female figure and so his idea was something like you know if you look0:49:07watch movies there's always this beta male guy if there romantic movies and he's a nice guy and he's the friend and you know the woman tells him everything but she doesn't like him a bit she likes the guy who's0:49:17like God an edge and and who's capable of I would say mayhem but at least of aggression now that doesn't mean she0:49:26wants them to be aggressive but what it does mean is that she wants him to be able to be aggressive that would be good and so he's the romantic target and so0:49:35he's the person that's incorporated the shadow and he's someone that is respectable and perhaps useful and so well that's a very old story0:49:58so let's let's think about this for a minute I've already offered you a proposition and I think it's an important proposition and I'm I'm offering you0:50:08this proposition so that you can make sense of art and literature and mythology and religion and dance and all those strange ritualistic things that0:50:19human beings do which seem central to us including including not least the in eradicable tendency of us to seek out0:50:31stories of heroes I should finish the Harry Potter story so Harry Potter goes down there to rescue Virginia no it's0:50:41that's not her name what is it Ginny yeah but there's a there's a formal name for that it's a variant of0:50:50Virginia anyways which is a very divergent so um and it gets bitten didn't yes Ginevra that's it he gets bitten and the bite is poison and so0:51:01there is dying which doesn't seem to be so good and then what happens and again you guys swallow this it's no problem so what's his name the Dumbledore0:51:12character he's got a bird right so he's the wise old man he's the ruler of the castle he's the ruler of the Magic Castle he's the Magic King you know he's0:51:23like God the Father as far as Harry Potter is concerned and he has a bird what kind of bird is it it's a Phoenix right and one of the things that's very0:51:32strange about a Phoenix is that well it's immortal but in a strange way you know it lives and lives I think a hundred years and it gets older and0:51:41older and then one day poof it bursts into flames and turns into an egg and then you get a new Phoenix so that's a symbol of transformation it's a symbol0:51:51of transformation the bird is a spirit or psyche and so here's what it means in part you know you know how when you0:52:02learn a lesson in your life that that's not very pleasant right it's not like when you learn something important it's best day of your life it's often the0:52:13importance of what you learn is often proportionate to just how wretched it is to learn it you know you learn things the hard way you learn things by getting hit because obviously if what you're0:52:24doing is working you get where you want there's no learning in that and that's happy it's when you're doing something and you hit an obstacle and maybe yeah0:52:33bloody well hit it hard and then you know you recoil and then you down into the depths you go and you have to sort yourself out and you realize that you're you know this particular kind of idiot0:52:42and that you should probably fix that and that's really annoying and difficult and you know and maybe you're down in the dumps and anxious for quite a while and then you get it repaired more or0:52:51less and you know you put yourself back together that's the Phoenix poof into flames bang egg new you and so you know that's the0:53:03ability to learn now human beings are very strange creatures right because we're very malleable compared to most animals you know like grizzly bears now0:53:13and grizzly bears a thousand years ago it's like whatever they're the same thing they do the same thing there's no transformation about human0:53:23beings we have this massive brain and you know it's a pain because it means you have to take care of human children until they're 40 and and that's a big0:53:34burden and so you know we pay a big price for it it also makes childbirth very difficult and and it's costly you have to eat a lot because you have a big0:53:43brain because it uses up a lot of energy and so you know you pay a price for it but the advantage is your plastic you can learn now learning is a strange0:53:54thing because you can think of it as just acquiring more information but you could also think of it and this is more0:54:03accurate as finding out something that you're doing wrong so that's sort of built into you like a character a character element of your character a0:54:12presumption of your perception or a deep habit it's really built into you it's a neural structure right it's a little I've and you have to kill it because it0:54:22isn't working properly and the pain that you go through in part when you're suffering because you did something stupid is it's something like your your the neurology I0:54:33can never get this quite right it's the pain of the death of that structure and that could be a huge chunk of you you know if you really have to go through a0:54:43massive revision it's like the person that comes out the other end might hardly be the same at all you know that happens for example if0:54:52you're trying to combat alcoholism which is just you know a wretched thing to do because well all your friends are0:55:01alcoholic all your family drinks too much the only thing you know how to do when you're socializing is to go to the bar and drink too much you know and you spend like 20 hours a week on it it's0:55:12like it's not just that you're addicted to the substance it's like that's how you live and so if you want to stop being an alcoholic not only do you have to stop drinking0:55:21alcohol but you have to stop seeing all your drunk friends and then maybe you've had them for your whole life and you have to have continual battles with your0:55:30drunk family and then you have to figure out something to do with that 20 hours that's now like hanging around your neck like an albatross and so you have to let0:55:40that whole part of your personality die and a new part has to spring forth and that's what the Phoenix is and the Phoenix is the capacity of the person to0:55:50transform and so when Harry gets bit by the snake that freezes him he gets0:55:59seriously injured the Phoenix comes in Christ some tears in his wound it prepares him bang he's back to life and0:56:09the strange thing is that that's okay with all of the viewers now why would that be there's nothing about it that's0:56:19rational nothing right Magic Castle that's not rational giant snake0:56:28underneath it that's a little more irrational turning you to stone going down there to face it being rejuvenated by a Phoenix0:56:37it's like yeah yeah that's okay we can we'll watch that clue well swallow it will be completely engaged in it and the reason for that is because it's a myth it's about how0:56:47people it's a meta story about how to act about how to conduct yourself in the world to face the things that you're afraid of that would otherwise paralyze0:56:56you to let the death of what is insufficient about you occur and then to wait for the rebirth0:57:10okay so science is about what the world is and myth and drama and dream and the0:57:21unconscious all of that let's say the aesthetic and artistic and fantastic side of humanity that's more about how0:57:30things should be it's more about how to act they're there lessons in how to act and they're abstract lessons people are capable of abstraction right so you say0:57:40well there's something good about you and there's something good about you and there's something good about you and and there's some bad about you and you and you and so we'll take all the good things and make one good thing out of0:57:50that we'll take all the bad things and make one bad thing out of that and then we sort understand the difference between good and bad and we get better and better and better and better at that over the centuries as we distill that0:58:00and then we have a figure of ultimate good and a figure of ultimate evil and that helps us understand what those two things are those are the hostile0:58:09brothers that's a very common mythological motif and you could say well they're at war inside you and and I think that that's a universal truth it's0:58:21an existential truth the domain of ethics and morality is how0:58:30are we in the world and what how should we be what's the good and the reason I'm telling you all this apart from the fact that you should know it because this is what you should know if you go through university is that it bears directly on0:58:41issues of health you're trying to accomplish something say if you go see a psychotherapist you know you could say well I'm trying to get healthy but you know that's not really right what you're0:58:51trying to do when you go see your therapist just get your life together and that's not the same thing you know like mostly when I'm acting as a therapist it's not like I'm directly0:59:01treating mental disorder like mental disorders aren't there just not neat little boxes it's not like someone has a fully functioning life but they have an0:59:10anxiety disorder and then you bring them and you treat the anxiety disorder and they go back to their fully functioning life it's like it's not like that at all the disorder is tangled out into their0:59:19life you know if you're depressed well usually your your workplace isn't going very well and your relationships with the people around you are damaged and you know you're connected in the0:59:29actual world with all of these things and so when you come to see a therapist you have to work on putting your life together in a sustainable manner and0:59:38that's certainly not just removing the mental illness is very rare now and then you see someone who's depressed whose life is together and they're just0:59:47depressed something's gone wrong probably biochemically and so with someone like that you can often give them in SSRIs I can't give them to them0:59:57but I can recommend them recommend they go see a doctor anyways and that sometimes just does the trick because you know their life is actually pretty1:00:06good they just can't see it but that's bloody rare man it's usually the case that someone comes and sees you and things are in a serious state of chaos and all of that has to be addressed and1:00:17some of its psychological and a lot of it's just practical its embedded out there in the world that's what the behavior cycle behavioral psychologists are particularly concerned about so1:00:27anyways psychology especially the clinical end is predicated on it's necessarily predicated on the question1:00:36how is it that we obtain the good how do we aim at the good and what would that be when my clients for come to see me one of the things I often ask them is okay well let's say you look a year ahead what do you want what are1:00:47we aiming at what would what wouldn't your life isn't the way you want it to be how would it look if it was the way you wanted it to be or at least partly that way and we aim at that right we1:00:58look for impediments psychological impediments fears avoidance strategies that sort of thing and we develop strategies and we try to move towards1:01:09that I would say ideal all right to understand the categories of myth we'll1:01:18say you we have to understand something about the nature of categorization now categorization is a tricky thing and we're gonna run through some complicated1:01:29ideas relatively quickly you know you think you put things in the same category because they're similar but the1:01:40problem is is that first of all that's not an answer it's just a restatement of the initial proposition and second of all you can put things in the same1:01:50category that are by no means identical and you often do that and third it's things are things that are similar are often also importantly different and so1:02:01picking which element of similarity you know like let's say oh if you have a group of books well are they the same well obviously no because well unless1:02:12they're you know all the same book but the category of books is a pretty strange category because the content of the books differs completely well you1:02:21could still make a group of books and you pick some arbitrary element that unites them and consider that grounds to make a category there's other categories1:02:31more scientific categories and scientific categories tend to actually contain things that are very very similar in across multiple dimensions1:02:40like protons are like that as far as I can tell there's nothing that distinguishes one proton from another and the same with electrons and you know the set of triangles is like that1:02:50because you can define it precisely but most of the categories that human Jews aren't so neat and the problem with that is that unless the categories are1:02:59neat like scientific categories it's very difficult to investigate them scientifically so for example you might do research on a group of people with1:03:09anxiety disorders but the problem with that is that the anxiety disorder category is so heterogeneous that it's1:03:18almost impossible to identify the commonalities across all the people who are in that category and that's partly because the category isn't actually a1:03:27scientific category it's a hybrid category it's a practical category I can give you an example of that1:03:54no I can't because I must not have saved it anyways many of the DSM categories so these are categories for psychopathology require if you're part of that category1:04:05imagine there's seven symptoms that you could have or eight symptoms that you could have that would put you in that category like antisocial personality eight symptoms you steal you kick you1:04:15hit you bite you you know you're abusive I don't remember the category categories precisely but you can be in the category if you have symptoms two through five1:04:25and you can be in the category if you have symptoms six through eight they aren't the same symptoms but you're in the same category and you think well how the hell can that be well that's a1:04:34family resemblance category roughly speaking and lots of the things that we use our family resemblance categories there's a prototype and then if you have enough of the features of that prototype1:04:44imagine the prototype has ten features and if you have an six of it those pro features you get to be in that category but it means that the categories are1:04:53actually quite diverse and that's one of the problems that plagues psycho psychiatry as a science in clinical psychology as a science it's a really1:05:03big problem because if the categories aren't homogeneous then it's very difficult to draw conclusions about the members of the category and the1:05:12psychologists and the psychiatrist's claim that those are scientific categories but but they're not and they can't be partly because they're aimed at the classification of health or ideal1:05:23versus non health or non-ideal and partly because they play multiple roles say I mean the category isn't there just to provide neat demarcations for1:05:33scientific study the categories there to give people a language to talk about certain sets of symptoms to diagnose1:05:42because you know when you come in and you have a set of symptoms you might want to know what what they are so that you also know what they aren't it's really a relief often to find a1:05:51diagnosis and then of course the diagnosis has certain implications for treatment and and for billing and for all of that so the category has to play all of those roles so there's multiple1:06:01types of category and the categories that were talking about in relationship to ecology aren't scientific categories1:06:11they're categories about the world construed as a place to act so here's a way to think about it you're always1:06:22looking at the world through a framework of reference and you have to do that because there isn't very much of you you can't see the whole world at once and in1:06:31fact the amount of the world you actually see is so small you can't believe it the central part of your vision is zipping around producing a pretty high-resolution representation of1:06:40exactly what you're looking at but outside of that center like if I look at you I can't see her eyes I can see her glasses but barely I can't even tell1:06:52whether you're male or female the person past that I can't see it all now you don't notice that you know you don't1:07:01notice that you're that blind because you're your central vision is always popping around illuminating that tiny space but you're so damn blind it's just1:07:10mind-boggling and I'm sure some of you have seen the invisible gorilla video you know where a gorilla comes into the video and you don't notice which is1:07:20somewhat shocking because you would think that you would notice a gorilla but what happens is that you actually don't notice something unless it interferes with what you're doing and1:07:30because what are you gonna do notice everything you can't do that you can hardly notice anything so what you do is you pick something to focus on it's usually something that you value because1:07:40why else would you focus on it so that means that your value system determines the direction of your perception bloody well think about that for a minute1:07:49that's a Buddhist idea right people people live in a kind of illusion and sometimes that illusion causes suffering and they can transform the way they look1:07:59at the world and that can release them from their suffering but the idea that you do live in an illusion well I don't know if it's exactly an illusion but you certainly do live within a framework of1:08:10perception that's determined by your values now that is so weird you know because we never think of the world as something that reveals itself through1:08:19our values but of course it of course it because you look at what you want you aim at what you want and once you've1:08:28aimed the world lays itself out for you and that's exactly how perception works that's why I represented it this way you're always somewhere that's point a that's somewhere in some place and some1:08:39time and you always have some notion about what you want to have have happened next you know you're gonna go to the next class maybe you've got a plan after this in this class you have a1:08:50plan you're hoping to learn something I presume and maybe you have a goal with regards to a grade and that's nested inside your desire to get a degree and that's nested inside your desire to be1:09:00educated and to have a career and and and and have a successful life so attending to me at the moment the reason1:09:09you're doing that is because all of those values exist within you simultaneously focusing your attention and so you're attending to me and not to1:09:18something else assuming that all of you with your computers open aren't surfing the web which you might be but assuming that you're focusing whatever you're1:09:29focusing on is directed by what you value and some of that can be unconscious in fact a lot of it is unconscious because you know it's very difficult for you to get control of what1:09:38you pay attention to you know what that's like you're trying to study it's kind of a boring paper christ' your attention it's just like everywhere you1:09:47know maybe you'll vacuum under the bed instead of doing the Pape reading the paper you know you can't get a grip on that thing so your attention has an autonomy and that's another1:09:57psychoanalytic idea you know because you kind of think well you're in control it's like really you ever try telling yourself what to do does the how does that work for you I'm1:10:07going to go to the gym three times a week right sure heard you who are ya I'm gonna quit eating sugar for a month it's1:10:16like how long does that lasts like 15 minutes and you're eating like three chocolate bars so you're this is and this is Freud central insight I would1:10:25say you're an autonomous group of spiritual agents let's say personalities and they don't really get along very1:10:34well and you the ego will say is by no means necessarily in charge and that's a very strange thing to realize but you can1:10:44really realize that by noticing how little control you have over your attentional focus okay so you've got your point a you're going to point B1:10:53you're always doing that you inhabit a structure of value and it changes what the point a is and what the point B is but the structure itself doesn't change when you're looking at the world what1:11:03you see is not objects you see tools and they make you happy those are things that facilitate your movement forward and you see obstacles and those are things that make you unhappy and when1:11:13you encounter in an obstacle one of the problems is as well you don't get to where you're going and that's a problem but the other problem is if you encounter an obstacle the frame might be1:11:23wrong right because you never know it might be just something that you could Ditu around real easily might be a fatal flaw in your whole plan and so obstacles have this dual nature they get in your1:11:34way but they can also take your plan down and so they can produce anxiety so my point is and this there's a book called visual an ecological approach to1:11:45visual perceptions great book by Gibson JJ Gibson if I remember correctly and this is although I thought of this a1:11:56while back I realized eventually that it was a variant of his theory and when he believed was that when people looked at the world they saw a value first and an1:12:06inferred object second so for example for Gibson if you're standing by a cliff you don't see a cliff and then think about the fact that you might fall and1:12:16then feel frightened you see a falling off place and part of the seeing of that part of the act of seeing is being afraid of that because your eyes are1:12:25connected right to your emotional systems and part of what your eyes do is tell you what the object is but your eyes do all sorts of other things like they prepare you for action they prepare1:12:35you for gripping they prepare you for emotion and and none of that actually requires the the existence necessarily the existence of your perception of the1:12:45object so there are people who have blind sight and if you show them so they think they can't see but if you flash them in angry face they'll show a skin conductance response and that's because1:12:56the visual pathways to the amygdala which does face a most facial emotional processing can still be active these are people who've usually had a stroke so their eyes are okay but they've1:13:05destroyed the visual cortex so so anyways it's perfectly plausible that at least at one level of analysis when you1:13:14look at something you see it's utility first so you see a chair and you might say a chair is an object but I wouldn't say that beanbags a chair and a stump is1:13:24a chair and they don't share much in common except that you can sit on them and so you know the chair is just the chair is basically conceptualized by its1:13:33functional utility and when you look at a chair what you perceive its is its functional utility and the chair tells you what to do it says sit on me and so that and there1:13:42are people who have prefrontal damage and they engage in something called utilization behavior and if they're walking down the hallway and there's a door opened they have to walk through it1:13:52they can't not do what the object tells them to do that's called utilization behavior so that's how the world is laid out and I would say inside that domain1:14:03you're in the predictable world you're in the world that you understand it that you know and that if you hit an obstacle or if you're outside that domain you're in the unknown you're in unknown1:14:13territory in the mythological world in the world for action you could conceptualize the world as a stage for1:14:22action and this is a Shakespearean quote that sort of sums it up quite nicely all the world is a stage and all the men and1:14:34women merely players they have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts and you might say well is that really true and the answer to that1:14:44is well it depends on what you mean by true and and that really is the answer because there are different ways of defining true so and it isn't1:14:58self-evident that there's only one way of defining true that's appropriate you know the definition of truth might be more like a tool and you know we are1:15:08tool using creatures and really what we're trying to do with our conceptions of truth is to work through the world successfully so even science is subordinate should be subordinate to our1:15:19use of the world as a tool because if it isn't useful tool like what are we doing with it you know just generating technology that might1:15:28destroy the world that seems like a bad idea so so I think that that the world as tool is actually the fundamental sword1:15:37of truth and I think that that's a Darwinian idea right that that our notions about the world have evolved through a Darwinian process and that1:15:46it's appropriate for us to regard as what is most real those things that1:15:55reliably ensure are the continuation of our life and the probability of our propagation and if you're a true1:16:04Darwinian I don't think there's a way out of that argument and it isn't self-evident by any stretch of the imagination that seeing the world as all1:16:14as objects is the way that our brain works in fact I don't think it's the way it works at all and I think that that's why we're so wired for stories right1:16:29it's a mystery you know like you won't line up for two hours to go see a lecture but you'll line up for two hours maybe you'll even1:16:39camp overnight if you're mythological imagination has been seized for god only knows what reason by Star Wars and you know that's the source of mythology1:16:49it's the mythology of the modern person and it fills a gap and that's why people do it so that to me speaks of men the1:17:01manner in which our psyches are constructed and that's a union idea that's the idea of the archetype essentially that to be human is to1:17:10participate in a certain pattern of being and that that pattern of being is socially it's acted out individually but1:17:19it's also part of your structure even your perceptual structure as a as a living organism of your particular type1:17:28and it would be the case at least in part that the hero myth which is go out where no one has gone before face they terrors of the unknown gather1:17:40something of value and return is the central story of humankind it's not the only central story but it's it's up1:17:50there in the top three and many of the dramas that you engage yourself in are variations of that story and you watch1:18:01it over and over and over because you're trying to learn how to do that because that's what you need to do to live okay1:18:14here's the here's an idea what's common among people well we're self conscious so we know of1:18:25our own existence and we know of our own limitations and so that means that we have a certain innate terror and fragility our existence is a problem to1:18:37us and in some sense what we're trying to do when we search for meaning is to search for a solution to that problem and that can be security but it don't can also be mode of being you know and1:18:47so for example being engaged in something worthwhile seems to be a good medicine for being fragile you know because you think well I'm doing this it seems worthwhile and the fact that1:18:57there's a price to be paid for it and that things could befall me that aren't good I'm willing to put up with that because what I'm engaged in seems to be of appropriate of sufficient1:19:06significance to justify all that we all become self-conscious and we're all trying to do something about that figure out how to deal with it so there's a1:19:18landscape that we inhabit I would say within which that takes place so there's a human being self conscious doomed to1:19:27tragedy and doomed to be aware of that the human being has two elements and that's the element that seeks the good and there's the other element that seeks I would say revenge and destruction and1:19:39we have our reasons you know if something tragic happens to you it's tragic and unfair and it really brings you low the probability that you're1:19:48going to become resentful and want revenge is extraordinarily high at no wonder and you know the archetypal representation of that is evil itself and the archetypal representation of the1:19:59good that you could do is is the hero and so those things inhabit us they're they're permanent elements of the human psyche and then what else is universal1:20:10to us well we live in a society you could say and that's deep that's deep it's not just human society like we've lived in a society forever so you know1:20:21lobsters live in dominance hierarchies and they use their serotonin system at least in part to keep track of their dominance position and so you can use1:20:31antidepressants on lobsters when they get defeated and they don't feel so bad from being defeated in a fight and so you just think about that because the antidepressants do the same thing to us1:20:40we're so bloody social that the circuits that evolved 300 million years ago when1:20:49the lobsters in us had a shared ancestor are still operating at the base of your brain that's why status is so important to people and reputation I mean that1:21:00serotonin system governs your emotional regulation how people respond to you and what they think of you man that matters that's why you're on Facebook all the time and checking your texts and and1:21:10obsessing continually about your online presence and assuming that you're doing that and you know contacting people frantically and seeing what the updates are it's like where where how are you1:21:21held in the esteem of others very very important and that's because it determines your emotional regulation it's really important so we exist in a1:21:30society always and the society has two elements the tyrannical element of the society that would be the tyrannical king roughly speaking a very common1:21:39mythological theme you see that in the Lion King - right because that's scar and of course you see it in the real world with almost continually and then1:21:49the benevolent king who is the source of all the good things about culture you know and and you can see these things play out as mythologies in political1:21:58terms so I would say for example the continual harping about the oppressive nature of the patriarchy is part of a1:22:07myth and the myth is that society is oppressive it's like well yeah obviously you know because you have to be quite a1:22:16bit like you and you have to be quite a bit like you even if you're not so that you can get along right everybody sacrifices a tremendous amount of their individuality to the common to the1:22:27common mode of being that's there's a tyrannical element to that but you know by the same token it's the basis of cooperation and the stability of society1:22:38and the the final element is that's often represented met in a masculine manner by the way society and I think that's because our primary dominance1:22:48structures given the creatures we are like chimpanzees the primary structures of dominance are masculine and then outside of what's known is the unknown1:23:01and we always have to contend with that and it's wonderful in that it's the source of all new things and it's1:23:10terrible in that it's the place where all the things that destabilize you come from and so this is a good representation although not the only one1:23:20so that's the feminine nature that's the masculine order and that's the individual who's destined to suffer in1:23:29the grasp of those two things and1:23:42I'll finish this next time what have we got here yep all right good enough we'll see you next1:23:52time so today to begin with we're going to finish the last lecture and then with1:24:03any luck we're gonna start the next one there somatically linked anyways well you know what all the lectures for the next well for the whole course hopefully1:24:12will be thematically late to some degree given that nominally they're about the same topic but some are more tightly linked than others so I started telling you last week about1:24:27this idea of the voyage to the underworld and I want to tell you a little bit more about that young in particular1:24:38conceptualized the voyage to the underworld as a journey into the unconscious and the unconscious for the psychoanalyst is a place of fantasy and1:24:49dream an implicit presupposition and habit and that's all correct you know we there is an unconscious and it's1:25:00perfectly reasonable to conceptualize it that way that the big difference I think between the psychoanalysts and the later more empirical scientists is that the1:25:10psychoanalyst sort of envisioned your psyche as a place of living partial1:25:19personalities instead of cognitive computational systems you know they took into account the fact that you're alive1:25:29and that the parts of you are alive and you know there's there's a neuroscientist named gives that Gazza Nick I don't know how to say his name1:25:40Gazza nigga that's wrong is that Gazzaniga yeah I think that's it anyways he did some of the earliest experiments on split brains and so sometimes if you1:25:51have intractable epilepsy which I wouldn't recommend by the way one of the surgical procedures for mediating its negative effects is1:26:01something called a you cut the corpus callosum and it's very large number large structure in the brain that connects the two separate hemispheres1:26:11and you know it's not obvious why we have two separate hemispheres although I'll tell you a little bit about why I think it is but anyways they do communicate and what Gazzaniga1:26:23demonstrated was that you could tell one hemisphere something without the other one knowing that both hemispheres were1:26:32conscious and that the consciousness was somewhat independent it really strange it's very interest makes very interesting readings reading you know1:26:41because it suggests that fragments of ourselves you could think of you have fragments of yourself within you that are like low resolution representations1:26:50of you you know and that and the psychoanalysts would think of those more as they're kind of like they're kind of like one-eyed Giants that might be a way of thinking about it if you were thinking about it in a fantastical way1:27:00so there's the angry you and you know you've all come in contact with the angry you it's a rather rigid that's the1:27:10first thing you might say about it it's impulsive and short-term it doesn't think much about the past unless it's bad things about whoever you're angry at1:27:19in which case it thinks about them a lot it's not too concerned with long-term future consequences and mostly it wants to be right and you know when angry you1:27:31disappears and normal you assuming such a thing exists reappears you can be perfectly shocked about how angry you1:27:40behaved and in fact sometimes if angry you really gets out of hand like it might in a battle like a war it might do1:27:51things that you just can't imagine that you would do and under those circumstances you can reveal parts of yourself to yourself that are so foreign1:28:01and so horrifying that it will leave you with post-traumatic stress disorder because it is the case that many but not1:28:14all people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder especially if it's battlefield related get it because of something they did1:28:23rather than something they saw or something that happened to them and that's really we're thinking about you know I mean there's a lot of weird potential nested inside people and you1:28:34know you don't see it under normal circumstances because the circumstances are normal and part of the reason that we like the circumstances to be normal1:28:43is precisely so that we don't see those parts of people we don't want to see and that's really worth knowing it's really1:28:53worth knowing because that's why people are so identified with their culture and why they need a culture you know the terror management theorist types they1:29:03kind of think of culture as a mechanism that inhibits anxiety and they think about it psychologically like it's it's something inside your your head let's say and it gives meaning to events and1:29:14stops you from collapsing into chaos and protects you from death anxiety but that isn't that's not right it's sort of1:29:24right but that isn't what your culture is your culture is a set of value Laden presuppositions that you orient yourself1:29:33in the world that match the set of value Laden presuppositions that everyone in your culture has and acts out and so1:29:43what that means is that when you believe something and you're among your own people you believe something implicitly it's the way you look at the world it's1:29:52the way you act things out you act about everyone expects you to act about they're happy about it in fact so there's a match between what you're doing what you see and what you're doing1:30:01and what other people expect and it's that match that regulates your emotions it's not the belief system it's the match and so part of the reason that1:30:11people are so tied to their cultural identity is because their cultural identity regulates their emotions and in1:30:22a profound way like this is no joke you know I mean one of the things that stabilizes human nervous systems is imagine that you have a1:30:31domain of competence there's many domains of competence and of course in some of those domains you're completely incompetent but they met me not matter because you don't go into that domain so1:30:40you have some area of specialization which you might think of as your sub-tribe you know your university students and so some of you are lower status by the rules of the university1:30:51game and some of you are higher status by the rules of the university game by the tribe and so the higher status people tend to be the ones who fit into1:31:00the academic environment you know and and find it conducive to their mode of being and all who also do well and their serotonin levels rise and you know the1:31:11neuro chemicals that moderate mood particularly are serotonergic its serotonin it's lots of other things it's1:31:20an oversimplification but that'll do for now as you become dominant in a hierarchy your serotonin levels rise and what that means is that happy things1:31:29make you happier and sad things make you less sad it Tunes your nervous system so if you're down at the bottom of the hierarchy and you're failing it's like hey hardly anything makes you happy and1:31:40everything makes you nervous and it's no wonder because it's it's not very good down there so the the societal structure1:31:50which which is an elaborated dominance hierarchy regulates your emotions because of the match between your expectations and the behaviors of the1:31:59people within that structure and then your position within the hierarchy regulates the rate ratio let's say and the intensity between positive and1:32:08negative emotion so you mess with people's status at your peril and you disrupt their culture they don't like that and no wonder because when it's1:32:20disrupted they fall into chaos and chaos isn't just anxiety the anxiety is bad enough but it's not just anxiety because when you fall into chaos when things1:32:29fall apart for you of course you're uncertain and anxious because you don't know what the hell is going on and you don't know where you are and1:32:39you don't know what to do Pat's anxiety-provoking and maybe you can't even understand your past properly anymore that as I said that happens when people get betrayed and so you fall into1:32:48this state where nothing is certain the way you construe the world isn't certain and even the way the world is is no longer certain because you don't know1:32:58how to act or your actions aren't working and so the world is presenting itself as something that's chaotic it's not just psychological the chaos is a1:33:07weird intermingling of the chaotic world and the chaotic self I mean that's what happens when you get unemployed it's like it's devastating right it's1:33:17devastating to people and it you could say well that's psychological it's like well yeah but they're unemployed that makes the world far more1:33:26incomprehensible and uncertain it's not just psychological it's psychological and that's bad but it's also real and that's even worse and1:33:35then those two things can spiral which they often do because you know if you don't set your expectations properly for a job search and assume that you're1:33:45gonna get 49 rejections for every interview which you really need to know because if you get 49 rejections it's not because you're useless it's because1:33:54the baseline for rejection is 98% and that's okay because the base rate for rejection for everything is 98% no1:34:03matter what you do but you need to know that so that you don't feel that it's like something wrong with you and of course you only have to get it right once that then you have a job it's a1:34:13lottery but you have to set yourself up you have to think okay well I'm gonna look for a job I need to how many resumes can I tolerate sending out a day you know it has to be enough so you1:34:23don't feel like a useless moron and it can't be so many that you're overwhelmed by the burden so and I help people do1:34:32this sort of thing all the time so maybe you decide well you're gonna send out ten a day and you're gonna work two hours on it and it's gonna take six months and then you know you've got your1:34:42parameters set properly and you would know what to expect in the world and and your emotions are regulated and so but the state of being unemployed doesn't1:34:53just produce psychological consequences so the distinction between the psyche in the world in some sense is quite arbitrary and the psychoanalysts I think1:35:04it air too much on the side of the subject they tend to think that too much of you is inside of you and too little of you is outside of you and part of the1:35:14reason I believe that is because of my clinical experience I love the psychoanalyst man they're brilliant they're brilliant they're deep1:35:24they grapple with real problems like with the problems when people have real problems that I mean profound problems there really won't profound moral1:35:33problems or problems of good and evil really you know there are things going on in their family that are so terrible that well that there are there are1:35:42sometimes fatal you know lie upon lie upon lie upon lie for decades and decades and decades it's awful and that's not exactly inside them1:36:01it's out there in the world and lots of the people that I see very famous critic of psychology I can't remember his name1:36:11but I probably will criticize the practice of psychology quite effectively in the leave in the early 60s the myth1:36:21of mental illness by Thomas says Szasz it's a classic you should read it if you're interested in psychology read it1:36:30like it's it's a classic and he basically said most people have problems in living they don't have psychological problems and so I've experienced despite1:36:40my love for the psychoanalysts very frequently what I'm doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would1:36:49work you know and you can parameterize that it's like what do you need how about some friends that people kind of1:36:58like that how about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust that maybe has a future that would be good how about a career that puts you in a dominance hierarchy somewhere so at1:37:08least you've got some possibility of rising some possibility of stabilizing yourself and our schedule in a routine because no one can live without a1:37:17routine you just forget that if you guys don't have a routine I would recommend like you get one going because you cannot be mentally healthy without a1:37:27routine you need to pick a time to get up whatever time you want but pick one and stick to it because otherwise you dis regulate your circadian rhythms and1:37:36they regulate your mood and eat something in the morning I had lots of clients who've had anxiety disorders I had one client who was literally1:37:46starving very smart girl sheet there's very little that she liked she kind of tried to subsist on like half a cup of rice a day she came to me and said I1:37:55have no energy I come home all I want to do is watch the same movie over and over what like is that weird and I thought well it depends on how hard you work you1:38:04know it's a little weird but whatever it's familiar you're looking for comfort so I did an analysis of her diet it's like three quarters of a cup of rice1:38:14it's like you're starving eat something you know you'll feel better so she modified her diet and her all her1:38:26anxiety went away and she had some energy it's like yeah you got to eat so schedule that's a good thing man your1:38:36brain will thank you for it it will stabilize your nervous system with it's a bit of a plan that's a good thing you need a career you need something1:38:45productive to do with your time you need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol most particularly alcohol because that does even a lot of people1:38:56you need a family like the family you have your parents and all that be nice if you all got along you could work on that that's a good thing to work on and then you know you probably need children1:39:06at some point that's life that's what life is and if you're missing you know you may have a good reason to not be1:39:15operating on one of those dimensions it's not mandatory but I can tell you that if you're not operating reasonably1:39:24well on four I think I mentioned six if you're not operating reasonably well on at least three of them there's no way you're going to be psychologically1:39:34thriving and that's more pragmatic in some sense than psychological right human beings have a nature there's things we need and if we have them well1:39:44that's good and if we don't have them well then we feel the lack and so behaviorists behavioral psychologists concentrate a lot more on that sort of1:39:53thing you know it's practical it's like strategizing make a career plan figure out how to negotiate because that's bloody important figure out how to say1:40:02what you need figure out how to tell the truth to people figure out how to listen to your partner in particular because if1:40:12you listen to them they will actually tell you what they want and sometimes you can give it to them and maybe they'll return the favor and if you practice that for like 15 years well1:40:22then maybe you're constantly giving each other what you want well hooray that would be good and then there's two of you under all circumstances and it's1:40:32better to have two brains than one because people think differently because of their temperament mostly and so the negotiation is where the wisdom arises1:40:42and it's part of the transformation the psychological transformation that's attendant on an intimate relationship and one of the fundamental purposes of a1:40:51long-term intimate relationship anyways when that falls apart chaos ensues and that's why chaos is represented so1:41:00continually in myths and stories and I'm going to walk you through a bit of that more today I talked about the story of Jonah now here's something to think1:41:11about the internal representations of language meaning evolved partly from our1:41:20pre linguistic ancestors knowledge of social relations like modern monkeys and apes our ancestors lived in groups with intricate networks of relationships that1:41:29were simultaneously competitive operative the demands of social life created selective pressures for just the kind of complex abstract conceptual and1:41:38computational abilities that are likely to have preceded the earliest forms of linguistic communication although baboons have concepts and acquire1:41:47propositional information from other animals vocalizations they cannot articulate this information they understand dominance relationships and matrilineal kinship but they have no1:41:56words for them this suggests that the internal representation of many concept relations and actual action sequences does not require language and that1:42:06language did not evolve because it was uniquely suited to representing thought well you you know you can think without language well take the case of someone1:42:15who's deaf and mute they have no language well they can operate in society they learn how to represent other people and they do that with image1:42:25now with the post modernists who I despise would be a reasonable way of putting it have this proposition that1:42:36there's no meaning outside language and and it's a powerful argument by the way but it's seriously wrong there is a meaning network outside of1:42:46language and it's what language is grounded in and that's this pre verbal comprehension of the world it's an embodied comprehension of the world1:42:55animals have it lobsters have it you know this particular scientist Seyfarth talks about our shared history with you1:43:06know higher primates that probably goes back 20 million years something like that we split from the common ancestor with chimps about 7 million years ago but you1:43:18know lobsters have dominance hierarchies they hardly have a nervous system at all which is partly why they're studied quite extensively and so they have a1:43:28social structure and they understand it like if one lobster thira lobster to be quite a shark to you if it happened and1:43:37you were fighting with another lobster and you lost you would remember that and the next time you saw that lobster you'd scuttle off somewhere else and you1:43:46know that and all the lobsters in an area know who's top lobster and who isn't and top lobster gets the best bloody place to be and the best food so1:43:57this dominance issue this cultural issue you know the fact that we live in a social environment is far deeper than1:44:06people usually consider and it's also worth considering and that this is what you might think of from an evolutionary perspective you know you think of natural selection as producing evolution1:44:16right well random mutation with natural selection but here's something to think about and Darwin knew this but Darwin was really smart and the biologists who1:44:27followed in his footsteps even up to now have only expanded out a fraction of what he had to say you know he was very interested in sexual selection now one1:44:38of the things about human beings that's unique is that human females are picky majors they're choosy they're also sneaky because you can't1:44:48tell when they're ovulating and with many other female animals you know so they have hidden ovulation and they're1:44:57choosy and they tend to choose men who are more successful in the dominant turkey well they're there's a shock I mean if you have a choice why not1:45:08if you pick someone who's at the bottom of the competence hierarchy well that's probably not going to work out very well for you and since women bear the burden1:45:17of representation you know when you1:45:29think of a doorman sorry you might think well it's the powerful guy the aggressive guy say that rises to the top of the doorman it's hurricane that's not true it's not even true among chimps like you can get a chimp tyrunt but then1:45:41what happens is other chimps gang up on him and tear him to pieces and they don't do it nicely they don't do it nicely and the chimps that tend to maintain their dominance1:45:50for long periods of time have a pretty wide network of friends roughly speaking with whom they engage in reciprocal interactions like grooming and they actually pay a lot of1:45:59attention to the female chimps who have their own hierarchy by the way and to the their offspring so they're like baby kissing politicians and so the idea that1:46:08it's raw power that produces dominance is a it's just wrong it's it's wrong now you know tyrants you know it's pretty1:46:17damn up unstable business being a tyrant there's lots of people who want to kill you plus you know you tend to rule over something approximating hell so maybe1:46:26that's bit worse better than being a subject in hell but it's not much better so anyway so this social social now so1:46:35what this means think about this for a minute so imagine you know imagine what I'm telling you bears some vague resemblance to the truth I think there's1:46:44quite a lot of evidence for it from from a biological perspective I mean this choosy mating thing occurs with lots of species you know there's this bird1:46:54called the bower bird you got to look up bowerbirds man those things are you just can't even believe they exist and so the male bowerbird he makes this really1:47:03complicated nest that's close to the ground he weaves it it's really quite nice you couldn't make one so and then he sweeps this yard in front of the nest1:47:14and then he runs around the forest or flies cuz he is a bird finding pretty things so maybe he'll find a nice collection of red leaves and1:47:24so then he'll take the red leaves one by one and fly back to his front yard and make a little square you know he's a bird so it's not a great square but he makes a little patch of red and he takes1:47:34a look at that and then he goes off and finds something blue and and he decorates it makes a little piece of abstract art in the front of his nest and a lot of male bowerbirds do this all1:47:44at the same time and so then the females come along they hop on something nearby and they kind of look like this checking it out and if they're happy with it well1:47:54then things proceed but if they're not they'd fly off to someone else's piece of abstract art and if a male piece of art is rejected by like three females in1:48:03a row he gets irritated and brushes it all off with his wing and then he makes another one it's like God well they1:48:12obviously have a sense of where well developed sense of beauty it's so cool you know and I guess the idea is that who knows what the hell the idea is1:48:21the female birds like artistic males something like that but if you're thinking about it biologically maybe it's an indication of intelligence right1:48:30it's a marker of intelligence you know and it's certainly the case that female humans prefer creative men so and no1:48:40wonder of course we wouldn't be creative if that wasn't the case so then imagine that there's two primary forces of evolutionary selection operating on us1:48:49and they're not really the natural world which is what people always think like the environment you know the animals and the trees and nature but it is nature1:48:58that selected us it's two other things well partly it's two other things so one is the dominance hierarchy the male dominance hierarchy is one of the primary mechanisms of selection so it's1:49:10like well women are faced with a hard choice which guy to go after right that's a hard choice well so they do the same thing that people do with the stock1:49:19market they outsource the cognitive problem the computational problem to the male dominance hierarchy then they just let the male Sirk themselves out however1:49:28they're going to and then they appeal from the top and so what that means is the dominant male dominance hierarchy itself is a selection mechanism because if you fail at it then you don't leave1:49:39any offspring and so what that means at least in part is that we have adapted to be better and better at attaining status1:49:49in dominance hierarchies over god only knows how long a period of time and that doesn't mean just power you know it might mean cognitive flexibility because1:49:59you could imagine dormant its hierarchy a dominance hierarchy be dormant its hierarchy see okay so if like if you're really successful you climb up dominance1:50:08hierarchy a right but you'd be and see know if you happen to land it knows you just be a failure so then you could say the ideal human being is someone who can1:50:19climb to the top of a doorman it's her key no matter what the doorman is hierarchy is right so we've evolved to1:50:28we've evolved such that success across the set of possible dominance hierarchies is the target and I think1:50:37that's why we have general intelligence because general intelligence is a general problem-solving mechanism and it's a single factor even like there is1:50:46intelligence is a single factor it's it's not divisible despite what people like Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner1:50:58falsely claimed so and then from the female perspective females are the next1:51:07gatekeeper and that's why they're often Mother Nature took me a long time to figure this out why the hell is nature feminine in mythological representations it's a very very it's extraordinarily1:51:18common mother nature you don't think a father nature you think of mother nature it's like why well nature brings forth new forms so that's feminine and nature1:51:31select in fact that's the definition of nature from a Darwinian perspective nature is that which selects women select their nature and that's partly1:51:43why far more men than you might think like far more are terrified of women because to be rejected as a romantic1:51:54partner by a woman is to be classified as vaguely acceptable life form huh no1:52:06value in propagating it though right so it's a major major rejection and you know I've had dozens of clients and many1:52:16many people write to me whose primary problem is that they're so terrified of women they can't even approach them very very very common so all right I want to1:52:28show you this little triangle thing this is kind of cool1:53:39go yet so no no nonverbal right nonverbal so what happened well there's1:53:48mother triangle I would guess and mutter triangle has circle as a child and triangle is maybe1:54:00a friend but not one that's very welcome according to mother and child Circle1:54:10goes out to try to play with triangle child and mother doesn't like that so she goes out there and pecks the hell out of her out of him chases him away pushes child circle back1:54:23into the home and goes into the home and then child circle isn't very happy about that it's running around causing trouble and1:54:32it manages to escape and then bad child triangle shows up and they play together and run around and run around and round around and run around with mother chasing them and then they well maybe1:54:43they elope who knows and then mother triangle has a fit and blows down the house right it's obvious reasonable1:54:52would you consider that a reasonable story about what happened perhaps you had other interpretations but I suspect1:55:01they were vaguely along that line well but the point here in this is the point of this experiment is how much information do you need from which to derive a narrative and the answer is1:55:11like none it just it's just immediate you you can watch some triangles moving around a box and instantly you1:55:20personalize it and that's because that's what you're like and the reason you're like that is because your environment1:55:30isn't nature your environment is culture your environment is other people other people and that was even more true for1:55:40chimpanzees and so forth and especially animals that had a limited diet like like gorillas they pretty much only eat like leaves you know a chimp spends like1:55:5012 hours a day chewing and that's where they have a gut like this it's like you can't eat leaves you know have you tried they have no nutrition so if you're1:56:00gonna eat leaves you have to eat a lot of them and then it takes like three months to digest them and so what we've done and this is pretty cool because1:56:09we're so smart is that we've traded gut for brain and that's why we're so svelte and the way we manage that it appears is that we learned how to use fire to cook1:56:19things and that meant that we had high quality nutrition much higher it's easier to digest cooked things especially meat and so because we1:56:29invented fire we didn't have to have so much intestine and we could spend a little more time on the brain so human beings really are fire users we invented1:56:38fire or discovered it or whatever man mastered it at least a couple of million years ago a long time so that's all1:56:47pretty cool as far as I'm concerned so that's partly how you think and that's1:56:56naturally how you think you think a certain way and so we'll say that your fundamental architecture is social cognitive you tend to view the world as if it's personified and the reason for1:57:07that is that the world in which you emerged as a being was primarily social and what you needed to know was who's the big primate who's the little primate and who's related to who and you know1:57:17among chimps if a big chimp is threatened by a small chimp well you know the big chimp could just tear the small chimp apart but the big chimp will1:57:27back off if it knows that the little chimp is associated with some really big chimps and so the little chimp can bully1:57:36the big chimp because it's part of a dominant family and that's because the nervous system of the big chimp doesn't respond to the little chimp like a1:57:45little chimp it responds to the little chimp like it's a little chimp with four great monsters attached to it because it's true so it's nervous system is1:57:55actually responding to the network around the chimp and so that's exactly what you well it's not exactly what you're like cuz you're not chimps but you know it's that kind of platform that1:58:06constant it's the evolutionary underpinnings of your psyche so what does that mean well it means this is like perfectly fine to1:58:16us right can animate things we can hit rabbits are people no problem will go along with that you remember Roger Rabbit I presume most1:58:26of you've watched that so this is the detective whose name I don't remember he has to go to toontown because there's cartoons and there's people and you know1:58:35they share the same world and you can go to toontown although it's kind of annoying because cartoon figures are kind of annoying like there's slapstick types and so he's not very happy to be1:58:45there and this is what it looks like right everything is animated meaning alive anima means soul by the way so1:58:55everything has a personality and you know when you're reading books to kids the son has a personality train has a personality jet has a personality1:59:04doesn't matter what it is it has a personality and that's because the child is learning to understand the world using the architecture of social cognitive architecture and so and the1:59:13thing that's really interesting about that this just blows me away you know evolution is conservative and so once it's produced something it has to build on it it's like dass the operating system it's1:59:25like really it's still there if I remember correctly under Windows 10 you can't get rid of the damn thing because it's part it's part of the structure now1:59:35and it's like the keyboards we use which were actually designed to slow typers down because with mechanical typewriters if you type too fast the keys would jam1:59:44so they divine devise the keyboard to slow you down and we still use it which is stupid you know you want the high frequency letters close to your middle1:59:55fingers that isn't what it's like at all but we can't change it because everyone uses it so your body plan that thing is been around a long time man if you look2:00:05at mammals particularly but even lizards there's so much like us in their in their skeletal structure that it's just mind-boggling you know and we're all2:00:14variants of this same symmetrical four-legged mouth here structure and so you have to2:00:25build in what you have and if you have a social cognitive architecture then you have to first understand the world through the social cognitive categories and what's so bloody strange about that2:00:35is it actually seems to work we actually seem to develop a coherent representation of being I would say of being that's not the same as nature it's2:00:45not the same as the world because when we think of the world we think of the objective world and I'm not talking about the objective world I'm talking about the world of human experience and2:00:54we see that through social cognitive filter and it makes perfect sense to us and it works that's so strange so anyways everything's got this2:01:04animated nature and we don't have a problem with that in fact we actually find it quite fun you know people go visit the Disney2:01:14toontown and participate in it and and have fun with it and so that shows you as well how how natural it is for us to2:01:23to view things this way you know cars have faces right designers know that they know that people don't want a car2:01:32with three headlights because like who wants to be associated with a three eyed monster no one it's like two eyes that's something you could be comfortable with2:01:41and so cars have faces like a BMWs the new ones they really look cat-like you know and they have sexy curves they do2:01:51they do there's been a more eye studies of that so if you show men photographs of attractive women looking directly at2:02:00them there's a little part of their brain called a nucleus accumbens that lights up because to have someone look directly at you especially if they have like a smile is is interpreted as an2:02:09invitation to approach and women they have the same damn problem because with women because if you go into drugstores say and you look at women's magazines they're all the same they've all evolved2:02:19to the same endpoint they all have an attractive woman on them all of them and they're looking right out and so when women see that they actually see it as something to it approach it's an ideal2:02:30and you know when people say that those Beauty ideals are to women and all ideals are oppressive but the empirical research some of it2:02:39done here suggests that interacting with those images helps that it performs the psychological function of helping the2:02:48woman equate herself with the ideal and in most cases that actually produces a pop and elevation and mood and you know think about it you're really gonna go to the magazines store when you're just2:02:57looking for something to do and you're gonna buy something that makes you feel depressed and oppressed it's like no you're not going to do that magazines that do that to you they will die2:03:07because no one will buy them and there's a reason they all turned out the same way it's like they're just responding to demand so faces oh yes with regards to2:03:22the sexy curves so a woman who looks a woman's picture looking right at a man will produce this activation in the primary reward system cocaine produces2:03:32the same response and so does sports cars especially curvy red sports cars and so that's why you often see an attractive woman sitting on a curvy red2:03:42sports car in an ad because it's you know if there's a an ad for beer on the side it's like hey everything's perfect so and you know those are all primary2:03:52real reward representations and they produce attraction because part of positive emotion that dopamine dopaminergic Li mediated element of2:04:01positive emotion is an approach emotion it's not a satiation satisfaction emotion it's oh good there's something good here I can move towards it and that2:04:10that is what happiness is that's directly what happiness is it's not attaining something because that just puts in a whole new problem you got to2:04:19figure out what to do next alright so I suggested to you that one2:04:29of the problems that we have the problem I would say is not what the world is made out of but how we should be in the world because we're alive and how we2:04:39should be well it's fairly straightforward not so much pain would be good that'd be good not too much anxiety hey we're2:04:48bored for that little pleasure down then some stability not dying that's a big one that's a big one and then let's say2:04:59from the Darwinian perspective propagating and so that's what rained out and the reason we're aimed at that is you just think about this it's so amazing so every single one of your of2:05:11the relatives you have in your ancestry every single one of them successfully produced a child who successively2:05:21successfully produced a child all the way back to three billion years ago it's bloody unbelievable like the2:05:30probability that you exist well it's a hundred percent because there you are but the probability of predicting that you would exist you know if you tried to predict it it's like you the chance that2:05:40the chances that you're here are so infinitesimal that it's just absolutely mind-boggling think about that unbroken sequence of success over literally over2:05:51billions of years god it's amazing and so you have to obviously you have to think that there's a pretty strong2:06:01proclivity for that to happen I mean some of obviously was necessity but not only that I mean it's necessary that impregnated females have an infant it2:06:12isn't necessary that they keep it alive so you can't account for that continuity merely from necessity you have to2:06:21interject least a small amount of consideration that the care that's associated especially with taking care of infants because there you know there2:06:31are a lot of work that's there to tennis it's actually I think it's manifested in the personality trade agreeable to us as it looks to be like agreeableness is one2:06:41of the dimensions where men and women very most substantially agreeableness looks to be like the manifestation of the maternal instinct now men can be agreeable to because of course male2:06:50human beings take care of children you know if you're a grizzly bear female you just chased the damn male away because he'll kill your Cubs that's not so helpful but they're not maternal2:07:01at all quite the contrary but you know human men are pretty damn maternal they're not as maternal as women on average although some women are less maternal than some2:07:12men because you know the curves overlap but but on balance how are we in the world well we're aware of our own vulnerability who are aware of our own2:07:24shortcomings let's say and that's I think that's partly from being a social being because people are always signaling your shortcomings to you to such a degree that you even signal your2:07:33shortcomings to yourself because well you might as well fix them before someone else points them out that's guilt and shame you know when Freud called out the super ego the super-ego2:07:42is kind of like the internalized representation of the judgmental father and culture I think is represented as a father figure God the Father let's say2:07:52because it's actually oh it's actually quite a bit like there is an all-seeing eye that's always watching you it's a really really intelligent way of conceptualizing it because the group2:08:03which is more or less eternal is watching you all the time all the time and it's judging you all the time and we2:08:12know that if you put people in a room and you put a big eye on the wall you know that you give them an opportunity to cheat on some little Chiti thing you know nothing too important if they're in2:08:22the room with the big eye they're less likely to cheat if they're in the room with no eye at all so you know and what do you do you keep an eye on your kids and the reason you do that is so they2:08:31don't misbehave and we keep an eye on each other and so we have a representation of that and as far as I can tell we represent it as a transcendent figure of judgment and it's2:08:42like yeah it's hey that's a pretty good metaphor so one of the2:08:57this is a major intellectual battle the major intellectual battle and it's raging in universities it's basically a2:09:07battle between post-modernism and traditional and tradition I think that's the right way of thinking about it for2:09:17the post modernists human beings have no nature we're blank slates everything that we are is enculturated so we're completely malleable and all elements of our2:09:26identity are valuable on the other side are the traditionalists who are I would say grounded more in biology on the one2:09:35hand but also in in historical humanities tradition that suggests that people have a nature I explained some of2:09:45that nature most people want to have threads it's part of your nature you know most people want to find love part of your nature and you suffer2:09:54without it so and you know you could say those are all social constructs but you can say you can say anything so you know and don't ever trust someone who has one2:10:07explanation for everything you know how much intelligence does that take you got one explanation you just trot it out for every phenomena this is an2:10:18alternative now here's what happened in part Nietzsche back in the late 1800s was very interested in the dissolution of2:10:28traditional faith in the West we fell out of our myth that's a way of thinking about it we start believing in its fundamental axioms we start believing2:10:37that there was such a thing as a transcendent deity for example it did it didn't mesh well with the emerging scientific viewpoint and so in the late2:10:471800s Nietzsche announced the death of God which sounds fairly presumptuous but it wasn't something he was celebrating2:10:56the full quote and I haven't got it exactly right is God's dead we've killed him and we'll never find enough water to wash away the rivers of blood so like2:11:06that's a lot different than what you see scrawled on bathroom wall you know and echip hypothesized that in the 20th century millions of people2:11:15would die in the conflicts over what values were going to reign as an alternative to that tradition and he particularly brilliantly pointed to2:11:27communism he said that's where it's gonna be and Dostoyevsky did the same thing and so and since then there's this2:11:36being this battle hey and the battle is kind of like this the battle is on the one hand between social construction social constructionist utopians who2:11:45believe that human nature is infinitely malleable and that with the proper transformations in society you can bring apart about the perfect state and the perfect human being and and2:11:57traditionalists and young I think is the classic example of this who believe that there is a human nature and it's deeply2:12:07embedded within us and that the cultures we set up have to manifest themselves in accordance with that nature or they will fail well Jung believed in the existence2:12:19of a meta-narrative the hero myth roughly speaking and he explained its connections to various religious traditions in a staggeringly2:12:28brilliant manner Camille Paglia who I would recommend and I think I already told you that you know she she's already concluded after going through a2:12:37radical feminist period early in her life that the proper way for society orient itself is within a mythological structure and that that's part of what2:12:46the humanities provides and the alternative is rational arguments over2:12:55what values are going to dominate and it isn't obvious that rationality can solve that problem I don't think it can that's Humes point David Hume said you2:13:04can't derive an art from it is right you cannot use science as a guide to behavior so what do you use instinct2:13:15instinct manifested in imagination and the evolution the evolved structure of your organic cultures2:13:24something like that do they have a structure that's the question okay so you ask yourself this question what is it that every human being shares regardless of place and time so any2:13:35universally comprehensive language that would be a meta-narrative a myth a hero myth let's say a myth about what a human being not only is like but should be2:13:45like has to speak to us about those aspects of experience that we all share because otherwise we wouldn't understand the damn story now we go to how we go to stories that we understand all the time2:13:55like Star Wars and it really doesn't matter what country you know everybody gets it more or less so obviously there's stories that we can understand2:14:04and mutually you know we understand love stories we understand stories of conflict we understand stories of betrayal we understand stories of anger and that's because we can feel jealousy2:14:13we can feel love we can feel anger it's it's part of you it's right there we even know where the circuits are you know and then you're like other animals2:14:22they feel it too so very similar emotions as far as we can tell so here's2:14:31here's this is derived in large part from you but not only here's what we share natural world social world and the2:14:44fact of our existence as an individual and that can be represented different ways it can be represented as you the known the and unknown or it could be you2:14:55culture and nature all the same representations and the cultural representation tends to be male that's2:15:04God the Father let's say and the representation the feminine representation tends to be female this2:15:15is the known the culture Apple Indian control that's associated with the Sun consciousness the king the patriarchy2:15:24the plow because it pushes up the earth the phallus obviously order and authority and the crushing weight of tradition the wise old man and the tyrant Dogma the day sky the country man2:15:37the island heights the ancestral spirits the activity of the dead Captain Hook he's a tyrant and2:15:46that's why Peter Pan doesn't want to grow up to become him and that's why Peter Pan does well because he thinks that adults are all tyrants why is Captain Hook a tyrant because a2:15:55crocodile ate his hand and the crocodile has a clock in its stomach and the reason for that is that the crocodile is time and times already got a piece of2:16:04Captain Hook and he's not very happy about it he's bitter and resentful and tyrannical and when Peter Pan looks out adulthood that's what he sees and he thinks why should I sacrifice the2:16:14potential of childhood for the singularity of tyranny and so he stays immature his entire life and he's king of the Lost Boys Jesus great there's a2:16:25porn star named Jeremy Christ I can't remember his name it's really an ugly guy he is he is he is an ugly guy he2:16:34admits it and he said something funny I was watching a documentary about him and he said the funniest thing he said I'm2:16:43the hero to people who think people like me are heroes I had what a drag a I mean he's just did in this horrible situation he doesn't admire the people that admire2:16:54him but he gets admired by them all the time well it's sort of like Peter Pan it's like well he's king of the Lost Boys he doesn't get Wendy either right2:17:03she grows up she has a family he asked to content himself with Tinkerbell and you know what Tinkerbell doesn't exist well that's what happens when you don't2:17:13grow up that's a representation of culture that's a nasty one eh he'll will2:17:22kiss us we'll kiss a statue of Stalin who cares that he murdered 30 million people culture well you know in the2:17:32university you hear a lot about the patriarchy and how impressive it is it's like yeah Yeah right definitely no kidding but you know it's kind of useful as well since it provides2:17:41light the food and all of that which you know kind of counterbalances it to some degree culture has a pause development and a negative element the individual2:17:51has a positive the negative element nature has a positive element and a negative element and if people tell you a one-sided story which is the ideological story they2:18:00leave out that they say all culture is terrible the human being is a Despoiler and nature is perfect it's like no nature kills you culture keeps you alive2:18:12and there's things about you that are honorable and good as well as things about you that aren't and you need to know both of those and that's what the great stories tell us all right0:00:002017 Personality 04/05: Heroic and Shamanic Initiations
0:00:00 [Music] all right so I suggested to you last0:00:12class that human beings world as a place of action through the lens of their social cognitive biological sub structure and I made that argument on0:00:26the basis of the supposition that our primary environment was actually other people and I mentioned to you I believe that those other people are arranged in0:00:40hierarchies of influence and authority or power or dominance which is often how its construed and that the dominance hierarchy as a structure is at least 3000:00:52million years old which makes it older than trees and it's for that reason that you share the same neural biology to govern your0:01:02observations of your position in the hierarchy as lobsters do which is a remarkable fact you know it's a remarkable that the lobster uses0:01:13serotonin as the mechanism to adjudicate its status position and that modifying the serotonin function in the lobster can produce changes in its behavior can0:01:26can / help the logs to overcome defeat for example which is very much equivalent to what happens to a human being when they take antidepressants you0:01:36know it's it's it's a good example of the conservation of biological structure by evolution and another a good illustration of the continuity of life0:01:45on Earth it's really amazing but the other thing it is a testament to is the ancient nature of the social structure now we tend to think of the social0:01:55structure as something other than nature right because society is I suppose mythologically opposed it's opposed in a narrative way cultures opposed to nature0:02:06it's the town in the forest but the town has been around a long time so to speak and the structure of the town is also part of nature in that the dominance0:02:17hierarchy is part of and because it's so ancient you have to consider it as part of the mechanism that has played the role of selection in0:02:28the process of natural selection and so roughly seem what seems to happen is that there is a plethora of dominance hierarchies especially in complex human0:02:41communities and many of them are masculine in structure in that their dominance are keys that primarily men compete in or that has been the0:02:50historical norm and that some men rise to the top based on whatever the dominance hierarchy is based on and they make their preferential mates and it's a0:03:02good strategy for women to engage in because why and many sorts of female animals do precisely this is they let the male's battle it out and then pick0:03:13from the top and or often the dominant males there's no choice on the part of the females it's the dominant males just chasing away the subordinate males but0:03:24with humans it's usually the case that the females have the opportunity to do at least some choosing and so we have if you think about that what that implies0:03:35is that we have evolved to climb up dominance hierarchies and then I would say it's not exactly that even because there are many different dominance0:03:46hierarchies and so the skills that you might use to climb up one might not be necessarily the same skills that you would use to climb up another and so then I would say what we have all evolved for instead and I'm still0:04:00speaking mostly on the masculine edge of things historically speaking is the ability to climb up the set of all possible dominance hierarchies right and0:04:12that's that's a whole different idea it's like the averaged hierarchy across vast spans of time and I think it's for that reason that we among others that we0:04:22evolve general intelligence because general intelligence is a general problem-solving mechanism and it seems to be situation in depend0:04:31so to speak and of course there's been an arms race for the development of intelligence between men and women because each gender has to keep up with0:04:41the other and women have their own dominance hierarchies there's certainly no doubt about that and of course now men and women more increasingly compete within the same hierarchies and we don't exactly know0:04:53how to sort that out yet because it's an extraordinarily new phenomena but in any case because of the the permanence of the dominance hierarchy it has come to0:05:06be represented in fundamental narratives because human beings and this is something that we share everywhere it's the thing the Wall Street bankers shares0:05:15with with the kalahari Kung Bushmen who are among the genetically speaking they0:05:26seem to be very close to what the original most original human beings were like in Africa before the Diaspora about fifty thousand years ago but you know0:05:36both of those people despite their vast differences live in communities that have a hierarchical structure that are composed of0:05:46individuals that are embedded in a natural world you know the world outside of the dominant Sarki and so that's the standard human environment I would say0:05:55and so stories that rely on the representations of those environments and their interactions are what you might describe as universal stories and0:06:06that's why people can understand them and I would say further and this is drawing substantially on say derivation of the work of Carl Jung because I think0:06:15he delved into this more deeply than anyone else so a lot of this stuff is quite Union in its in its origins we the commonality between human beings so you0:06:29know you have to have commonalities in order to communicate right axiomatic commonalities because otherwise you have to explain everything and so there's0:06:38many things that human beings don't have to explain to one another we don't have to explain anger we do have to explain jealousy we don't have to explain fear we don't have to explain pain we don't have to explain joy we0:06:51don't have to explain love etc those are built into us and so there are predicates of being human and you could say that those human predicates and the0:07:02standard human environment produce standard narratives and then you could say even further and this is more of a leap I would say is that those who act0:07:12out the role of the victor in those standard narratives are precisely the people who attain victory in life and I would say biologically defined in that0:07:24they make more attractive partners but also I believe that there's an alignment between human well-being which is a very weak word and participation in these0:07:35meta narratives that drive success because well do you want to be a failure or a success well you know it's hard to be a success you have to adopt a lot of0:07:45responsibility and so you might be willing to take your chances as a failure but I can't exactly I'm not going to make the presumption that that's going to put you in a situation other than one where you experienced a0:07:58lot of frustration anger disappointment depression pain and anxiety at the bottom of the heap and so generally that's not what people are aiming for0:08:09although under certain circumstances if people don't like responsibility and are willing to take their chances they might take the irresponsibility and it's0:08:23apparent freedoms over the necessity of thinking things through the medium and long run anyways we stop here I suggested to you that one of the primary0:08:35narrative representations was the known or culture or order I think those or the explored territory or the dominance arc I think those things are basically0:08:44interchangeable from from a representational perspective and you know in the movie The Lion King that's represented by Pride Rock which is the0:08:55central place of orientation founded on Raw which is the sort of thing that people embed their memories in that's why we make sculptures and gravestones and that sort of things rock stands for permanent0:09:07and to have rock under your feet as to be on a solid foundation and that's a pyramid in some sense in that movie and the pyramid has topped by you know the0:09:17king and queen and they're their offspring so that's that's the divine couple that's one way of thinking about it and Simba of course is the newborn0:09:27hero and you know you extend that even though it's lions and drawings of lions at that and animals are acting it out it's completely irrelevant to you that0:09:38those characters happen to be animated and that what you're watching is a fiction so and I would say to you with regards to fiction you know you might0:09:48say well is fiction true or not and the answer to that is yes and no it's not true in that the events portrayed in fiction occurred in the world they0:10:02didn't but they're fiction is true the same way numbers are true I would say like you know if you have one apple and one orange and one banana the common0:10:15analogy between all of those three is one and you might say well is one as real as one fruit is the abstraction one as real as one fruit and I would say it0:10:27depends on what you mean by real but representing things mathematically and abstractly gives you incredible power and you could make the case that the0:10:37abstraction is actually more real than the phenomena that it represents and certainly mathematicians would make that case they would say that mathematics is0:10:47in some sense more real than the phenomenal world and you know you don't have to believe that mostly it's a matter of choice in some sense but you0:10:56can't deny the fact that an abstraction has enough reality so that if you're proficient in using it you can really you can change the world and in and in0:11:06insanely powerful ways you know I mean all the computational equipment you people are using or depending on the abstractions one and zero0:11:15essentially and I mean look at what emerges from that and so I would say with regards to fiction if you take someone like Dostoyevsky oh I think it's0:11:24a favorite of mine by the way I would highly recommend that you read all five of his great novels because they are unparalleled in their psychological depth and so if you're interested in psychology Dostoyevsky's the person for0:11:37you Tolstoy is more of a sociologist but Dostoyevsky man he gets right down into the bottom of the questions and messes around transformative reading anyways Dostoyevsky's characters this character0:11:53named her skull in the Cobb is a character in crime and punishment and Raskolnikov is a materialist rationalist I would say which was a rather new type0:12:02of person back in the 1880s and he was sort of taken by the idea that God was dead and took and convinced himself that the only reason that he that anyone0:12:15acted in a moral way in a traditional way was because of cowardice they were unable to remove from them the restrictions of mere convention and act0:12:25in the manner of someone who rose above the norm and so he's tortured by these ideas he's half starving he's a law student he doesn't have enough to eat he0:12:36doesn't have much money and so you know he's not thinking all that clearly either and he's got a lot of family problems his mother's sick and she can't spend him send a much money and his sister is planning to engage in a0:12:49marriage that's loveless to someone who's rather tyrannical who he hopes will provide the family with enough money so that he can continue in law school and they write him brave letters telling him that she's very much in love0:13:02with this guy but he is smart enough to read between the lines and realizes that his sister is just planning to prostitute herself in you know in an altruistic manner he's not very happy with that and then at the same time as0:13:16all this is happening he becomes aware of this pawnbroker who he's you know pawning his last possessions to and she's a horrible0:13:26person and not only by his estimation she pawns a lot of things for the neighborhood and people really don't like her she's grasping and cruel and0:13:36deceitful and and resentful and like and she has this niece who's not very bright intellectually impaired whom she basically treats as a slave and beats0:13:46all the time and so Raskolnikov you know involved in this mess and half starved and a bit delirious and possessed of these strange new nihilistic ideas0:13:59decides that the best way out of this situation would be just to kill the land let the pawnbroker take her wealth which he all she does is keep it in a chest0:14:10free the niece so that seems like a good idea so remove one apparently horrible and useless person from the world free his sister from the necessity of this0:14:21loveless marriage and allow him to go to law school where he can become educated and do some good for the world you know so one of the things that's lovely about0:14:30Dostoyevsky is that he you know when sometimes when one person is arguing against another or when they're having an argument in their head they make0:14:39their opponent into a straw man which is basically they take their opponent and curricular their perspective and try to make it as weak as possible and and0:14:48laugh about it and and then they come up with their argument and destroy this straw man and feel that they've obtained victory but it's a very pathetic way of0:14:59thinking it's not thinking at all what thinking is is when you adopt the opposite position from your suppositions and you make that argument as strong as0:15:09you can possibly make it and then you pit your perspective against that that strong iron man not the straw man and you argue it out you0:15:23battle it out and that's what Dostoevsky does in his novels I mean he's the people who stand for the antithesis of what dust is dust is he actually0:15:32believes are often the strongest smartest and sometimes most admirable people in the book and so takes great moral courage to do that and0:15:44you know in risk Olenick oov what he wanted to do was set up a character who had every reason to commit murder every reasonable reason philosophically0:15:53practically ethically even well so risk Olenick off goes and he kills the old lady with an axe and it doesn't go the way he expects it will because what he0:16:05finds out is that post murder Raskolnikov and pre murder Raskolnikov are not the same people at all they're not even close to the same people he's0:16:16entered an entirely different universe and Dostoevsky does a lovely job of describing that universe of horror and chaos and and and deception and and and0:16:29suffering and terror and all of that and he doesn't even use the money he just buries it in a and an alley as fast as he can and then doesn't want anything to do with it again and anyways the reason I'm telling you all this is potentially0:16:43to entice you into reading the book because it is an amazing amazing book but also because you might say well his risk is what happened to Raskolnikov0:16:52true are the stories in that book true and the answer to that is well from a factual perspective clearly they're untrue but then if you think of0:17:01Raskolnikov as the embodiment of a particular type of person who lived at that time and the embodiment of a certain kind of ideology which had swept0:17:11across Europe and really invaded Russia and which was actually a precursor a philosophical precursor to the Russian Revolution then Raskolnikov is more real0:17:21than any one person he's like a composite person he's like a person who's irrelevant sees have been eliminated for the purpose of relating0:17:33something about the structure of the world and so I like to think of those things as sort of meta real meta real they're more real than real and of0:17:42course that's what you expect people to do when they tell you about their own lives about their own day you don't want a factual description of0:17:53every muscle twitch you want them to distill their experiences down into the gist which is the significance of the experience and the significance of the0:18:06experience is roughly what you can derive from listening to the experience that will change the way that you look at the world and act in the world so0:18:17it's valuable information and they can tell you a terrible story and then that can be valuable because that can tell you how not to look in the world look at0:18:26the world and act in it or they can tell you a positive story you can derive benefit either way which is why we also like to go watch stories about horrible psychopathic thugs you know and and hopefully we're learning not to be like0:18:40them although there are additional advantages in that you know someone you might be some say that someone who is incapable of cruelty is a higher moral0:18:51being than someone who is capable of cruelty and I would say and this follows young as well that that's incorrect and it's dangerously incorrect because if0:19:00you are not capable of cruelty you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is and so part of the reason that people go watch anti heroes and villains is0:19:12because there's a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect0:19:21because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth and if you grow teeth and you realize that you're somewhat dangerous and let or maybe0:19:30somewhat seriously dangerous and then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and other people do the same thing and so0:19:40that doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel what it means is that being able to be cruel and then not being cruel is better than not0:19:49being able to be cruel because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naive and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control0:19:59and you know a lot of martial arts concentrate on exactly that as part of their philosophy of training it's like we're not training you to fight we're training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights but0:20:14if you happen to have to get in one and then I guess the philosophy also is is that if you're competent at fighting that actually decreases the probability0:20:24that you're going to have to fight because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence and with any luck and this is certainly the case with bullies with any lock a reasonable show of confidence which is0:20:36very much equivalent to the show of dominance is going to be enough to make the bully back off and so the strength that you develop in your monstrousness0:20:46is actually the best guarantee of peace and that's partly why Jung believed that it was necessary for people to integrate their shadow and he said that was a0:20:55terrible thing for people to attempt because the human shadow mmm which is all those things about yourself that you don't want to realize reaches all the0:21:05way to hell and what he meant by that was it's through an analysis of your own shadow that you can come to understand why other people are capable and you as0:21:14well of the sorts of terrible atrocities that characterize let's say the 20th century and without that understanding there's no possibility of bringing it0:21:23under control when you study Nazi Germany for example or you study the Soviet Union particularly under Stalin and you're asking yourself well what are0:21:34these perpetrators like forget about the victims let's talk about the perpetrators the answer is they're just like you and if you don't know that that just means that you don't know anything about people including yourself and then0:21:46it also means that you have to discover why they're just like you and believe me that's no picnic so that's enough to traumatize people and that's partly why0:21:56they don't do it and it's also partly why the path to enlightenment and wisdom is seldom trod upon because if it was all a matter of following your bliss and0:22:06doing what made you happy then everyone in the world would be a paragon of wisdom but it's not that at all it's the it's a matter of facing the thing you least want to face and everyone has that old there's this old story in King0:22:19Arthur where the night's go off to look for the Holy Grail which is either the cup that Christ drank out of it the Last Supper or the cup into which the blood that gushed from his side was poured when he0:22:32was crucified the stories vary but it's it's basically a holy object like the Phoenix in some sense that's representation a representation of0:22:41transformation so it's a it's an ideal and so King Arthur's knights who sit at a round table because they're all roughly equal go off to find the most0:22:51valuable thing and they and where do you look for the most valuable thing when you don't know where it is well each of the knights looks at the forest0:23:00surrounding the castle and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him and that's a good thing to understand because the gateway to wisdom0:23:10and the gateway to the development of personality which is exactly the same thing is precisely through the porthole portal that you do not want to climb0:23:19through and the reason for that's actually quite technical this is a union presupposition - is that well there's a bunch of things about you that are underdeveloped and a lot of those things are because there's things you've0:23:30avoided looking at because you don't want to look at them and there's parts of you you've avoided developing because it's hard for you to develop those parts and so it's by virtual necessity that what you need is where you don't want to0:23:44look because that's where you've kept it and so and that's why there's you know an idiosyncratic element of it for everyone your particular place of0:23:53enlightenment and terror is not going to be the same as yours except that they're both places of enlightenment and terror so they're equivalent at one level of0:24:02analysis and and different than another so anyways back to the fiction and and and and what it does if it distills truth and it produces characters that0:24:14are composites and the more they become composites the more they approximate a mythological character and so they become more and more universally true0:24:25and more and more approximating religious deities but the problem with that is they become more and more distant from individual experience and so with literature there's this very tight line0:24:38where you need to make the character more than merely human but not so much of a God that you know one of the things that happened to Superman in the 1980s0:24:50Superman started out he's got a heavenly set a parents by the way in an earthly set of parents and he's an orphan like Harry Potter very common theme is that when Superman first emerged he could only jump out of her buildings you know0:25:02and maybe he could stop a locomotive but by the time the 1980s rolled around like he could juggle planets and you know swallow hydrogen bombs and you know he0:25:11could do anything well people stopped buying the Superman comics because how interesting is that it's like something horrible happens and Superman deals with0:25:20it and something else horrible happens and Superman deals with it and it's like that's dull he turned into such an archetype he was basically the0:25:30omniscient omnipresent omnipotent God and that's no fun it's like God wins and then God wins again and then again God wins and you know so then they had to0:25:43weaken him in different ways with kryptonite you know so green kryptonite kind of made him sick and red kryptonite I think kind of mutated him if I remember correctly and anyways they had to introduce flaws into his characters0:25:55so that there could be some damn plot and that's something to think about you know there's a deep existential lesson in that in that your being is limited0:26:05and flawed and fragile you're like the genie which is genius in the little tiny in the little tiny lamp you know this immense potential but0:26:16constrained in this tiny little living space as Robin Williams said when he played the genie in Aladdin but the fact that you have limitations means that the0:26:26plot of your life is the overcoming of those limitations and that if you didn't have limitations well there wouldn't be a plot and maybe there would be no life0:26:35and so that's part of the reason why perhaps you have to accept the fact that you're flawed and insufficient and and live with it and consider it a precondition for being it's at least a reasonable0:26:49it's a reasonable idea so anyways one of the main characters is the country the known the explored territory we went over that a bit and it always has two0:26:59elements I mean your country is your greatest friend and your worst enemy you know because it squashes you into conformity and demands that you act in a0:27:11certain manner and reduces your individuality to that element that's tolerated by everyone else and it it constrains your potential in a single0:27:21direction and so it's really tyrannical but at the same time it provides you with a place to be and all of the benefits that have accrued as a result0:27:33of the actions of your ancestors and all the other people that you're associated with so there's the good tyrant or the bad tyrant and the good King and those0:27:45are archetypal figures and that's because they're always true and they're always true simultaneously you know which is partly why I object to the notion of the patriarchy because it's a myth the law the it's the what do you0:27:57call that it's the apprehension of a mythological trope which is that of the evil tyrant without any appreciation for the fact that the archetype actually has0:28:07two parts and the other part is the wise king and you know you can tell an evil tyrant story about culture no problem but it's one-sided and that's very0:28:17dangerous because you don't want to forget all the good things that you have while you're criticizing all the ways that things are in error that's a lack0:28:26of gratitude and it's a lack of wisdom and it's it's founded in resentment and it's it's very dangerous both personally and socially I told you that Captain0:28:40Hook is a tyrant because he's got this crocodile chasing him in the crocodile has a clock in its stomach and that's death it's like obviously right tick tick tick tick and it's a crocodile and it's under the water and it's already0:28:53got a taste of him so he's being chased around by death and that makes him terrified and resentful and and cruel and bitter0:29:02so he's a tyrant and he wants to wreak havoc everywhere and then Peter Pan of course looks at Captain Hook and thinks why the hell should I grow up and to be0:29:12a tyrant and sacrifice all the potential of childhood and the answer to that is the potential sacrifices itself if you don't utilize it as you mature and you0:29:22just end up a 40 year old lost boy which is a horrifying thing to behold it's almost as if you're the corpse of a child the living corpse of a child0:29:31because who the hell wants a six-year-old 40 year old you're a little on the stale side by that point and not the world's happiest individual so you0:29:41know your potential is going to disappear because you aged anyways and so you might as well shape that potential in a particular direction and0:29:50at least become something no matter how limited rather than nothing so you know0:30:00Peter Pan that's a great story it's a great mythological story so well so let's talk about tyrants well not only are they mythological figures but they0:30:13exist and they tend to be deified I mean Stalin was for all intents and purposes God the Father in Soviet Russia although he was pretty much only the worst0:30:23elements of Old Testament God who was you know constantly smiting people and and wiping out populations and doing all sorts of things that seem to be quite0:30:32nasty but nonetheless you know people worshipped him in many ways and and he's a representation of just exactly what goes wrong when things really go wrong0:30:43when people stop paying attention and when they all lie because one of the things that characterized the communist state was that no one ever got to say0:30:52anything they actually believed ever and that was partly because one out of three people was an informer which meant if you had a family of six people two of0:31:02them were informing on the government about you and that included your own children and you and if you were an informer you were often amply rewarded by the state so that if you lived in an overcrowded apartment building with0:31:14three families in the same flat and you informed on you know the woman down the hall that you didn't like she got shift shipped off to the old concentration camp and you got her apartment and so that was a lovely0:31:26society and it only killed about thirty million people between 1919 and nineteen fifty-nine so that's what happens when the archetypal structure gets tilted0:31:37badly when people forget that they have a responsibility to fulfill as citizens as awake citizens who are capable of stating the truth and the archetype0:31:48shift so there's nothing left of the Great Father except the tyrant and let's not have that happen I mean the one on the right is really interesting because0:31:57consciously or unconsciously you know there's Stalin surrounded by what is for all intents and purposes fire you know he looks like he looks like Maleficent0:32:09in Sleeping Beauty when she shows up at Aurora's christening you know she puts her arms up in the air and green fire surrounds her it's like it's like he's0:32:22surrounded by fire and there's Lenin above him who's like king of the fiery realm and that's for sure so I mean all the terrors that happened in the Soviet Union didn't start under stell and they started under Lenin and0:32:35Lenin was or Stalin was definitely Lenin's legitimate son let's put it that way so you know this is another example of the tyrannical element of the Great0:32:48Father and the sorts of things that can happen I mean I kind of got a an evil kick out of this bad that was quite old you know0:33:00it's kitschy in some sense and and you know it shows I don't think that's something you'd ever see at a magazine today 10 unusual stamps showing evil dictator you know well fair enough I mean that's0:33:14what he was and that's the consequence and that's just a tiny bit of the consequence because the Nazis wiped out a very large number of people often0:33:24using compassion as a as a as a as a justification so when they went after the mentally ill and the terminally ill and those who whose0:33:39intelligence was compromised for biological reasons and and those who were too old they basically justified it by saying that the enforced euthanasia was merciful and that you were actually0:33:52being a good person by complying with the requirements and so something to think about more mythological representations I like0:34:02these quite a bit so there's their Hitler as you know Knight of the faith essentially with I suppose that's a recreation of the Christian holy spirit0:34:12dove you know except it's an eagle which is a bird of prey and and a prayer and uh what do you call those things a scavenger right so that's kind of0:34:21interesting but that's Hitler as night of the of the blood roughly speaking and there this is an allied war poster essentially that assimilates the Nazis0:34:35to poisonous snakes and you know we don't like poisonous snakes very much and and it's probably because they've been preying on us for approximately0:34:44twenty million years because snakes and primates humans in particular co-evolved and so the snake is a representation of that which lies outside the comfortable0:34:57domain and that can be you know a snake obviously or it can be an abstract snake0:35:06and the abstract snake is your enemy or an even more abstract snake is the evil in your own heart and this is going to be a bit of a leap for you but there's0:35:16this ancient idea that developed in what in the West over thousands of years far predating Christianity that at least its origins that the snake in the Garden of0:35:29Eden was also Satan which is like of what the hell it's a very strange idea but the reason for that as far as I can tell is that you know we have this0:35:38circuitry that detects predators and a predator representation of a predator is a snake or a monster that incorporates snake-like features like a dragon or something like that or a dinosaur with0:35:49lots of teeth or a shark that lives under the water and will pull you down you know because I suspect a lot of our ancestors met a nasty death at the hands0:35:58of Nile crocodiles while they were in the African veldt going down to get some nice water so you know that's the thing that jumps up and pulls you under and0:36:07you know that happens in your own life because things jump up and pull you under you know and use the same circuitry we use the same circuitry to process unknown things that upset us as we once used to detect predators who0:36:21were likely to invade our space and so and and human beings are capable of abstraction and so you know you could think about the real predator that might0:36:30invade your space and maybe that's a snake or a wolf or or some kind of monster you know and that's pretty concrete and biological chimps have that0:36:40you know chimps don't like snakes and so if you a chimp comes across a snake in the wild then like a big let's say I don't know what live with chimps I don't0:36:50know if they're pythons but they have constrictors there anyways so you know maybe there's like a 20 foot constrictor and this and the chimp like stays a good distance away from it but it won't leave and then it has this particular cry that0:37:02it uh ters that's called a snake rah WRA a and so it makes this noise which means something like holy shit that's a big snake and I actually mean that because0:37:14the circuits that primates use to utter distress calls are the same circuits that we use to curse just so you know that's why people with Tourette's0:37:25syndrome swear because like what what's up with that how can you have a neurological condition that makes you swear well it turns out that guttural0:37:34effect Laden curses are mediated by a different speech circuit and that's the speech circuit we share with the predator alarms of other primates so0:37:45that's pretty cool so anyways this chimp stands there and makes this snake noise and then all bunch of other chimps come running and you know some of them stay a0:37:55fair ways from the snake can some of them get pretty close but they'll stand there and watch that snake for like 24 hours you know so they're fascinated by it and you know if you've handled snakes you can understand that0:38:06fascination because they're fascinating you know and they're numinous I would say that that's the right way of putting it at numinous is a word that means0:38:17intrinsically meaningful like a fire you know you can't look away from fire you know if you're sitting in front of a fireplace it's like you're staring at it and that's because you're all descended from the first mad chimpanzee who had0:38:30some weird genetic mutation that made it impossible for him to stay away from fire it was like the first chimp arsonist you know and and he figured it0:38:40out and well hey now he was a chimp with a stick with fire on it like that's a mega chimp man and so you know we have that mutation in spades and no wonder so0:38:53anyways so they they make this you know they have this reaction to snakes and chimps that have never seen a snake if they're in a cage and you throw a rubber0:39:05snake in there it's like bang they hit the roof but then they look at the snake you know it's so it's like it's terrifying and fascinating at the same0:39:14time and you should look at the snake because you want to know what it does but you should stay away from it because it's a snake so you you're kind of screwed in terms of your motivations right one is get the hell away and the0:39:25other is well don't don't let that thing do anything that you're not watching and so that's really the reaction we have to the unknown it's terrifying but we watch0:39:36it and then you know the meta story is that not only do we watch it but we go explore it and so you might think well back in the Garden of Eden so to speak0:39:45when we were living in trees the snakes used to come and eat us and and our offspring more likely and you know we weren't very happy about that and then0:39:56we figured out how to maybe maybe by accident draw up a stay a stick on a snake and that was a good thing because the snake didn't like that and then maybe the next thing we learned a little later was to like actually take a stick0:40:09and like ock the snake with it and you can believe that the first primate who figured out that was just as popular as the guy who mastered fire and so we're pretty good at whacking state snakes0:40:21with sticks which is why Springfield has a snake whacking day it's devoted to nothing but that right I don't know if you know that0:40:30Simpsons episode but it's quite comical so well so then you think about the snake as a predator and it's the thing that invades the garden always because0:40:40you just can't keep snakes out of the damn garden no matter how hard you try and then you think of snakes and maybe you think of meta snakes and like a meta snake would be also a predator but maybe that's the predator that represents the0:40:54the destructive spirit of the other tribe because chimpanzees for example are quite tribal and they definitely go to war with one another and so you think0:41:03you abstract out the idea of the predator to represent malevolence as such and then you take that one step further and you realize that the worst0:41:14of all evil predators is the human capacity for evil and then at that point you know you're starting to I would say psychologize or spiritual eyes the idea0:41:27of danger and making it make it into something that's conceptual and something that's psychological and something that you can you can face sort0:41:38of on mas I mean one of the things people had to figure out was how do you deal with danger and so you feel figure out how you deal with a specific danger0:41:47but then because human beings are death so damn smart they thought well what if we considered the class of all dangerous things and then what have we considered0:41:56a a mode of being that was the best mode of being in the face of the class of all dangerous things well that's a lot better you get you know you could solve0:42:06all the dangerous problems all at once instead of having to conjure up a different solution for every dangerous thing and that's basically as far as I can tell where the hero's story came from and the hero's story is basically0:42:19you know there's a community it's threatened by the emergence of some old evil often represented by a dragon that's sort of typical say of the Lord of the Rings stories there's a hero often a0:42:32humble guy but not always sometimes a knight decides he'll go out there you know and chase down the snake maybe even or the serpent or the dragon maybe even0:42:42in its lair and he'll have a bunch of adventures on the way that transform him from you know useless naive Hobbit into you know sword wielding hero and he0:42:53confronts the dragon and gets the gold and frees the people that it had enslaved and then comes back transformed to share what he's learned with the0:43:03community it's like well that's the human story fundamentally and that's that's our basic instinctive pattern and it's represented in narratives constantly and that's partly what this see this has meaning you know what this0:43:15means why why do you know well you know because it draws on symbolic representations that you already understand you understand that a mess of tooth snakes is not a good thing and0:43:29that may be the sensible thing to do is stomp them and it's not like you need an instruction manual to figure out what the poster means and so you know that's0:43:42two different representations of Hitler that's sort of the pro-hitler representation and I would say that's the anti-hitler representation and you know that's the real Hitler who at this point does not look like a very happy0:43:53clam so so that's the known that's culture that's order and what's eternally juxtaposed to culture and the known and the explored and order is the0:44:06unknown and the unknown is a strange place the unknown is actually it's a physical place like the unknown is the place that when you're camping and0:44:17you're around a fire the unknown is everything outside the circle of the light and you remember in the Lion King you may not remember when when when0:44:28Mufasa that's the king right goes and takes Simba up to show him his territory he says he is the king of everything that the light touches0:44:38and that's a very old idea and you guys had no problem with you know that was fine that made sense and that I would be on the light was the darkness and that was the elephant graveyard that was death that was the place of death and0:44:50danger that's where the hyenas hung out and you weren't supposed to go there and so of course Simba because he's a rule breaking hero just like Harry Potter immediately goes there and so you know that's like the forbidden fruit it's the0:45:02same sort of idea if you want someone to do something the best thing to do is tell them that they shouldn't and not explain why you know so for example if I0:45:14said to you at the beginning of this class look I've got one rule here don't sit in that chair no matter what you'd be thinking the whole year especially if0:45:25I reminded you well just what's up with that chair like let's chair as magical all of a sudden you some of you might even well you probably wouldn't because this is a ridiculous example but maybe you know you come to class early and sit0:45:37in that chair just to see what would happen you know and people are very curious and that's exactly what we're like and that's a very old story too right it's like opening Pandora's box don't open that box you'll be sorry it's0:45:49like oh huh you know all the horrors of the world fly out and believe me you will open Pandora's box many times in your life because you know with your0:46:00family or maybe your mate or maybe your children you'll have this idea that they have a box with things in it that you want to know about and you'll say well0:46:11I'm kind of curious about this particular event so why don't you tell me about it and they say well no we probably really shouldn't open that box and you keep bugging them and then they open it and then all sorts of things fly0:46:23out that you didn't expect and then maybe you think hey it would have been better if I would have just left that damn box closed but and you can do the same thing to yourself believe me and so the Pandora's box idea the0:46:35forbidden fruit idea that's that's a major-league idea and part of the reason in the judeo-christian tradition why people are saddled with the notion of0:46:44original sin is because hyper cortically developed chimpanzees without much sense can keep their hands off things and so they0:46:55keep exploring even when they know better and every time they do that they learn something that is that destroys the paradise that they currently inhabit0:47:07right because there's plenty Unni and I never learned anything in your life that's of importance without it having a pretty damn destabilizing effect on you0:47:16at the moment of realisation right you learn something happy it's like whatever you know that all that means is that I was doing things right like it's nice0:47:26and everything but it's not informative you do something and all hell breaks loose that'll make you think that's for sure you might never stop thinking for0:47:38the rest of your life so anyways the unknown the unknown is that which surrounds the known it's an unexplored territory it's usually represented as0:47:49female I think for a variety of reasons and not not as female exactly it's not the right way to think about it as feminine and that's not the same thing0:47:58because feminine is a symbolic category whereas female is like an actual female and so you don't want to confuse the metaphor with with the with the0:48:08actuality because we have these social cognitive categories built-in you know you might say masculine feminine and offspring something like that we had to0:48:19use what we could to represent what we were attempting to figure out and we kind of mapped them onto the external realities of being the best we could0:48:30using what we could and so you know nature is benevolent and it's fruitful you know all things come from nature and all things come from the unknown right0:48:40because the known is already there it's the unknown that manifests the new right and so that's part of the reason for the characterization of the unknown as0:48:51feminine and then there's also the case that women play a massive role in sexual selection among human beings so that mmm from an evolutionary perspective you're0:49:02twice as likely to be a failure if you're a man then you or if you're a woman in that you have twice as many female ancestors as male0:49:11ancestors and you think well that's impossible but it's not all you have to do is imagine that every woman has one child half the men have two and the0:49:20other half have zero and so end of problem and that's basically how it works out so women are more choosy mater's than men by a substantial margin0:49:31there was a funny study done by the guy who established it's one of the big dating sites and he looked at how women rated men and they rated the 50th0:49:46percentile man at the 15th percentile so 85% of men were below average according to women's ratings now men had their same arbitrary choices because of course0:49:57they preferred younger women to older women and and they were more swayed I would say by by attractiveness but that didn't have set nearly as big an effect0:50:07on their actually actually writing of women so anyway so you know from from a Darwinian perspective nature is that which selects so that's all it is and so0:50:22sexual selection plays a massive role in human evolution you know the fact that we have these massive brains is very likely a consequence of a positive0:50:31feedback loop and sexual selection you know because otherwise that's the only time you can get really rapid changes in evolutionary space where you0:50:40know you get a process going that reinforces itself so there's a little preference for intelligence and then that produces more intelligent men and women and then there's a little more preference for intelligence and you know0:50:52maybe then that turns into the ability to speak and or to master fire and then there's way more selection for intelligence and the brain just goes like this you know and women have paid a pretty big price for that because your0:51:06hips are basically so wide that you can barely run and if they were any wider than you couldn't and of course the pelvic passageway through which the baby0:51:16travels is too small so it's really painful and dangerous and the baby's head has to compress quite a lot I mean they come out cone-shaped often0:51:26and then they're born really young so you have to take care of them forever like what the hell you know a deer is born a fawn is born and it's like two seconds later it's standing and then it's running from a lion it's like you0:51:38know it's like 15 minutes later and a baby it's like you just lies there and you know utters plaintive noises that's all it can do and that does that for0:51:49like ten months before it could skitter away from a sloth if it was predatory you know so you really got to take care of those creatures and so that's a big0:52:01price to pay that's a big price to pay for our cortical evolution so anyways here is some of the symbolic represents representatives of the unknown the0:52:12unconscious Dionysian force of the it'd that sort of Freud's representation of the unknown the terrors of the darkness that's the unknown the monsters that0:52:23lurk they're the source and the resting place of all things the great mother the Queen the matrix which means matter which means mother0:52:32the matriarch matter mother the container the cornucopia the object to be fertilized the source of all things the fecund the pregnant the strange the emotional the foreigner the place of return and0:52:46rest the deep the valley the cleft the cave hell death and the grave because it's beyond the moon ruler of the night and mysterious dark and matter and the0:52:57earth then you know all this because when you watch a movie that's rife with symbolic representations it draws on those underlying metaphors and they're0:53:07natural I mean where does a witch live well in a swamp for God's sake she doesn't live in the penthouse of a New York Tower she lives in a swamp and it's0:53:16dark there and if the moon's up that's a better and maybe it could be a crescent moon or maybe it could be a full moon but you know witches live in the right place if you're going to understand it and you all you understand all of that0:53:28and it's part of the structure of your imagination you could say and so it's part of the unspoken fantastical imagination that unites all0:53:40of us and it makes us specifically human there's a good representation of the underworld and the place of transformation so that's Hell in Isis in0:53:50Egypt was queen of the underworld and the underworld generally has a queen and she usually shows up when order falls apart and so you go to the underworld0:54:01when your life falls apart that's what it means and so when you see these stories of the hero you know journeying to unknown lands of terror and danger0:54:13that's that's what happens to you it happens to you all the time you know you're you're in this little safe space like The Hobbit in the Shire and then0:54:22you know there's a great evil brewing somewhere and you can no longer ignore it so off you go into the land of terror and uncertainty and better to go on0:54:31purpose then accidentally that's for sure because at least you can be prepared and we also know that if you're going to face a threat if you face it0:54:41voluntarily what happens is your body activates itself for exploration and mastery but if you face it involuntarily same size threat then you you you you0:54:52revert to pray pray mode and you're frozen and that's way way way more stressful it's way harder on your body and so it's better to keep your eye open0:55:03and watch for emergent threats because you all know you know what you're not doing quite right and where your life is likely to unravel you all have a sense of that and the best thing to do is to not ignore that to pay attention to it0:55:16to watch it and to take corrective action early and then you know you stay on top of things and things your little trip to the underworld might be a few0:55:26minutes long instead of a catastrophe that produces post-traumatic stress disorder knocks you out for four or five years and maybe you never recover so and0:55:35that's right you know that's what these kind of symbolic representations mean it's those are states of being that that that indicate being devoured and you can0:55:46be devoured your own unconscious Jesus that happens all the time what does that mean well you know and it's an autonomous thing in some sense you know like if you if you get depressed or if you get really0:55:57anxious you don't have any control over that it's like it sweeps up over you and pulls you down why down well down is where you go when you're sad you don't0:56:08go up man I'm up today oh that's too bad no it's man I'm down today and well that's partly this and it's partly because this is subordinate and it's0:56:18partly because down is closer to the ground and farther from the sky like there's all sorts of reasons you're feeling down rather than up up is where0:56:29you're aiming right yeh MUP you don't aim down well there the reason those phrases make sense is because they're locked deeply into this underlying0:56:38structure of imagination and well those are the architect or the archetypal structures according to Jung and I I think that he's far as I can tell he's0:56:52dead accurate and I think we understand the biology of such things much better than we did so there is more representations she's she's quite the0:57:02friendly creature that's Kelly I like this representation better those are heads by the way in hands so she sort of represents well very complex0:57:12things she represents death she represents transformation in this I already like this representation I think it's brilliant so imagine that what the people were doing who formulated these representations what they were trying to0:57:25do was to make a representation of the domain of threat itself right so that they could deal with the idea that because we can say threat well what is0:57:35that what the hell does that mean well threat is the category of all threatening things and so then you can think about threat and you can think about threat across all those individual instances and maybe you can figure out0:57:47how to deal with threat right how what's the best way to be in the world so that you most effectively deal with threat well that's sort of like apart from how0:57:58do you deal with pain that's sort of like the ultimate question of human beings you want to be terrified No so you want to be in danger No so like you better figure out how to deal with0:58:09threat so first of all you have to conceptualize it so we'll take a look at this representation so that's Kelly shear her hair is on fire well fire you know that's that's a numinous phenomena0:58:22dangerous but transformative she's wearing a headdress of skulls she has a weapon in this hand and and she has a tiger's tongue she often has a snake0:58:33around her waist need none of these do but she often does but in this case this then that's because you know it it's a snake we've already covered that well0:58:44these things that look like snakes here aren't you notice how her belly is concave well it's because she's just given birth to this unfortunate person that she happens to be standing on and she's eating him intestines first and0:58:56that's a fire ring which he is in and then it's got skulls on the inside of it it's like what's that supposed to do well partly it's supposed to represent0:59:05that which terrifies you it's like yeah fair enough man because I don't imagine you saw those things in there before I explained them but someone who was0:59:14familiar with that image would know what it meant it's like some poor artist was sitting there thinking well how do I represent destruction it's like bang whoa okay well put that down and then we won't look at it again so and then what0:59:27do you do with this you make sacrifices to it and you think well that's kind of primitive you know first of all well that doesn't really exist well it does0:59:40if it's an amalgam of threat symbols I can tell you that it exists that's for sure so it exists as an abstraction if nothing else do you offer it sacrifices0:59:51well what the hell do you think you do what are you doing in class why aren't you like drinking vodka and snorting cocaine you know because you could be doing that instead here you are listening to me you know slaving away in1:00:06university you're young it's like really you've got nothing better to do than sit there you know well what you're willing to forego today1:00:15pleasure for tomorrow's advantage and that's what sacrifice is and human beings discovered that dramatically first you know like we were we were apes1:00:25for God's sake we didn't just leap up and think oh we better save for tomorrow you know we it took thousands of years for that idea to emerge and it emerged1:00:34in dramatic form and it was sort of like well society is sort of like a god know what they weren't thinking this through is like if you're gonna represent society well it's like this masculine God that's always judging the1:00:47hell out of you that's everywhere all at the same time it's like yeah yeah that's true absolutely and what do you have to do with it well you have to give it what it wants why why do you have to give it what it wants because it'll crush you if1:01:01you don't and that's exactly right and if you're lucky and you give it the right sacrifice then it'll smile on you and you get to have a good life and that1:01:12was like that was the major discovery of mankind man that was a killer discovery it was like the discovery of the future you know we discovered the future as a1:01:23place and it was a place that you could bargain with you can bargain with the future wow that's just what an idea that is you know it's it's so unlikely well1:01:34how do you bargain with the future well you give it what it wants and you know some of that you maintain your social relationship and you know you make1:01:44yourself useful to other people and you shape yourself so that you can cooperate with people and you you don't act impulsively and maybe you squirrel1:01:55something away for the next harvest even if you're hungry and you know and then the future isn't hell and you make the proper sacrifices and so if you1:02:04sacrifice to Kelly then she turns into her opposite and showers benevolence on you and that's Mother Nature right it's like look out for Mother Nature man you1:02:17know two weeks out in the bush right now and you're dead and it's not pleasant and then if it's the spring you last longer huh but the bugs eat you and so1:02:27that's not very fun either so nature you know it's bent on your destruction but if you treat it properly and carefully and make the right1:02:37sacrifices then maybe one of her trees will offer you some fruit and that would be okay and so believe me lots of people died trying to figure that out1:02:48so here's another way of looking at it so I said you know order and chaos known unknown explored territory unexplored territory I love this this is the Taoist1:02:58symbol it's a symbol of being and being isn't reality as you would conceptualize it as a scientist it's more like reality as it manifests itself to you as a1:03:09living thing which is completely different you know science extracts out all the subjectivity all it is there is an array of our objective facts of1:03:19equivalent value and that's part of its method but that's not the world in which you live the world in which you live is full of motivation and emotion it's full of terror and pain and joy and frustration and and other people that's1:03:33for sure and so that's the real world and so well that's what this is it's it's the real world and what is it made out of well it's made out of all those1:03:42things you know that can get out of hand you know because the explored territory and the known can get so damn tight that it's nothing but a tyrant and then it's1:03:53all those things you don't know and that's pretty exciting because you know you want to go find out some things you don't know and that adds a lot of spice to life you want a little adventure you don't want to go out with someone who's1:04:04so predictable that you know everything about them in a week you know unless you're hyper conservative you want to go out with someone who's got they're a little erratic like not too erratic let's say they're a little dangerous1:04:15perhaps not too dangerous but some of that at least you want predictability with a bit of unpredictability in there well that's exactly what this means it's1:04:25like that's predictability with a little unpredictability in it and what that also means is that what you know can be turned into what you don't know just1:04:34like that and that's going to happen to you lots of times in your life man when someone close to you dies suddenly it's like poof order turns into chaos and now you're in chaos and what the hell are you gonna do1:04:46there and that's a good question because you need to know what to do there cuz you're gonna be there and it happens to you when your dreams fall1:04:55apart you know I mean your dreams for your life or you know when you discover something awful about yourself that you didn't know or you know it flips on you all the time and in small ways sometimes you know you have a fight with a friend1:05:08or in big ways that that wipe you out for well indefinitely sometimes because you can fall into chaos and never get out you know that's the people who are1:05:18trapped in the belly of the beast it isn't necessary that when you descend into chaos that you learn something and you get back out you could just be stuck there suffering until you die and that's you know I wouldn't recommend that you1:05:32know it's something to avoid but it happens to people all the time all the time you see them wandering around you know shattered on the streets of Toronto1:05:42you know they're done they're in chaos and there's so much chaos around them that you won't even go near them the chaos spreads like eight feet around1:05:52them and so when you see someone like that you're like well first we're not going to look too closely and people like that often don't like you to look at them because that also helps them remember where they are and that's no1:06:03Pleasant thing and you're gonna just stay away from that maybe you'll cross the street maybe you'll keep your head down whatever you're not going anywhere near that chaos and no bloody wonder you know and and you don't think about it1:06:16much after you pass it because it's a hell of a thing to think about and what are you gonna do about it anyway so you don't know what to do about it you might1:06:25just make it worse well so chaos you know that's the other half of life and it can turn into order sometimes better order that's actually what you do when1:06:36you explore right you explore you find out something new not too new not to Pandora boxy you know you bite off as much as you can chew but no more and so1:06:47that rearranges the way you look at the world but you're doing it voluntarily so you can kind of tolerate there the recalibration and you strength and the order right because now you become more competent and I would say1:07:00that you're trying to live on the edge between order and chaos and I and I mean that's a real place that's an actual it's a meta place but it's more real1:07:10than places because it's so old it's such an old place it really exists and your nervous system knows that it sees the world this way in fact the right1:07:19hemisphere is roughly specialized for chaos and the left hemisphere is roughly specialized for order which is why the left hemisphere tends to have the linguistic elements and and why people are right-handed and the right1:07:31hemisphere has a more diffuse structure it's more associated with negative emotion and imagination and the two communicate between each other through the corpus callosum and the right hemisphere appears to update the less1:07:42left hemisphere kind of slowly often in dreams and so if you were hurt if your right hemisphere is hurt for example back here in the parietal lobe then you1:07:53lose the left part of your body you can't move it anymore but you also lose the idea that you have a left part of your body so it's like1:08:02blindness it's a blindness to the left and so if someone comes along and says you know you're not moving your left arm you're gonna say yeah well my arthritis1:08:11is bothering me 2d have moved it for six months MA my arthritis is bothering today or you know you don't move in your left foot it's like well you know uh I'm1:08:22too tired well what's happened is the left hemisphere has a representation of the body and it's not being updated because the part of the brain that would notice that the left is gone because of a stroke it isn't there anymore and so1:08:35the left already has a model and it's not gonna change just it's hard to change your model of yourself you know have a tooth pulled what happens it's1:08:44like your damn tongue is in that hole for the next six months fiddling around constantly and that's because you're rebuilding your neurological model of1:08:53your body it's like try it out with your whole left side and see how well you do you know so this guy named Ramachandran was experimenting with people like this1:09:03and one of the things he did was kind of he was checking their balance and you can do that by irrigating the ear with cold water and1:09:12that makes people go like this makes their eyes move back and forth because it upsets the vestibular system and what he found was that if he if he poured cold water in the left ear of someone with right per aisle damage who had left1:09:24neglect that they'd all of a sudden sort of wake up catastrophic ly they'd have a terrible reaction to the fact that they were paralyzed on the left and they1:09:34would know that it had happened and cry and you know amid all sorts of distress and no wonder and then like 20 minutes later they'd1:09:44snap back into their damaged mode of being and they would not deny because that isn't really what it is is that they couldn't update the model they just1:09:56didn't have the neurology for it anymore so they were back to not noticing that it was gone and coming up with stories about it and so well so that's a good1:10:05example of how the right and left hemispheres worked together and how they're kind of mapped onto this weirdly enough so you know we're map were adapted to the meta reality and so what that would be is we're adapted to that1:10:19which remains constant across the longest spans of time and that's not the same things that you see flitting around you day to day those are just they just1:10:30like clouds they're just evaporating you know there's things underneath that that are more fundamental that are more fundamental realities like the dominance hierarchy like the tribe like the danger outside of society like the threat that1:10:44other people pose to you and that you pose to yourself those are eternal realities and we're adapted to those that's our world and1:10:53that's why we express that in stories and so then you might say well how do you adapt yourself to this world and the answer to that isn't I believe this is a neurological answer I believe this that your brain can tell you when you're1:11:08optimally situated between chaos and order and the way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning so let's say there's a place in1:11:20the environment you should be okay what should that place be well you don't want to be terrified out of your skull like what good is that and you know you don't want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep1:11:33you want to be somewhere where you know you're kind of on firm ground here but over here you're kind of testing out new territory and some of you who are1:11:43exploratory and emotionally stable you know you're gonna go pretty far out into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself and other people are gonna just put a toe in the chaos and you know that's neuroticism1:11:57basically that's that your sensitivity to threat that's calibrated differently in different people and more some people are more exploratory than others that's kind of extraversion and openness working together and and intelligence so1:12:09some people are going to tolerate a larger admixture of chaos in their order those are liberals by the way and I mean that technically liberals are more1:12:20interested in novel chaos and conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that already exist and who's right well it1:12:32depends on the situation and that's why conservatives and liberals have to talk to each other because one of them isn't right and the other wrong sometimes the1:12:42conservatives are right and sometimes the liberals are right because the environments go in like this you can't predict the damn thing so that's why you have to communicate and that's what a democracy does it allows people of1:12:53different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate the damn societies so anyways so let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos and1:13:02order so what does that mean well you're stable enough but you're interested right because a little novelty heightens your anxiety that wakes you up a bit1:13:14that's the adventure part of it but it also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity and that's actually associated with pleasure that's the dopamine circuit and so if you're optimally balanced and you know1:13:27that you know you're there when you're listening to an interesting conversation or you're engaged in one it's a real conversation you know you're saying some things you know and the other person is saying some things they know1:13:37but the both of what you know is changing it's like wow that's so interesting you'll have a conversation like that forever or maybe you're1:13:46reading a book like that or you're listening to a piece of music that models that because what music does is provide you with predictable forms1:13:56multi-level predictable forms that transform just the right amount and so music is a very representational art form it says this is what the universe is like you know there's a dancing element to it1:14:08repetitive and then cute little variations that sort of surprise and delight you and and you think wow that's so cool and it doesn't matter how1:14:18nihilistic you are you know music still infuses you with a sense of meaning and that's because it models meaning that's what it does that's why we love it and1:14:27you know you can dance to it and that sort of symbolizes you putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of reality and positioning yourself1:14:37properly and you like that too you know you'll pay for it oh boy I get to go dancing you know oh boy I get to listen to music it's like what the hell are you1:14:46doing listening to music what good is that well you think that's a stupid question I don't care about your dopey criticism I'm going to listen to some music right it did there's no rational there's no rational argument against1:14:58music it's like you just don't even think about it you just walk away from someone who's stupid enough to ask that question it's like some things are1:15:10obvious well why okay so that's pretty fun so1:15:19what mediates between these two domains well that's what consciousness does far as I can tell and that's sort of the individual and that's the hero that's1:15:28another way of thinking about it it's the logos that's another way of thinking about it it's the word that generates order out of chaos at the beginning of1:15:37time it's the consciousness that interacting with the matter of the world produces being that's basically it that's basically you for all intents and1:15:47purposes how do you do that well the unconscious does it to some degree you know because it's with our fantasy that we first meet1:15:57the unknown right well look say you're going out with a new person it's like what do you do you project a fantasy on them and then you fall in love with the1:16:06fantasy and aren't you stupid because you're gonna find out that the match between your damn fantasy and the actual person is tenuous at best and so young1:16:17would call that a projection of either the anima or the animus you know the anima is what a man projects onto a woman he finds desirable it's like oh1:16:27she's the perfect woman it's like well how do you know that you've like seen her for four seconds you know but it grips you and the same thing happens in the opposite direction and it's an action of instinct you know1:16:39it's like you fall in love with the image and but interestingly enough what you do in a relationship that works is that you actually I think that what you see it's a rough approximation when you1:16:50project the ideal and fall in love with it you see what could be it could be that but it's going to take you a hell of a lot of work because like you got no1:17:00shortage of flaws and the other person has no shortage of flaws and so you're bringing your flaws together and that's going to produce a lot of friction and1:17:09you're gonna have to engage in a lot of dialogue before you approach that level of perfection again but maybe you can do it then you get to live happily ever1:17:21after well would not be nice well so the unconscious meets the unknown and it it meets it with imagination and fantasy and dream and art that's how you take so you don't just go from what you don't1:17:35know to fully articulated knowledge in one bloody leap you can't do that you have to extend pseudo pods of fantasy and imagination into the unknown that's1:17:46kind of what theorizing is like right even scientifically you know you don't know something scientifically you generate a theory well it's an imaginative representation that your unconscious is helping you generate and1:17:58so you meet the unknown with fantasy that's what the unconscious is for from the psychoanalytic perspective that's what rheems do and you can see why you dream about the future you know it's like well1:18:09what's the future gonna be like well you have a little imaginative story going on and it's like you don't really create it it's sort of you watch it unfold you know maybe you could tweak it here and there but it sort of comes to you from1:18:21wherever the hell things like that come from you know the unconscious that's the psychoanalytic answer it's not really much of an answer because it's more like1:18:31a representation of a place that we don't understand but that's where creativity comes from and I mean some people are really creative right down to1:18:41the bloody core so in my clinical practice I often see people who are high in openness because they're attracted to me because they watch my lectures and you have to kind of be high in openness to like my lectures so because well you1:18:53do because they go everywhere you know and and they're not necessarily very orderly so so anyways lots of my clients are really high in openness and they're1:19:02funny people often especially if they're smart because sometimes they have the most nihilistic intelligence you can imagine it's just self-critical and nihilistic and brutally brutal man and smart and so they just criticize1:19:16themselves out of existence and so often I have to just try to get them to quit listening to their chattering right self-critical rationality and go out and1:19:26create something you know with their massive creativity and as long as they're doing that they're engaged in the world and happy as hell but as soon as that self-critical rationality comes in and shuts down the creativity they're1:19:38just they're just like walking corpses you know and it's because if you're really open like that's your a tree and it has some trunks and you know your1:19:48your most prominent trait is the most lively trunk and if you're a creative person and you're not engaging in a creative enterprise you're just you're like a tree that that has been that has had its vitality1:20:00amputated and so this is not trivial this stuff is this is deeply deeply deeply rooted in your biology and and those are people often who have like1:20:13dream lives you just can't believe I have one client he has like four spectacular dreams a week and most of the time we just spend discussing them I mean God he and I had another client who could be1:20:25lucid in her dreams which is more common among women she could ask the damn characters what they represented and they would tell her it was like okay1:20:34that was pretty weird and like a lot of the things they told her were really helpful and they were not things that she wanted to hear she she basically one1:20:43of them told her she if she was gonna live she'd have to go visit a slaughterhouse and the reason for that was because she was raised as a little1:20:52princess and protected from horrible mother nature until she hit puberty in which time she turned into an evil villain because that's how the family worked perfect child evil teenager overnight and then well1:21:06that was hard on her and she wasn't prepared because she thought the world was princess world and you know she couldn't go through a butcher store without having a fit and no wonder you know like really Jesus you know it's no1:21:18wonder but you do it but she couldn't so we used to go to butcher stores and that would make her cry and and that she was a vegetarian that would make her cry and1:21:28you know bemoan the cruelty of the world and it's like yeah fair enough man those are bloody slabs of meat it's like I don't know why everyone isn't screaming when they walk through the butcher store but but you got to get used to it man1:21:41because you can't live in the world otherwise and so the dream character who was a gypsy told her that she had to go visit a slaughterhouse which seemed rather impractical and so I asked her if she could think of anything else to do1:21:54and she saw it well why don't we go visit a funeral home and and watch an embalming and I thought oh how good that sounds that sounds like a fun way to spend a day and so I phoned up a funeral parlor and I said I had a client it was1:22:10terrified of death yeah and I was the therapist who was also a little shaky on the concept myself and so they they had no problem with that they deal with1:22:20death all the time which is really something to think about right a human being can actually have an occupation where they do nothing but deal with death and they don't go stark raving mad it's like what the hell's up1:22:32with that it's like working in a palliative care ward where your your clients that you you know have a relationship all they're gonna do is die this week next week the week after people do that it's like those people1:22:44are tough man they're tough so anyways we went and watched this embalming which was I have a rather high level of disgust sensitivity so it was a little1:22:56on the rough side for me but she sat there and first while she was not we were outside this little room she was not looking at that man no way and she1:23:06kind of go like this and you know that was pretty good and then she'd go like this and then she go like this and then and she watched it and then she asked if1:23:17she could go in and she put on the glove and she touched the body and she didn't have a fit she didn't have a panic attack and so she walked away from there1:23:26learning that there was a hell of a lot more to her than she thought there was and that she could see things that she didn't think she could see and live and after that she sort of had a touchstone it's like well I'm kind of afraid of1:23:37this well is it as bad as going to see the embalming no it's not that bad well I guess I can do it it's like an initiation right she had an initiation and so did I you know and I learned a lot from doing that I1:23:50learned that one of the things you need to do if you're going to be a human being is to prepare yourself to be useful in the face of death and so when you have a parent that dies which you know shatters people's ideas often they1:24:01can't even think about it if you can't even think about that man you've got some thinking to do because you need to be able to at least think about that1:24:10because otherwise you're just gonna be a wasteland when it happens and you never know you could even have a higher ambition maybe you could even be useful1:24:19when it happens instead of being part of the heap of destroyed people who also have to be taken care of you know and that's brutal you have to be brutal to1:24:29be useful in the aftermath of your parents death you know you don't get to crumble and fall apart and no you have every reason to so you got to be kind of1:24:39some tough monster to manage that but you want to be useful in the face of tragedy or do you want to be well you make your choice so out of the1:24:54unconscious you get ritual you get dreams you get drama you get stories you get art you get music and that sort of buffers us we have our little domain of1:25:03competence and we're buffered by the domain of fantasy and culture and that's really what you learn about when you come to university if you're lucky and and the professors are smart enough to actually teach you something about1:25:13culture instead of constantly telling you that it's completely reprehensible and should be destroyed it's like why you would prefer chaos to order is1:25:22beyond me and the only possible reason is that you haven't read enough history to understand exactly what chaos means and believe me if you understood what it1:25:33means you'd be pretty goddamn careful about tearing down the temple that you live in unless you want to be a denizen of chaos and some people do you know1:25:44because that's when the impulses that you Harbor can really come out and shine and so a little gratitude is in order and that makes you appreciative of the1:25:54wise King well being smart enough to know that he's also an evil tyrant it's like that's that's a total conception of the world it's balanced it's like yeah1:26:04we should preserve nature but good god it is trying to kill us and you know yes our culture is tyrannical and oppressive people but it is protecting1:26:13us from dying that's helpful you know and yes we're reasonably good people but like don't take that theory too far until you've tested yourself and you1:26:24know that's wisdom at least in part and that's what these stories try to teach you there's a nice mythological1:26:34representation I love this one it's like the Dome of the known and the seeker looking outside you know that's a that's a metaphysical representation you know1:26:46and then that is the world as it looks to us right you go out in a field and it looks like there's a dome covering it it's a circle a big circle with a dome over it and you know what's outside the dome well the unknown right that's where1:26:57heaven is theoretically you know it's a projection obviously heaven is in the unknown well it was localized in space I suppose that's partly because when people looked up in the sky they were1:27:08overwhelmed with all so it's a reasonable conclusion you know it it's a projection of an unconscious presupposition it's a projection of1:27:19fantasy you know heaven is a fantasy and and I'm not denigrating fantasy by the way and it's projected imaginatively onto the sky and that's part of the way1:27:30you discover what's in your fantasy well this is us man we mediate between chaos and order and you know those are the two archetypal representations fundamentally1:27:40you know and I think they apply to both genders you know like women can act as the individual who holds the world on his or her shoulders and males men can1:27:54play a maternal role you know meet female human beings are quite masculine and male human beings are quite feminine and so you know maybe maybe this1:28:04archetype dominates among men and that archetype dominates among women which I would say is that is the case as far as I'm concerned although there in our1:28:13individual conceptions and of course those two things have to work in conjunction but that's you the eternal mediator between chaos and order which1:28:24also has its enemy so that's that's Horace there and that Seth who's eventually turns into Satan as though as the West progresses so to speak and1:28:37that's represented there as well the temptations of I would say resentment and hatred which everyone has to fight with all the time all right1:28:49initiations so this is cool this is a standard hero story and initiate initiative rights are a part of human heritage and so let's take a look this1:28:59is from el yada I would like even now to stress the fact that the psychopathology of the shamanic vocation is not profaned it does not belong to ordinary symptomatology it's not mental illness1:29:10it has an int initiatory structure and signification short it reproduces a traditional mystical pattern the total crisis of the future shaman sometimes leading to complete disintegration of the1:29:22personality and to madness can be valuated not only as an initiatory death but also as a symbolic returned to the pre cosmogonic chaos to the amorphous1:29:31and indescribable state that precedes any comes Morgan II well what he means by that is that I suppose the mythological view of the emergence of1:29:40order that's a cosmogony is that there's a state of potential and chaos out of which order emerges and you know here's here's how it is that you think that way1:29:52because you do think that way so you know imagine what you're facing when you're facing the future right well you might say well the future is full of potential right it's full of potential what the hell does that mean you know1:30:05you act as if that you act as if that potential is really a real thing and you're confronting it all the time I'm confronting the potential of the future1:30:14well it doesn't exist yet so did what you're confronting doesn't even really exist what you're conceptualizing doesn't really exist and in some sense you bring it into being by plotting your path through it well the pre cosmogonic1:30:27chaos is the same as the potential of the future it's exactly the same idea it's the realm of possibility from which actuality emerges and you participate in1:30:39turning that possibility into actuality that's what you're doing all the time now can I explain that well no I have no idea how consciousness and the substrate1:30:52of the world interact i I can only say that that's how it looks that's how it feels you know that's how people act and1:31:01they'll get into trouble if they don't manifest their potential whatever that is that's all those things you could be that you're not well where are those1:31:10it's just potential well that's the chaos this is a that's the I would say that's the the cosmos that's the cosmos that you live in all the time it's a1:31:23little story it's the thing that you extract out of the chaos it's - consists of your conception of where you are now and your conception of where you want to be at some point could be ten minutes could be three years if you1:31:36can slide it and then you have a little plan about how you should move your body to do transform one in into the other that's your action powder and that's a1:31:46little story and when you ask someone to say what they were up to you they'll tell you a little story like that you know I was at some place and I went somewhere else and here's how I did it then they might tell you more1:31:56interesting story which is I was someplace and something happened that I really didn't expect and it knocked me for a loop you know and that's a good1:32:09divorce story I came home one night and my wife was gone it's like yeah chaos and probably a bit of willful blindness preceding it we might suspect1:32:21anyways down into chaos and then well maybe you learn something down there and maybe you don't but hopefully you do and you put yourself together if you're lucky and then pop bang you pop up into another little structure of order and1:32:33that's an initiatory process it's like you're some more stable falls apart or maybe you break it apart on purpose you do it voluntarily you know people do1:32:43that all the time you know they do that for example when they experiment with drugs and they do that when they go on wild adventures and you know when they break themselves out of their normal routine and throw themselves somewhere1:32:56they don't understand and hope that that's going to produce a transformation of personality that's the basic story that's the initiatory story now this is1:33:05William James who was the one of the establishes of modern psychology and a kind of an odd guy he was an early experimenter with psychedelics of course1:33:14they'll never tell you that but he was and he is his drug of choice was nitrous oxide which is an inhalant gas which seems to be inert no one really knows1:33:24why it works but it produces quite intense hallucinogenic experience mystical experience although if you breathe too much of it then you die1:33:33because it doesn't it doesn't have any oxygen in it so so don't do that and and he wrote some really bad hippie poetry back in the 1880s well he was you know experimenting with with nitrous oxide1:33:47I'll read a little bit of that to you pure experience is the name which I give to the original flux of life before a reflection has categorized it only1:33:57newborn babes in persons in semi coma from sleep drugs illnesses or blows can have an experience pure in the literal sense of that which is not yet any1:34:06definite what though ready to be any sorts of what's both full both of oneness and of many 'no specs that don't appear changing throughout yet so1:34:18confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points either of distinction or of identity can be caught 1905 William James Journal of philosophy1:34:29you know a lot of these old guys that established what we regard is you know fairly stable bodies of knowledge we're just as crazy as you could possibly1:34:39imagine they're just the most peculiar damn people and they get sanitized you know as they are represented in history and that's no fun you know I mean it's1:34:49much more interesting to know what they were like they were just so bloody peculiar and and strange and involved in all sorts of weird things that's a lot1:34:58more fun to know that here's his poem Wow it's like right from 1968 no verbiage can give it because the verbiage is1:35:08other incoherent coherent same and it fades and it's infinite and it's infinite don't you see the difference don't you see the identity constantly1:35:18opposites United the same me telling you to write and not to write extreme extreme extreme something and other than that thing intoxication and other nest1:35:29and intoxication every attempt at betterment every attempt at other menthe is a it fades forever and forever as we move it's like it's just about as1:35:39incoherent as post modernist philosophy so we know for archaic and traditional cultures that a symbolic return to chaos is equivalent to preparing a new1:35:50creation it follows that we may interpret the psychic chaos of the future shaman as assigned the profane man is being dissolved and a new personality being prepared for birth transformation here's a way of thinking1:36:02about it paradise Paradise Lost redemption classic story of mankind always it was a great past we're in a state of chaos we're heading1:36:13towards a better future everyone thinks that way the stories are based on that well that's that now Ellen Burch a who wrote a lot about the psychoanalysts1:36:27believed that Freud and Jung in particular had a creative illness which he regarded as a sort of spontaneous shamanic transformation and he said a creative illness has these elements it follow succeeds a period of intense1:36:39preoccupation with an idea and search for certain truth it's a polymorphous condition that can take the shape of depression neurosis psychosomatic ailments or even psychosis Jung was in that state when he wrote this book1:36:51called the red book which was just released last year which is full of visionary illustrations and hands very strange poetry and it contains the the1:37:03communications he had with imaginative beings that he conjured up when when practicing doing exactly that he practiced that for years and he had1:37:13these autonomous beings manifest themselves in his fantasy it had long conversations with them it just you know while he was working as a doctor and1:37:22having a sane normal life and well it's kind of well it's really something whatever the symptoms they're felt is painful while he thought maybe he was1:37:31going mad and some people think he did if not agonizing by the subject with alternating periods of alleviation and worsening throughout the illness the subject never loses the thread of his dominating preoccupation it's often1:37:44compatible with normal professional activity and family life but even if he keeps to his social activities he's almost entirely absorbed with1:37:53himself he suffers from feelings of utter isolation even when he has a mentor who guides him through the ordeal like the shaman apprentice with his master the termination is often rapid and marked by a phase of exhilaration1:38:05the subject emerges from his ordeal with a permanent Tran formation in his personality and a conviction that he has discovered a great truth or a new spiritual world many of the 19th and 20th century1:38:19figures regarded universally as great Nietzsche Darwin Dostoyevsky Tolstoy Freud Jung were all additionally characterized by lengthy periods of profound psychological unrest and uncertainty1:38:30well you don't generate a new theory without some birth pangs right because your old theory has to bite the dust first and when your old theory bites the1:38:39dust it's like where are you you don't know do you know if you're gonna come up with a new one no here's a cool thing this is my daughter she was five years1:38:51at this point she was playing prince or in princess with Julie and her three-year-old she said dad if we killed a dragon we could use his skin as armor wouldn't that be a good idea I thought1:39:01hey yeah that's that's a hell of an idea kid you know you go right after the thing that frightens you the most and you develop something that protects you from doing that it's like where did she get that idea1:39:12well good work kiddo she had plenty of dragons in her life so the following1:39:22dream was described by my daughter Mikayla three years nine months old about my son Julian one year Julian was in the process of toilet training and rapid speech development was having some trouble controlling his emotions Mikayla1:39:34liked to call him baby we had several discussions about the fact that he wasn't really a baby anymore she told me this story while I was at the computer so I was able to get it for Batum she wasn't very happy with1:39:44the idea that he wasn't a baby anymore because she kind of liked the baby she took care of that baby a lot and her little brain was having a hard time with the notion that whatever that thing is now it isn't a baby it's like well1:39:55where's my baby and believe me plenty of mothers go through the same thing then they attempt to keep their children babies for the rest of their lives so this is what Mikayla said the dream Julian's eyes fell out and then he1:40:07falled into pieces I said what sort of pieces she said Julian pieces and the bones fall doubt too then a hole got him and there was water in it and when he1:40:17came out he was big mom Julian isn't a baby anymore no he a big boy and a bug with legs got him out cuz bugs can swim and the whole was1:40:26in the park and it moved into the backyard and he fall into it a tree burned and left the hole I thought wow that's so amazing it's like it was a it1:40:36was a shamanic transformation dream it was like the tree that's The Tree of Life had burnt and left a hole the kid fell into it it dissolved him right down to his bones this little bug which would be a union representation of the self1:40:49like Jiminy Cricket by the way in Pinocchio the bug was the thing that was alive that helped him through the transformation he stepped out and now he was big it's like that was her little brain conjuring up the notion of radical1:41:01transformation so this is cool I hope this works this is a dream that my my nephew had did someone animated Jordan Peterson is1:41:12a clinical psychologist from the University of Toronto Maya do disagree with some of his fundamental ideas but his thoughts and facing problems merge with my stoic values within one of his maps of meaning lectures he tells a true1:41:27story about a four year old boy his nephew who for months was suffering from terrible night terrors terrors that were waking him up screaming this boy by the1:41:37way did have some areas of instability in his family life Jordan visited the young boy's house and the boy was running around dressed as an eight with1:41:46a sword a shield and a helmet at night aim he would take a sword and shield to bed so Jordan got speaking to him and the boy described his dream and the dream he's standing surrounded by knee-high Dwarfs these dwarves had beaks1:41:59and every time you would try to move the dwarfs would jump up and bait him a very fretting scenario for a young boy and if you look behind all the dwarfs away in1:42:09the background there was a dragon and every time this dragon would puff out fire and smoke more dwarfs would be created so there's no point fighting off the dwarfs because more would just be me it1:42:20so Jordan tapped him and asked what could you do about that so the kid says he could jump up on the Dragons head he could poke out his eyes with a sword so1:42:29he couldn't see then they could go go down the throat to the box where the fire came from carve a piece out of that box thereby destroying it and use that1:42:39piece as a sheet its shamed before Jordan arrived was already a keynote in life what he knew he had to do and after that conversation he had no more Nate1:42:50pears this is what Marcus really is meant when he said the impediment to action advances action what stands in the way becomes the way he was tell not1:43:02us that we must not shy away from problems or shown or personal responsibility we must be willing to sacrifice her comfort Goethe source of her problems to solve them and then take something away well there you go so yeah1:43:17he was waking up screaming at night for four weeks that's night terrorist he couldn't really remember what hell was going on and there was instability and his family his parents got divorced soon after and1:43:28he was off to kindergarten and that was kind of destabilizing him too and so it was fun to watch him zip around as a knight it's like you know where'd he get1:43:37that idea well you know he watched TV watch movies see his little imagination was aggregating the picture of the hero and then he was trying to act it out1:43:46that's what he was doing pretending right I'm pretending to be the thing that takes on the unknown and then he has this amazing dream it's like it's mind-boggling it's so sophisticated it's like well here I am1:43:58and there's troubles everywhere and they're biting me they're jumping up on me and it's like a Hydra you know in the Hydra you cut off a hydras head and seven more heads grow it's like that's life man solve one problem seven more1:44:11appear right so also that that was the Dragons at the background chaos itself and chaos kept breeding these are the evil little Dwarfs which is what it does1:44:23it's like it's one damn trouble after another we fight this one off fight this one off it's like who cares the dragon the dwarf generating machine is still working in the background so he I asked him and that was purposeful what1:44:35could you do see that's a leading question that implies that there's something that he could do he said well I take my dad that1:44:44was missing in the animation and we go well poke the dragon's eyes out go right down to the source of the problem extinguish it make a shield right so1:44:54that meant that he would have strengthened his character by the encounter so brilliant and then and I talked to his mom for months afterwards1:45:05done no more night terrors what had happened he identified with the mythological hero he did identified with st. George and the dragon he identified1:45:15with that little bloody tree dwelling primate who 20 million years ago was the first one to drop a stick on a snake he adopted the classic human mode of being1:45:26in the face of uncertainty and construed himself as that which could prevail end of terrors well I guess we're done E so we're gonna do something a little1:45:46different than the syllabus today because you know we got this one hour to our problem and I really can't cover constructionism reasonably in two hours1:45:55or one hour that was supposed to be today so what I'm going to do is instead is continue on the line that I've been pursuing but I'm going to expand it up more into Union psychology which is the1:46:07what we're going after after constructivism anyways and so I can weave the constructivism and the depth psychology together and it's nice to do that because it gives you a kind of a coherent view so just so you know we're1:46:19one lecture ahead at the moment roughly speaking and I'll do constructivism on Tuesday for two hours so all right so I showed you that anime animation I told1:46:29you about my nephew's dream which is a remarkable dream you know really it's just amazing amazing dream and it's it's got this archetypal pattern you know and1:46:40the pattern is that there's a threat and worse than not that there's there are threats and at the back of it there is the the1:46:49fact of threat itself you see so human beings were so smart hey so this is so amazing that we figured this out so you imagine well human beings are the only1:46:59creatures that can really conceive of the class of all threatening things right and that's kind of why we can be permanently anxious there's so it's sort of annoying so you know here you are and it's safe there's no Lions here or or1:47:13anything that might prey on you but you can think of something to be anxious about no problem you know I'm certain you've got some little skeleton rattling1:47:23around in your closet somewhere that's like eating away at you and so I think part of the reason we're so damn awake human beings is because we're always1:47:33anxious like and you have to be awake when you're anxious and the the anxiety system actually activates your reticular activating system and that that that1:47:42actually produces its the substrate for consciousness if you snap a few fibers in the back of your brain that are part of the reticulating activate reticular1:47:53activating system in a car accident or something you'll go into a coma and that'll be that here you're not getting out of it doesn't take much of an injury either in the right place so anyways so human beings have been struggling with1:48:05this problem of threat forever really for as long as there's been life or at least as long as there's been life with a nervous system and you know1:48:14that's several hundred million years it's a long time and of course it's easy to you know to respond to a particular threat think about zebras they're out1:48:24there on the veldt and there's lions everywhere right but the zebras are like they're calmed because there's lions are sleeping and so the zebras don't think apparently oh my god what was going to happen with those Lions wake up because1:48:38they don't think that way you know and they're not going to be happy if the lion goes into a hunting Crouch and starts its hunting approach obviously but it's not like the zebras are freaking out non-stop because there are1:48:50Lions around you know so they can react to specific threats but human beings partly because we discovered the future which was a big mistake was a big1:48:59mistake because the future is an uncertain place we realized that well there isn't any threat right now but there might well be some tomorrow and if there isn't some tomorrow well maybe next week or next1:49:10month or next year like it's coming and so there's danger so it's the category of danger you know and out of the category of danger emerged specific1:49:21threats and the dragon seems to be a symbol of it is a symbol I believe of the ever-present fact of predatory slightly predatory threat but our1:49:33nervous systems as they've become capable of abstraction have used that underlying architecture to represent more abstract categories so it's not1:49:42it's not a predator like a dragon is not a predator because there are no dragons but maybe a dragon is a snake and a and a crocodile and maybe a leopard and1:49:51maybe a predatory bird all mangled into one monster because a monster is actually technically something that's made out of disparate parts and so it's1:50:00a good symbolic representation for the unknown as such that which lies beyond the campfire let's say and what lurks out there and so the eternal problem is1:50:10what the hell do you do with the dragon and that also explains why the dragon typically is a treasure garter right because it's even more the problem is even worse out there in no-man's land out there in potential1:50:23there's threat and and and like mortal threat but there's also endless opportunity and riches and wealth and and and the possibility of attracting1:50:32someone and all of that and so well the dragon you can't just be afraid of it you just stay in your burrow the whole time and lots of animals more or less do that is you know especially the nocturnal ones1:50:43they just hide away but that is what human beings alight because we're not only prey animals right we're also predators and then of course we're crazy we're absolutely insane chimpanzees right we're crazy and so we're always1:50:54out there mucking about with things and with our you know fingers and and our thumbs and and taking the world apart and putting it back together and we're1:51:04crazily exploratory and and in troublemaking and so we don't just run from dragons we go hunt them down and so and so there's a story here there's the1:51:17oldest story that mankind knows and literally it is the oldest story that we know is this stories in this story basically is there's a bounded space a1:51:26walled garden a walled city you know on all the original cities were walled because if they weren't barbarians would swoop in and they'd just steal all your stuff and so you know that was kind of pointless so you know you wanted to have1:51:38some major-league walls surrounding your territory and so that's inhabited space and inside that is here little dominance hierarchy and so all you primates knew1:51:47exactly who was who inside that space so you didn't have to fight with each other and you could predict each other's behavior because you believed the same things and saw the world roughly the same way and acted the same way and so1:51:58you were sort of secure but then the problem is is that that can always be breached there's always something outside of it that's a danger and so that's signified by this this little creature here this is dragon and that1:52:12that twirl in its tail is very common among dragons actually it's actually a symbol because you imagistic languages imagistic symbols have an ancient1:52:21language and it it's referring to something that's basically eternal and so it lives down here in this in this cave because it's an underground thing1:52:30it's an underground thing and you can kind of imagine what that's like and sometimes this happens in initiation rituals among archaic people they're gonna when they're gonna initiate usually the young men because nature1:52:40initiates women know by itself usually the young men maybe they'll put them in a cave and leave them there you know for like well who know who knows how long1:52:49and Sagada think what's in a cave that caves are dark man I don't know if you've ever been in one but like they're dark and they're really dark and so not1:52:59only is there whatever there is in the cave and you don't know what the hell's in the cave there's whatever you imagined might be in the cave and so when you're in that cave and you're alone you you're confronting the devils1:53:10and demons and monsters of your own imagination you know and so then you have a chance to perhaps deal with that and overcome it and that's perhaps part of the initiation ceremony you know and that's part of growing up because you1:53:22have to learn how to face the things that terrify and upset you and and we cast them and put them back together we talked a little bit about1:53:31this idea of the pre cosmogonic chaos that that Iliad it refers to and and that's this stuff out of which order is produced at the beginning of time and1:53:43it's also the stuff out of which you constantly reproduce order and the young unions the psychoanalysts especially the really deep psychoanalysts like young1:53:52Freud was a more surface psychoanalyst and that's not an insult there's some things that Freud figured out they're absolutely amazing he was a precursor to Jung for sure for Jung the hero's journey was the journey inside the1:54:05unconscious and that would be perhaps in some sense that the the willingness to face everything terrible that's happened to you and to think it through and to articulate it and and to come to grips perhaps with your own capacity for1:54:17malevolence that was a really important part of Union ideas that the first step towards individuation which is the manifestation of your full self let's1:54:26say was the discovery of your shadow and your shadow is the part of you that will do terrible things under the right circumstances and maybe even without1:54:35that much provocation and you know and it's a terrifying part of you to come into contact with because it's sort of it's sort of the way that you're specifically attached to the archetype of evil that's a that's a good way of1:54:46thinking about it and you know modern people they don't really think much about think much about the idea of good and evil but that's because the most of them are so they I'm naive you can just barely even comprehend it you know if1:54:58you read any history if you really read it like and you and you don't come away with the idea that evil exists it's like you're just reading the wrong kind of1:55:07history you know it's just unbelievable what people can do to each other and we're so imaginative you know and one of the things I figured out about people1:55:17the reason that we're we have the knowledge of good and evil let's say is that because we're self conscious and we know about ourselves we know about our1:55:26own vulnerability right you know what hurts you you really know what hurts you way more than an animal knows and so when you're all so creative and so once you know what hurts you man you can really hurt someone else and you can do1:55:38it in such a creative way you can draw it out you can make it excruciating you can take people apart physically and psychologically and you can keep them say even right on the edge of death so that you can keep doing1:55:49that endlessly and you know that happens hell of a lot more than you think it happens it happens a lot and so well and you think well you know that doesn't1:56:00involve me it's like oh yes it does man that's the problem because you know you're human and that's the sort of things that human beings are capable of and I'm not saying you're all it's all probable that you do that ever or or1:56:13that but I'm saying that you know you got to take that into account when you're looking at the world and you think about all the perpetrators out there it's like it's not like there's perpetrators and there's victims that1:56:26isn't how it works it doesn't work that way at all and so the horrors of humanity as well as the noble elements of humanity are all elements of your central being and for you and this is the terrible thing for young the pathway1:56:39to higher wisdom was through the terrible portal of well you could say hell for that matter really in and so who wants to do that man it's like no1:56:49you know like maybe you're resentful about something well you probably are because like everybody's resentful about something you know and resentment is just vicious emotion it's really useful it's really useful because if you're1:57:01resentful about something it either means that you should grow the hell up and accept the responsibility and quit sniveling around and whining or it means1:57:10that someone actually is oppressing you and and pushing on you too hard and bullying you and demeaning you and you have something to say or do that you're1:57:20not saying or doing and no wonder you're not saying or doing it because you know it can be really dangerous to say things or do them to free yourself from from1:57:30being oppressed you can get in a lot of trouble in the short term for doing it so it's easier just to not say anything sort of day after day in the short term you protect yourself but just crushes you and then the the resentment comes up1:57:43and resentment and that can just get so out of hand you know it starts with resentment and then it starts it goes to the desire for revenge you know because you'll play nasty little tricks on the person that's1:57:54opressing you at any chance you'll talk about them behind their back and if they want you to do something you'll do it badly or you'll do it grudgingly or you'll do a half rate job and you'll set up little1:58:03traps and you know so it puts you in a poisonous space and then if that if you really start to dwell on that say in your basement for three or four years1:58:13about just exactly how terrible the world is and how that's focused on you and how everyone's rejected you and how you get to this point where you're thinking that you know existence itself is a kind of poisonous endeavor and that1:58:25the best thing for you to do is go out there and do as much you know create as much mayhem as you possibly can and if you really get to a dark place you think I'm going to create as much mayhem as I possibly can by targeting the most1:58:37innocent thing I can possibly imagine and then you end up shooting kids in Connecticut and that's how you get there and so that's a bad road man there's1:58:46dark things down there but you can go there and people do and they go through the hole of resentment and so resentment can tell you you've got something to say1:58:57you bloody well better say it you've got a free yourself from what's oppressing you you have to stand up for that because otherwise you become oppressed1:59:06and then once you're oppressed that's just not so good and so like in your marriage and your relationships you got to tell people what you're thinking you1:59:17don't have to assume you're right that's a whole different story because you're not cuz you're you know ignorant and you're biased and you know so you're not right but you can stumble towards your this the expression of yourself and then1:59:32you can listen to the other person and hope that they tell you some way that you're stupid that's useful so you can be a little less stupid in the future because that wouldn't that be good and so you know you go after the unknown you1:59:45don't protect what you know you already know what you know you go after what you don't know that's why you have to talk to people you don't agree with that's1:59:54where you have to talk to your enemies because they're gonna tell you things you don't know you could even listen to them it's possible they know a thing or two you don't know but people don't like that you know they just talk to people2:00:03who think the same way and then they just stay stupid and so that's and that's not because if you're not wise the world2:00:12will wallop you it'll flatten you and and far more than it has to and then you'll be better and resentful and you'll be part of that force that2:00:21Wallops instead of the force that fights against that so well so you go after the dragon and that's what that's what this guy is doing he's going after the dragon2:00:30it's it's threatening the society because it always does chaos what's outside of order always threatens order always always and so you have to step2:00:40forward you know in this manner voluntarily and and and go after that when it's still manageable right and that's the case in your own life too so2:00:49you know if you're if you've had a proclivity to be bullied in the past you know and you want to get out of that what you have to do is you have to make yourself awake to the to the Maite to the to the what would you say to the to2:01:05the initial stages of that sort of bullying emerging in your life again that sort of domination and you have to step forward against it when it's still2:01:14in its developing stages because maybe you can just not have it happen that would be better and so you have to be ready to speak what you have to say more2:01:24or less at a moment's notice you can't be impulsive about it you know like if you and I are talking and you make a mistake or I make a mistake even if it's bothers one or the other of us we should just write it off because2:01:34it's like one encounter what the hell you you know maybe we had a bad night's sleep or something you know you gotta be a little forgiving and what if it happens twice then you know you should be a little awake and you should2:01:46remember both times and then if it happens a third time it's like that's when you that's when you act and you say look we talked and this happened and I2:01:56thought yeah whatever and but then you did it again and then you just did it again well then the person is basically like what are they gonna do you know no well maybe they might argue with you but you kind2:02:08of got them and you're generally if you just point that out to people just like that just that you noticed and they're willing to say something about it they'll back the hell off they'll often apologize and sometimes you even make2:02:20them a little more conscious which is like hey that's not such a bad idea that's what all this means and so this caught this chaos idea it's so for young it was the unconscious right it was the contents of your2:02:31unconscious and so that might be the unknown past the threatening past that you have never dealt with there might be the threatening future it might be the threatening present but you realized as his as he got older that that the2:02:45unconscious was also the world and you think and so the chaos is not only your unconscious mind which meets the unknown but it's actually the unknown itself2:02:54mingled together you think what the hell does that that's why the dragon is a land creature and an air creature it's matter and spirit at the same time and2:03:03this sort of gets us into constructivism because the constructivist think that basically what happens is that you encounter those elements of the world that don't fit into your theory and out of those new elements you make the world2:03:15through your perceptions and you make yourself by incorporating the information and transforming yourself and that's how Piaget explains the development of a child if the child starts out with some reflexes basic2:03:26reflexes and manifesting the reflexes produces results in the world and then the child has to reorganize its perceptions to take into account the2:03:35transformations and so then it it gets a little more sophisticated and then it can do a few more things and then it can manifest more changes in the world and then it martyr it attracts them and modifies its perceptions and actions to2:03:47account for them and it just keeps doing that that's how the child boots itself up like a computer does it's a very cool idea and so from from the Piaget Gian2:03:57stance so it's constructive the stance you could think of the world as a latent pool of information it's something like that with a structure obviously that you2:04:06can interact with with your little fingers in your body and your mind and your eyes and your mouth and you make changes happen and you track them and you model them and you build your skills and as you continue to do that in the2:04:19safety of your house initially under the care of your parents who who fill in where you're ignorant you you you just emerge more and more competent and2:04:28confident and ready to move ahead so that's that's how the constructivist idea works and so so there's kind of a chaos idea at the bottom of that which is that out of which you emerge and the world emerges at the same time because2:04:41you know you don't see reality not at all you see almost like an animated version of reality you know like when I look at you I just see the front of you2:04:50I just see the outside of you I see you at this height I don't see any of your internal structure I don't see the the back part of you at all I don't see your family I don't see your history I don't see your future you know I just see this2:05:03slice of you you're so complicated I just see this little like oversimplified slice of you right now and I think that's the reality that's it's it's sort2:05:13of the reality the way that the Simpsons a Simpsons character is you it's like it's sort of like you and it's enough so that you can watch the story but the2:05:24real you man god only knows what that is and that's a union idea you know that the real you is something that radically transcends your perception of yourself2:05:34or your conception of yourself and that you get to that higher you at least in part by going into the darkest place and so it's a hell of an idea man it's2:05:45really but it's the old idea of initiation it's as old as time that idea and and there's something to it and we definitely recreate it in psychotherapy like this isn't an airy theory it's quite the contrary because what you do2:05:58and as a psychologist always always a behaviorist say that the most the most logical clinical type of psychologists a behaviorist is it an initiatory shaman2:06:10even though he or she doesn't know it because what they do is they say okay well let's take a look at your life like okay you got a bunch of problems and they're like massive dragons and you're just like you're not going anywhere with2:06:21those problems you're just cowering in the corner and what the behavioral therapist does is cut them cut that dragon into those little Dwarfs until2:06:30the dwarfs are small enough so that you can really kick the hell out of them and so and that by the way they do that is they they take the problem and they decompose it into elements that are small enough that you have a reasonable2:06:43probability of mastering them so you take that problem apart into into its micro problems careful careful process and then you think okay well how2:06:53could we progress a little bit this week and some of that is to face to practice facing things you're afraid of so like if you're a graphic and you can't get on an elevator you can't get on a taxi and you can't stand up to your husband and2:07:05I'm saying husband because most agoraphobic sar women most of them are middle-aged women and most of them were too dependent for most of their life so that's a monster it's like society husband elevator taxi2:07:17subway it's a monster and it's that place you will not go and that's because you feel this high and everything else looks this big and so and partly that's2:07:27because you've run away and when you run away from something it grows and chases you which is well it's exactly what happens to a prey animal man if you go in the woods and you find a bear especially a grizzly well you're in real2:07:40trouble if it's a grizzly but if it's a black bear you know generally speaking if you stand your ground and make a hell of a lot of noise that thing will leave you alone but if you run well what's it supposed to think it eats things that2:07:52run from it so that's exactly where that idea came to come from you turn tail and run and then the thing that you're afraid of is really a monster and it's2:08:01gonna like get you and eat you it's like well that's true psychologically as well and and the same circuits that we use to when we were you know out in the forest2:08:10even even in trees the same circuits that we used to parse up the world then into safe territory and place where the predators loom is the way we parse up2:08:21the world now which is safe territory and the place where the predators loom it's just become abstracted way up abstracted way up so but it's the same2:08:30damn circuits it's we know this like the same circuits you used to forage for information it's a dopaminergic circuit is the circuit that squirrels use to forage for nuts and you think well why well it's2:08:42because there's no difference between information and food like you trade information for food all the time that's what you're doing when you're working especially if you're working on a computer so the idea that there's2:08:55there's an equation between information and food it's like well obviously obviously there's an equation between them so of course you'd use the same2:09:04and I mean the damn squirrel has to remember where the nuts are and so for him information is food even so when what happened to human beings is that we started thinking hey maybe it's better to go after information than it is to go2:09:17after food because going after information produces more food than just going after food and so that was a pretty damn smart idea so we're still2:09:26doing that so anyways this is what you're supposed to be doing and so and this is what behavior therapists do they decompose your problems what are you afraid of well okay you're afraid of everything well let's get something2:09:38specific you're afraid of well I'm afraid of an elevator okay an elevator so I have a client she's afraid of elevators the elevator door open she goes that's a tomb and I thought oh wow I thought it was an elevator but for you2:09:52it's not a bloody elevator it's death and so that's what you're afraid of it's worse than that you're afraid of being trapped inside there in the dark alone alone not knowing if anyone is going to rescue you stuck2:10:04there with your damn imagination freaking out it's like and if that's not and then maybe you have a heart attacks because you're so terrified and you die it's like you know so that's the elevator2:10:16well it's no bloody wonder there no one's gonna get into something like that and then maybe underneath that is your distrust in the mechanisms of society right because you know a normal person those weird creatures they'll get an2:10:29elevator what the hell they don't care and partly it's because they have an implicit belief even if the thing stops somebody will come along and rescue them and usually you don't even think about it right it's like no what the hell it's2:10:40an elevator it's like the danger is invisible to you and it's partly because you implicitly trust the structure and so maybe you go into the unconscious2:10:51presuppositions of the person who is terrified of the elevator in the subways and you find out they have a real problem with trusting Authority that's partly why they don't get along with their husband why they've never been2:11:01able to stand up for themselves so then you say okay well you're afraid of the damn elevator but it's not an elevator it's a tomb and the tomb is partly you and partly it's partly the elevator and partly your unconscious mind and so well2:11:14what can you handle can you go look at an elevator from and feet away it's like yes okay how about 9 feet away yes 5 feet yes 4 feet2:11:24no okay no problem four and a half feet we're gonna go from that elevator we're gonna look at the damn thing until you're bored of it because that's what2:11:33we're trying to you should be bored of the elevator because then you're not afraid of it obviously it's like it's an elevator you just don't notice it right all these things around here that you don't notice I take you out of here and2:11:45ask you what color the walls are you haven't got any idea you know yeah I suspect for most of you there's not a chance you'd be able to identify the gender of the person who's sitting next to you unless you know them it's like2:11:57you just don't remember anything and why should you everything works like you don't have to pay attention to it it's like is that staying up yeah it's still2:12:07up yeah still up still up if it's like really no you know you get bored of that real quick and so then you just ignore it and but the agoraphobic has had that2:12:19veil of ignorance torn away and what they see behind it is mortal threat and so that's really what you're helping them deal with and so this week there2:12:28are four and a half feet from the elevator next week they're a foot from the elevator and the week after that the horrible gates of Hell open and they look inside and they don't run and so hey they're tougher than they thought2:12:39they were and that's what you're teaching them actually you're not teaching them that the world isn't dangerous because that's a stupid thing to teach someone bloody right the world is dangerous it's terrifying and2:12:50sometimes people under they realize that and the veil lifts and they see horror everywhere they see that and then they think well I'm just a little rabbit I'm over here in the corner I can't move I'm petrified and then they2:13:03can't move they hide it home they cower at home because everything has become a predatory domain and so what you teach them is you're not as much of a rabbit2:13:13as you think and part of that is that you help them grow some teeth so that they can go home and have that fight with their husband that they should have had 25 years ago and it happens very frequently with agra phobic clients that2:13:25you get them so they can go on the damn elevator and they can go on the subway and they can take a taxi maybe they learn to drive Wow they get2:13:34some autonomy and then they're a little tougher and so then they can stand up from loot for themselves and they go back and like their husband might not be very happy with any of this really it depends on what sort of guy he is you2:13:45know if he's a real tyrant he might be just perfectly happy that he's married to someone who you know was afraid of her own shadow because then she won't ever leave and so that's a nasty little story and believe me it's not uncommon2:13:58so she gets tougher by facing what she fears and what she finds out is there's a hell of a lot more to her than she thought and that's really what happens when you do behavior therapy with someone who's agoraphobic it isn't2:14:09really that they get less afraid it's that they get braver that's way different it's because brave is alert and able to cope naive is there's no2:14:21danger it's like hell yeah right there's no danger Jesus what a stupid theory that is so anyways that's what all this is that's that's the story man and it's2:14:30a it's a major story it's the story of human transformation and growth it's the evolution of mankind it's like it's a major story and we've been working on2:14:41the damn thing for like god only knows how long you know snakes and primates co-evolved and our vision are sharp sharp sharp vision seems to have been an2:14:54evolutionary adaptation forced on us by the presence of predatory snakes and we're talking tens of millions of years ago and human beings have unbelievably2:15:04sharp eyesight the only thing that can out see us is birds of prey and they have eyes like an eagle a bald eagle has eyes as big as ours and it has two2:15:13phobias that phobia is the central part of the vision so an eagle is all eyes man and so but human beings we're kind of like that too and like half our brain2:15:22is devoted to visual processing we have acute vision in Madagascar where there are primates with no predatory snakes there are lemurs they can't see worth a2:15:31damn and I'm a anthropologist named Lynn Isabelle did a comprehensive study worldwide trying to account for the acuity of primate vision and what she found was that the more predatory snakes in the vicinity the sharper the eyesight2:15:43of the primates and so we have a really sharp eyesight so that means a lot of us were eaten by snakes and none of your ancestors fortunately because otherwise you wouldn't be here but a lot of those who2:15:54fell by the wayside were snake snack and you know when you're little and living in a tree a snake is no damn joke and even now lots of people get bitten by2:16:05snakes and people are phobic of snakes at quite a rate and some of that actually seems innate there's arguments about cycle between psychologists about2:16:14this but even the ones who don't accept the fact that it's innate accept the fact that you can make someone afraid of a snake by conditioning just like that we're trying to make them afraid of a flower by conditioning is really really2:16:26hard so we're at least at minimum prepared to be afraid of snakes minimum and I believe it's I don't I believe this fear is actually an 8 although you2:16:36can learn to control it so anyways so that's that story and like what a story man it's an amazing amazing story you see the the den of the dragon2:16:46here is littered with skulls and bones that's what that is so either thing is no joke it's like look the hell out and that's this you know and look it up at the top right hand corner there you know that's from Peter Pan right well you2:16:59remember Captain Hook we talked about him already he's a tyrant and he's a tyrant because he's afraid of death and that's all he sees in life and so it makes him cruel and better and death has already taken part of him right that's2:17:11why he has a hook and that damn crocodiles chasing him tick tick all the time and of course that's the same situation you're all in man there was a crocodile with a clock at its stomach chasing you and it could easily turn you2:17:23into a tyrant it can turn you into a tyrant or a cowering victim or a hero those are the options fundamentally so and that's the Gorgon looking at her own2:17:33the Medusa looking at her own reflection you know mother nature with a head full of snakes you know a terrifying vision and that's actually to some degree an archetype that men get confused with women and you know that's the witchy2:17:45part of women and that's the part that's attractive attractive attractive but rejecting rejecting rejecting it so many men are petrified by women they won't2:17:54approach them at all they have no idea how to talk to them they're just petrified into and that's way more common than you think and so that breeds resentment like you wouldn't believe you know you hear2:18:06the guy who shot up like Dawson College it's like what the hell do you think motivated him it's like he that's what he saw and and it was because well he2:18:16was my opinion is he was too goddamn useless to be attractive to anyone and so that's a hell of a place to be in you know it's then that's the problem2:18:25too if you're chronically rejected by people it's often because of your own insufficiencies you know whether that's cowardice or lack of social skills or whatever it is it's like you can't just brush it off as oh well you know no one2:18:37likes me but really I'm okay it's like no no wrong if everyone rejects you there's probably something wrong and it's probably deep and difficult and2:18:46it's going to be horrible to fix and so it's this isn't a trivial problem it's not a trivial problem at all and so you know that's mother nature for man too2:18:56because from from the sexual selection point of view if they if they're not selected as a mate Nature has taken them out of the game right and so you know2:19:09people don't really like that they're not that happy with that and so but getting all whiny about it and then getting violent it's like that's just not all not really very helpful although it's very common so this is Lyndon2:19:22Isabel an evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brain in primates a radical new theory suggests these are old representations I really like this one this is I don't2:19:35remember I think it's Greek but it doesn't exactly look Greek it might be older it doesn't matter anyways you see it's the same thing same ideas as Graham's dream right it's like there's this thing2:19:46that exists this this multi headed snake and it's got this infinity problem it's everywhere that's that little circle down there and the problem is well what2:19:55do you do with it you cut off one head seven more growth that's the eternal problem of life and the problem is there there there is the category of problems2:20:05in life and it ain't going anywhere and so the question is can you deal with the whole category at the same time that's the thing that's how to be in the2:20:15world is to deal with that category all at the same time and so how did how did human beings what did they come up with as a solution and that's so cool too because the solution they come up with not only was the heroism that allows you2:20:27to approach what you're terrified by and what you find offensive and to learn from it but also the idea of sacrifice and and that was played out by cultures everywhere including human sacrifice and you think what the hell was up with2:20:39those crazy bastards so long ago they were sacrificing two gods all the time what kind of clueless behavior was that burned something and please God burn2:20:48something valuable and please God it's like what was with them what were they thinking well they weren't stupid those people if they were stupid we wouldn't2:20:58be here they were not stupid and believe me they lived under a lot harsher conditions than we do so those were some tough people man you know back then2:21:07you'd last about 15 minutes and so you don't want to be thinking of your ancestors as stupid like there's no real evidence that we're much different cognitively than we were a hundred and fifty thousand years ago2:21:18so anyways sacrifice what does that mean sacrifice well it's a discovery man it's the discovery of the future it's like the future is actually the place where2:21:29there is threat and it's always gonna be there so what do you do you make sacrifices in the present so that the future is better right everyone does2:21:40that that's what you're doing right now that's what you're doing here that's what your parents are doing when they pay money to send you to university they think you can bargain with reality it's amazing you can bargain with reality you2:21:52can forestall gratification now and it'll pay off it at a place in time that doesn't even exist yet it's like who would have believed that it's like2:22:04that's a miracle that that occurs and it's not like people just figured that overnight you know we were chimps for Christ's sake like how are we gonna come up with an idea like that well it's like well we thought about it for seven2:22:15million years and you know we got to the point where we could kind of act it out but we didn't know what we were doing but it was a merge it's like a dream it2:22:25was so the terror of the future is a dream and the solution to the terror the dream of the terror of the future is another dream and and it comes out in mythology and in fantasy and in drama where you2:22:38act out the sacrifice and then it's a step on the way to full understanding so we can say sacrifice now instead of doing it you know although we still do2:22:47it it's just not concretize like it used to be we do it abstractly and we all have faith that it will work you know and we also set up our society so that2:22:57it'll work and one thing about you know I'm not a fan of moral relativism for a variety of reasons partly because I think it's an it's an extreme form of2:23:07cowardice but anyways apart from that no no no no there's minimal ways that you can set up a society that will work and so one of them is is that the society2:23:18has to be set up so that your sacrifices will pay off or you won't work and then the society will die and so it has to make promises people have to make2:23:27promises to one another and that's what money is money is a promise that your sacrifice will pay off in the future that's what money is and so if the2:23:36society is stable you can store up your work right now you can sacrifice your impulses and you can work and you can store up credit for the future and then2:23:48you can make the future a better place but Society has to be stable enough to allow for that hyperinflation will do you in so the promise that's implicit in2:23:57the currency is the promise that what you're doing now will pay off in the future and if people don't have that promise then well we know what they do2:24:06because in in gangs for example and say gangs in North America the time horizon of the gang members shrinks rapidly because they don't really expect to be alive at much past 21 and so they get really impulsive and violent and like2:24:18why the hell not that's that's what you do when when the future doesn't matter when it's not real you you default back to living in the moment and you take2:24:27what you can get right now and no wonder because you don't know if you're gonna be around you know in a year and you get whatever you can well you can bloody2:24:36well get it and that's like anarchy that state and so you don't want to live and some people like to live in that state because they're really wired for that you know and so they're they're much more2:24:45comfortable in those conditions there they're kind of like warrior types I would say in some sense but you know for most people that's just where that2:24:56stress will just do you in you know the stress of a life like that so that's a pretty horrible picture the one on the right I think and you know it's it's a2:25:07creepy picture and don't you think doesn't it seems like a creepy picture to me yeah and so that's quetzel a codel if I remember correctly who's me who is an Aztec dragon God and that's the Eye of Horus by oh by the way this little2:25:21thing here and that see the Egyptians they worship the eye yeah well that's cool because well why did they worship the eye well wake the2:25:30hell up and look at the world that's your salvation to do that pay bloody attention especially to the things you don't want to pay attention to and use your vision have some vision and you can use your vision to see into the future2:25:43and that is your that's your Redemption and the Egyptians they didn't know how to say that but they knew how to represent it and that's how they2:25:52represented it like the pupil on that is completely open completely dilated and that's a God as far as the Egyptians we're concerned it's Horus and I'll tell you Horus a story at some point so early primates developed a better eye for2:26:04color detail and movement and the ability to see in three dimensions traits that are important for detecting threats at close range humans are descended from these same primates all right2:26:15so now the initiation when you go into psychotherapy or when you make any supreme moral effort which is roughly the same thing you have to confront that2:26:26which you do not know now I mentioned the called prima cosmogonic chaos and the idea that at the end of Jung's life he sort of thought of the unconscious and the world as the same and you think what the hell does that mean but here's2:26:38what it means so let's say you're in a long-term intimate relationship and you get betrayed okay so what is it that you see when you see your partner at the2:26:48moment you know of the betrayal well you see the pre maganda chaos and here's why well it rattles your unconscious up because you2:26:59don't know anything anymore you don't know what the past was right you don't know what it was and it's supposed to be real and all of a sudden you don't know what it was and so you come up with wild ideas about what it might have been and2:27:11what it represented and then you don't know what the future is gonna be anymore so then your fantasy fills that space and you don't know who the hell you're looking at that's for sure and you don't know much about human beings and you2:27:22certainly don't know anything about yourself and so all of a sudden not only is everything in chaos inside your mind but everything is in chaos in your world and it actually is and2:27:33there's no telling the difference between those two things you know and so then they you're just shattered and so then you go talk to a therapist for like two years and you think what happened what was the reality and the reality is2:27:47because who knows what the reality was like but as far as you're concerned the reality is I better represent this properly in my head I better figure out2:27:56who I was who that person was what we did together and what it meant because I do not want this to happen again and so you're healed2:28:07when you get to the point where you've grasped the bloody moral of the story what went wrong and how can I not have that happen again2:28:16because that's the purpose of learning right that's the purpose of memory it's to prepare you for the future and so you have to pull out of that massive chaos a2:28:26functional representation that increases your wisdom so that you're not this naive target the next time you enter into a relationship so at least you can2:28:35have another relationship without being so traumatized that you know you you're done and you know it can take people years to talk that through because this2:28:45landscape of potential opens up when when they're betrayed it's like well anything could have been the truth well you to sort through that you have to2:28:55wander through all that mess and it's really painful and and emotional as well you have to sort through all that mess to come out with the new you right there2:29:04renewed you and so well this is a representation of it this is how people act this out by but whatever method he may have been2:29:14designated the shaman is recognized as such as only after having received two methods of instruction the first is ecstatic dreams trances and visions the2:29:24second is traditional shamanic techniques names and functions of the spirit mythology and genealogy of the clan and the secret language well one of the things that happens this happens to you even if if you encounter something2:29:36terrible like a betrayal what happens is that you have to take a journey into the domain of morality essentially which is how did I act and how did that person to2:29:46act and how should have they acted and how should have I acted and so and that's part of your cultural structure and so that's the idea of rescuing the dead farther from the depths right and that's what we'll show you some examples2:29:57of that so this is a critical issue with regards to the shamanic transformation is that people go through these terrible terrible experiences often drug-induced2:30:10by the way with regards to the shaman they usually use psychedelic chemicals of one form another often mushrooms but but they've come up with some very strange concoctions like ayahuasca down in the Amazon and ayahuasca is an2:30:22amazing substance it's made out of the bark of one thing and another plant whose name I don't remember that hardly even grow in the same place and that have to be cooked together in a special way and no one has any idea how the damn2:30:35Amazonians figured that out it looks impossible and if you ask them they say well the plants told us how to do it which you know Western people don't find very helpful but the shamans are perfectly helped happy with that that2:30:47description in ayahuasca takes them apart and it does that in part because its effects the serotonergic system very very powerfully like all psychedelics do2:30:56and it transports them to another world and that's how they interpret it and and and and what we know about psychedelics you could put in a thimble and then2:31:07throw the thimble away we know nothing about psychedelics there's new experiments going on at Johns Hopkins for example with psilocybin which is part of this active chemical in magic mushrooms same structure basically as2:31:19LSD and mescaline all the real psychedelics have basically the same structure except the one that's derived from Amanita muscaria which is called muscarinic acid and it's a it's its own weird thing that no one knows2:31:30anything about anyways they have profound neuro chemical effects in very small doses and the research group at Johns Hopkins has given psilocybin to2:31:40research subjects you know purified psilocybin because they started the new experimentation with psychedelics and that's been banned for like 40 years because psychedelics were so terrifying2:31:50to our culture that we just put them away it's like oh no we're not going there and so even from a research perspective and even though some of the psychedelics look very promising for the treatment of disorders like alcoholism2:32:02they recently used psilocybin to help people stop smoking down at Johns Hopkins and I think they had an 80% success rate which is just like that's just absolutely mind-boggling and so but if you give people psilocybin2:32:14and they have a mystical experience which is very common among people who take these sorts of chemicals then their personality transforms permanently such2:32:23that one year later their one standard deviation higher in openness and openness is the creativity dimension and that seems to be a permanent transformation so that's really remarkable and about 80 percent of the2:32:35people who undergo the Johns Hopkins experiments report that the experience is like one of the two or three most important things they've ever that's never ever happened to them and so well that's that's something you know it's2:32:48like and then there's this guy named Rick Strassman down at I think he was at the University of Texas and he did experimentation with DMT and DMT dimethyltryptamine I remember I remember correctly is the active ingredient in2:33:01ayahuasca and you produce it in your brain and it's in plants it's like a very common chemical but DMT is a weird hallucinogen because it has an2:33:10extraordinarily short mechanism of action it's like and people who take it report that they're blasted out of their body like out of a cannon and then they2:33:19go out somewhere and encounter beings of various sorts and then ten minutes later they're back and virtually everyone reports that which is really strange and2:33:29and so strassman was giving people DMT intravenously so that the trip would last longer he this was all all you know nih-funded2:33:39experimentation all cleared with the relevant ethics boards all conducted within the last 10 years and he basically quit doing it because he was a pretty straight scientist you know he was measuring heart rate and pulse and2:33:50all that sort of thing trying to look at the physiology and then the people he was giving these chemicals to kept coming back and telling him these these crazy stories and well it just it was too much for him you know and no wonder2:34:04you know cuz they all said the same thing and he'd say well that was a dream and they'd say no and it was the most real thing that ever happened to me and he'd say well you know it's an archetypal experience and they'd say no2:34:14no no that was no archetypal experience I went somewhere else and I saw things and I'm back and like I don't care what you think and like who the hell knows right because it's all subjective but but the weird thing about it is that2:34:25everyone's reporting the same thing how the hell do you account for that and then the shaman you know when they take these psychedelic chemicals they basically say the same thing they say well first of all it more or less killed2:34:36me that's this you know i dissolved two skeleton and then I climbed the tree that unites heaven and earth and I went into the realm of the gods and they gave2:34:47me some information and I'm back it's like okay well you know we don't really know what to make of that and we and certainly that's what Elia describes2:34:56when he describes the shamanic the shamanic procession not the shamanic initiation and you know there's dissolution to a skeleton first and then like a death the symbolic death or experienced as an actual death and then2:35:08bang up into the realm of the gods and then they come back there's a very old idea and that's a medieval representation of the tunnel that people2:35:17travel through at the end of their life to you know to find the light which is a very common near-death experience report and people don't have any idea what the hell to do with those reports except say well it's the paroxysm zuv the dying2:35:29brain which you'd expect to be a hell of a lot more random in my opinion and the idea is there's a rebirth after that and you know here this is the Scandinavian2:35:39representation of that tree that unites earth with heaven and so there's the Scandinavian representation it has a snake snakes down here eating it and2:35:48and that's the amazonian representation it's like how the hell he account for that I mean those those pictures are so similar that it's just it's beyond2:35:58belief well you know we lived in trees for a long time a long long long long time millions of years and there were lots of snakes around them and so the2:36:10idea that reality is a tree that's surrounded by a snake is that's in us man it's down there it's deep and there's something about it that's true now not true like we normally think of truth a truth true in an entirely2:36:23different manner so and all that's pretty damn strange we'll stop with this my son drew this when he was seven years old blew me away man I thought it was so2:36:32cool so I had it laminated and so here is what it is on the right hand side that's ordered it's like the yin-yang thing that's order left-side chaos right2:36:42and those are all mushroom houses which I thought was amazing and then there's this river that runs right down the middle like the line for order and chaos2:36:51and then there's this tree that goes up to heaven and that's heaven up there it's like there st. Peter there's the pearly gates there's the clouds it's like it's he never went to church you know it's like what the hell and then2:37:03there's a little bug there that goes up and down from heaven to earth and that was him and I thought he had a very organized psyche that kid he was a very2:37:13very stable kid and still is and I he drew that and I thought Jesus that's just bloody will unbelievable and I still think that when I look at it and2:37:22that's a great example of an archetype and so we'll see you Tuesday you0:00:002017 Personality 06: Jean Piaget & Constructivism
0:00:000:00:12this one's particularly complicated so because with Piaget you enter a whole new domain of of axiomatic thinking that's the right way to think about it0:00:22say each of these people that were discussing each of these theories comes out the construction of the world from a different perspective and it's it's really fundamentally different it's different way deep down at the level of0:00:32fundamental assumptions and so Piaget who's a who's probably the world's most famous developmental psychologist but although he didn't consider himself a0:00:41developmental psychologist he considered himself a genetic epistemology and what that meant was that he was interested in Paestum ology which is how knowledge0:00:51structures work and genetic means formulation of and so he was interested in how children formulate their knowledge structures in the world and he was a constructivist because he believed that human beings construct the they0:01:05don't only construct the representations of the world and it's deeper than that it's more like they construct the world itself now it depends to some degree on what you think of as the world and of course that's so there's a reality0:01:16definition issue that's nested at the bottom of this and it's a very complex one and so I'm going to have to walk you through it piece by piece now Piaget was a genius he was he wrote a paper I believe on mollusks when he was ten and0:01:29had it published in a scientific journal and he was offered the curatorship of a museum as a consequence of that and his parents had to write the museum directors and tell them that he couldn't curate the museum because he was only0:01:40ten and so that gives you some idea about Piaget and he's published many many many books and many of them haven't been translated into English yet and so0:01:49he was quite the he was quite the you know large intelligence creature and he studied all sorts of things so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about0:02:00constructivism I'm gonna start with a quote from Piaget and it's uh it's he's some book some of his books I found quite straightforward and some of them very difficult and I think it's often because of the quality of the0:02:11translation this happens to be a relatively difficult section I don't think it's translated that well but whatever we're going to go through it I'll explain it to you a little bit so Piaget said the common postulate that's0:02:22assumption of various traditional epistemology theories of valid knowledge is that knowledge itself is a fact and not a process and then if our various forms of knowledge are always0:02:34incomplete and our various science is still imperfect that which is acquired is still acquired and can therefore be studied statically hence the absolute0:02:44position of the problems what is knowledge or how are the various types of knowledge possible under the converging influence of a series of factors we're tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process0:02:55more than a state any being or object that Sciences attempts to hold fast dissolves once again in the current of development it is the last analysis of0:03:04this development and of it alone that we have the right to state it is a fact what we can and should then seek is the law of this process quotes we are well0:03:13aware on the other hand of the fine book by kuhn on scientific revolutions now there is an awful lot of information in that paragraph so we'll unpack it a0:03:22little bit before we go on now one way of looking at science is that it's a collection of facts right that's that's what Piaget is stating to begin with and0:03:32that we assume that the facts that science has gathered are facts and Static but if you observe them across time what you find is that scientific0:03:41facts tend to shift and transform because scientific theories that are applicable in one century let's say turn out to be less applicable in the next now there's been a lot of argument and discussion about this because the fact0:03:55that facts change seems to indicate that they're not so self-evidently fact and there are people and perhaps Kuhn would be among them who believe that science0:04:06consisted of the juxtaposition of paradigms so those are sets of axioms within which something operates and the paradigms he considered them often in0:04:15commensurate you couldn't move from one to another because the axioms were different there was no necessary no what what might you say there was no necessary means of communication between them but and and and Piaget knew of0:04:28Thomas Kuhns work that's the scientists structure of scientific revolutions which was published in 1962 it's a classic text in the philosophy of science and and what Piaget soon more was more like a I would say0:04:41more like a classic view of science where so for example when Newton came up with Newtonian physics there was a set of propositions upon which Newtonian0:04:51physics was based and then when Einstein transformed those propositions what happened was that Newtonian physics became a subset of Einsteinian physics and so the way that Piaget looked at the development of factual ideas at least in0:05:05part was that you'd come up with a set of ideas that were facts and then that would be superseded by a different theory within that within which that original theory would be nested and so that what happens that each theory in0:05:16some sense although it transforms it becomes more complete as the scientific progression continues now Kuhn didn't precisely believe that although exactly0:05:25what Kuhn meant by a paradigm shift because Kuhn originated that term isn't clear but he didn't seem to actually believe that science had this capacity0:05:34to present a series of facts and then alter the underlying presuppositions and then to nest that within a broader series of facts like you would assume if you were thinking about the relationship between Newton and Einstein0:05:45so Newtonian physics is a subset of einsteinium physics so now that's kind of how Piaget thought about how human beings developed knowledge he believed0:05:54that we came up with well let's say you wanted to chop down a tree that might be a good example I mean you could use a dull axe made of bronze and it's like0:06:04well that would chop down the tree it'd be a lot of work though and then maybe you replace that with a sharp steel axe that's designed like a wedge so that you can really hack down a tree with it or maybe you replace it with a saw and so0:06:16the it's not like the bronze axe could chop down the tree but the steel axe can do a better job in the saw can do even a better job and so the way that Piaget0:06:25thought about the transformation of human knowledge structures from from infancy onward essentially was that infants would produce a representation of the world that was sort of low resolution but quite tool like it would0:06:37work in the world but then as they progressed the nature of those tools would become refined that sometimes transform completely so some sometimes0:06:46imagine that a child would use in a sense a low resolution picture of something and then they would increase its resolution as they filled in the details that would be assimilation that's the page idea0:06:58notion of assimilation you're using the same basic theory but filling in the details and then now and then you'd have to switch to another picture entirely and that would be more like accommodation that's where you'd have to0:07:08transform your internal structures completely in order to properly represent an act within the world and so that's the basic difference between accommodation and assimilation so assimilation is like micro alterations0:07:19and accommodation is transformation of the knowledge structure itself and so that's part of so what khun pointed out was that there'd be a set of facts and0:07:28then there'd be an anomaly arise of some sort so like at the end of the 19th century the only remaining anomaly was at least one of the remaining anomalies was that no matter which direction you shine a light beam in and no matter how0:07:42fast the platform on which you're standing is moving the light beam has exactly the same velocity which seems impossible so you know if the earth is moving this way around the Sun and you shine a light off the earth you'd expect0:07:54the speed of light to be the speed of light plus the speed of the earth and then if you shone it the other way then you'd expect the speed of light to be the speed of light - the earth speed but that isn't what happens no matter how0:08:04fast the platform on which the person shining the light is standing the speed of light is always the same to every observer so and people kind of thought of that as that wasn't the only anomaly but that was one of them0:08:15thought of that is the only anomaly left in physics at the end of the 19th century and turned out that was a bad one how long there was some other ones as well like the fact that light tends to behave as a wave and a particle more0:08:26or less at the same time which doesn't seem possible so there's a couple of things left over in Newtonian physics that the Newtonian physics couldn't explain but by the end of the 19th century there were famous scientists0:08:35saying yeah well we got this all wrapped up there's really nothing left to discover and then Along Came quantum mechanics and Einstein Yin relativity and bang the whole world was like really different and quantum mechanics is much0:08:47more comprehensive theory of the world then Newtonian physics all of the electronics you used wouldn't work if quantum physics wasn't correct roughly0:08:56speaking and so that little tiny anomaly blew into something that knocked the slats out underneath from underneath the entire axiomatic structure of Newtonian physics it showed it was wrong at its fundamental levels0:09:07even though it turned out to be a subset a correct subset of something that was much broader and so you can kind of think of that as that's what kids are doing as they progress they develop a theory that accounts for a certain set0:09:16of you could say fact but this is another place it gets tricky and then they modify those and make them more and more refined but now and then they have to under grow quite a transformation not be a stage transition in Piaget and0:09:29thought that that's the stage transition idea and that would be akin in some sense to a kuhnian scientific revolution now what Piaget is trying to state here is that because you there's this weird problem with facts which is that they0:09:43tend to transform across time you know like if you go take a biology course right now in 20 years pretty much everything you read you learned or very much of what you learned will turn out to have been wrong and that's kind of0:09:53weird because it isn't wrong right now and you think well how can it be wrong in 20 years and that that's a really complicated problem and in order to solve that you kind of have to think about facts like tools instead of them0:10:05as thinking about them as objective independent realities because a bad tool can still work as a tool whereas a bad fact just kills you stone dead and so0:10:15there's any ways in any case that seems to be a completely unnecessary phenomena Oh God there's no reason for that that's just0:10:57sheer spite as far as I can tell mm-hmm okay so so here's one of psays propositions and and it is that because facts flux in some sense across time0:11:12you're looking for something that doesn't change across time to call it a real fact and so what Piaget is trying to point out in this let's call it introductory paragraph is that the one thing that doesn't change is the manner0:11:21in which people generate facts rather than the facts themselves so the ultimate fact is a fact about the way people generate facts all right and so psays theory in part is a is a theory about how knowledge is acquired and0:11:34transformed and so it's not that no it's not a study of the knowledge itself it's a study of the process by which the knowledge is generated and he believed that that process was unchanging at least with regards to human beings and0:11:45so you could think of the Piaget alien genetic epistemological mystery as being how is it that people form and transform representations of the world and one of0:11:55his conclusions about that is that there's a standard process and then the reason that I'm telling you about Piaget right now is because as far as I can tell the standard Piaget daeun description of the manner in which0:12:05knowledge is acquired and transformed is the same thing that's represented in the mythology of the shamanic transformation which is that there's a state of being and then it's derp up disrupted by something chaotic and there's a0:12:17disintegration period and that's the space between the stage transitions for for children in which time they're often upset because their little theory about the world isn't learning it isn't working anymore0:12:27and then in that chaotic period they adjust themselves to new anomalies and anomalies or what occur when you act in the world and what you want to happen doesn't happen right because that means there's something wrong with your0:12:38knowledge structure if you act and then something happens you don't want to happen something's wrong with the way you're representing the world or you could say something's wrong with the world but good luck with that although0:12:49you know people can modify the world as well as modifying their belief structures and people do that a lot but so this the piagetian stage transition0:12:58as far as I can tell is a micro case of the broader idea of the the existence an orderly state its dissolution into a chaotic state because something0:13:07unexpected has occurred and then it's retransfer Meishan into a more integrated state now Piaget would say well the initial state and the chaotic state and the final state aren't the ultimate realities the ultimate reality0:13:19is the process of moving through those stages and that's how people acquire knowledge and that's you could say that's the central element of human beings and I would say that's a that's another reason Tatian of the hero myth0:13:30because the hero is the person who notes uh normally notes something that's changed that's outside of explored territory encounters it defeats it let's0:13:40say or get something of value from it and then recasts it into the world shares it with the community restructures of the world and so that's the central story it's it's not the central story of human beings but it's0:13:53it's close enough for for our purposes at the moment so okay so that's what Piaget is about how do human beings encounter the world and and what happens when they do that now the thing about the world0:14:04for Piaget is it's also a complicated place it's not exactly the set of it's not the set of all objective facts that remain to be discovered because Piaget0:14:13is a constructivist and he's more of a pragmatist than he is precisely a scientific realist and so that's a complicated thing very very complicated0:14:22thing I don't know if any of you and maybe this is completely irrelevant I don't know if any of you listened to my argument with Sam Harris but Sam Harris is a scientific realist and I was trying to make at least in part at Piaget Ian's0:14:34point but he was having none of that that's for sure but but Piaget makes the point and so you know I'm going to let him speak in some sense as we proceed0:14:43through this and and well you'll see why he does what he does so if all knowledge is always in the state of development and consists in proceeding from one0:14:52state to a more complete and efficient one so that that implies a hierarchy of states right that you move from one knowledge structure to the next one0:15:02which includes the previous one and is better and it's better because it covers more territory that's how you know it's better it does the same thing the old tool does plus some additional things so it's a definition of better it's a good0:15:14thing to have a definition of better and worse all knowledge is always in the state of development and consists in proceeding for one state to a more complete deficient one evidently it is a question0:15:24of knowing this development and analyzing it with the greatest possible accuracy which is something I happen to agree with but that's partly because I read Piaget and and I think I understand what he meant and he's quite the thinker0:15:35and so I'm gonna see if I can like clue you in a little bit about this because it's it's well it's exceedingly complex you know and most of the time when people talk about Piaget they just talk about his surface experiments they don't0:15:46talk about what he was actually up to and what he was up to was well he was trying to figure out how people represent the world and learned and that's not only it's not only that you know this is another thing people don't0:15:57know about Piaget is that he was trying to reconcile the chasm between science and values that's what drove him through his entire intellectual life he was0:16:06attempting to bridge the gap between science and religion that's another way of thinking about it and and that was explicit he knew that that's why he did everything he did and so the thing that's so cool about Piaget I think is0:16:16that he actually started to provide what you might think about as a rational basis for morality it's not exactly rational that's the thing because it's0:16:25rational rational belief like scientific realism has a certain set of presuppositions at its core and Piaget doesn't use those presuppositions to0:16:34solve the problem get a problem so deep the gap between what is and what ought to be that's the David Humes problem you can't derive a naught from it is just0:16:44because you know a bunch of things doesn't give you an unerring guide to know what to do about those things there's a gap there and Harris and people like him say that gap is illusory but most philosophers including David0:16:56Hume including Piaget these are heavy-duty people including Heidegger would would disagree with that they don't believe that that that that gap is0:17:05non-existent and and and Harris believes that you can nest values within science and and that's the proposition that he continually puts forward like most of the so-called new atheists but it's a hell of a lot more difficult to do than0:17:17you think that's for sure and so anyway so how is Piaget purporting to manage this well one thing he does is he for Piaget it's really important that you0:17:28have a body and that's one of the things that's four cool about his thinking so you could think about him as an early exponent of embodied cognition it's like he's not exactly a Cartesian a follower of0:17:39Descartes he doesn't really believe that you have a spirit or say a rational mind that is in some sense separate from your body which is an implicit presupposition of a lot of a lot of of philosophical claims Piaget really sticks you in your0:17:52body and the other thing that Piaget claims is that your abstract knowledge is actually determined by the structure of your body and that it unfolds from your body up into abstraction and that's what happens as infants transform into0:18:04adults first of all almost all their knowledge is embodied and what that means is that it's not look there's a couple of different kinds of memory like0:18:13the most the most fundamental distinction you might think of is between procedural representation procedural memory and and representational memory so when you remember your past that little movie or0:18:25that runs in your head or maybe the facts that you can recite about your past that's episodic memory that's representational but procedural memory is different procedural memories how you0:18:34walk you don't know how you walk that's how you ride a bike it's how you play the piano it's how you type so it's it's automatic right it's built into your nervous system it's built into the nerves that innervate your musculature0:18:46and there's completely separate memory systems now one can represent the other which is interesting the representational system can represent the output of the body which is basically what you happen what happens0:18:57when someone tells a story even when you tell a story about your own life but the contents of procedural memory precede the contents of representational memory0:19:07and they're shaped in different ways so for example part of the wisdom that's encoded in your body is there because of things you've practiced but it's also there because you've practiced things in a social environment and so while you0:19:19practice those things the effect of the social environment shaped the way you learned it and that's encoded right in your neurons it's not representational it's encoded in the way you do things it's encoded in0:19:30the way you smile when you look at someone or frown or when you do that and that's all implicit it's not under your conscious control it's not even in that system and so Piaget figured this out and so one of the things he said was0:19:41that you start as an infant by building your cedral memory not your representational memory that's partly perhaps why you can't remember your infancy you know I actually don't have that kind of0:19:52representational memory there what you do is you act you learn to act you build your body so that it can move and you do that partly by experimenting with your own body but you also do that by experimenting with your body in a0:20:04context that's shaped from the beginning by the presence of other people so for example you know what child learns how to breastfeed its mouth is pretty wired up right at birth hey and and the rest of its body isn't wired up very much at0:20:16all but its mouth is and you might think well that's just a reflex and that Piaget would agree with that it's a built in it's something built in that that a baby can do right at birth but even in the act of breastfeeding the0:20:27baby has to learn how to modify that reflex so that it gets along with its mother so even at the very beginning with the most you might think the most0:20:37primordial acts there's a sociological and influence and there's a mutual dynamic going on that's really really important it's really important and so in some sense for Piaget the structure of society is implicitly built into the0:20:51structure of the procedural memory system and so one of the things you might think about that and Piaget makes much of this because he looks at the relationship between play and dreams and imitation so he's kind of a quasi0:21:02psychoanalyst one of the things that means is that coded in your behavior coded in your behavior is is this is the social structure in which you emerged0:21:18and it's coded in a way that you don't actually understand you just know how to act and then you can figure out how you're acting and you can extract out of that some of the social rules but you don't you don't that doesn't mean that0:21:29you know the rules it meant that the rules were built into you here's the way of thinking about it like a wolf pack wolf pack knows how to operate together it knows how to hunt right and each wolf knows where every other wolf is in the0:21:40dominance hierarchy but they don't know they know that they don't have rules right they don't have a code they don't have laws what they have is behavioral regularities patterned behavioral regularities and those are like a0:21:52morality they're very very in fact that's exactly what they are a dominance hierarchy of animal that aren't representational you know that don't have language at least they don't have language the dominance0:22:04hierarchy is a kind of morality it's a way of it's a way of setting up individual behavior within a social context to maximize cooperation and minimize competition and so well so Piaget would say that you know the0:22:16origin of more and and Fran's de Waal who's a great primatologist by the way Fran's fr ansd de w AAL he's written a lot of books about the emergence of0:22:26morality and chimpanzees in particular and you know he follows the same line of logic it's that the morality emerges out of the interaction between the chimpanzees and it's bounded by the necessity that the actions take certain0:22:38forms so for example if the chimpanzees act in a way that each of them kills everyone else it's like that's the end of it it's the end of the game so that's not a very functional morality it's it doesn't0:22:49produce survival of the individuals it doesn't produce flourishing of the individuals certainly it produces extinction of the individuals and the death of the group so as far as do all would concerned from an evolutionary0:23:02perspective that sort of mode of interacting is a dead end and so one of Pia Jays claims implicit claims is that and this is one of the things that's so brilliant about Piaget is that the interactions between people the social0:23:17interactions between people necessarily emerge within a kind of bounded space and the space is the space of the game so we're always playing games always and0:23:29a game you might think about a game as a microcosm of the world and a small child's game is a tiny fractional microcosm of the world but then you get0:23:38up into adult games and you could think about those maybe as multiplayer online games that's one good representation but even more sophisticated things like being a lawyer say are like working at McDonald's or any of those things those0:23:49are also forms of game and and that P and people negotiate the rules and that game is nested inside sets of broader games and so for Piaget that the game0:24:01that killed the games the children play kind of transform inexorably and and and what incrementally into the games that adults play and and a0:24:11a game that's playable as an adult is a functional game it's it's an acceptable game and one of PJ's claims is that not only do people start playing games0:24:21unconsciously in a sense and implicitly then they start to play games more consciously they actually they actually represent the games to some degree at least in their actions then they start to learn the explicit rules of the game0:24:33but only later after they know how to play it and then at the highest stage of moral development they start to realize that not only are they players of games0:24:42and followers of a rules but they're also producers of rules so it starts you start out not being able to play a game at all then you can play a game with0:24:51yourself then you can play a game with a few other people then you can play rule-governed games with lots of people and then you realize that you make the rules and you can make new games and that's the highest level of moral0:25:02development according to Piaget it's varrick's brilliant it's it's bloody brilliant he's the first person that I ever really encountered who was able to put the notion of an emergent morality on something you know broadly0:25:15commensurate with a scientific perspective but you have to understand that in order to do that he had to sacrifice a little bit of his notions of scientific realism and that's what makes him a constructivist and so and so we're0:25:26going back to constructivism so he says at the beginning and this is the beginning of the development of knowledge does not unfold itself as a matter of chance but forms a development so he said there's not only do knowledge0:25:39structures change across time and they're embedded in the social world but the manner in which they change across time actually has a bit of a structure and so that would be the Piaget lien stages of development just so you know0:25:49now people have debated ever since Piaget proposed this if those developmental stages are fixed and necessary and if he identified them0:25:58properly and even and as well whether or not they could be sped up which he always called the American problem could you speed up these stages of development and there's a lot of argument about whether those stages exist in the manner0:26:10that Piaget described there and whether they're fixed at all of that but that's still the fundamental elements of his the fundamental element of his theory so0:26:20and in since the cognitive domain has an absolute beginning which means you were you're here now but at one point you weren't so there was an absolute beginning to to you as a phenomena it's to be studied at the very stages nor0:26:32known as formation that's his rationalization for being a genetic epistemology right someone who studies the formation of knowledge structures across time like an embryologist someone like that right who developmental0:26:43embryologist the first aim of genetic epistemology is therefore if one can say so to take psychology seriously and to furnish verifications to any question which each epistemology necessarily raises yet replacing the generally0:26:55unsatisfying speculative or implicit psychology with controllable analysis and so basically what he's saying there is that you can guess in a sense like Freud did about developmental psychology Freud kind of projected backwards from0:27:07his patients into the dim mists of childhood and came up with like a what would a hypothetical developmental sequence and Piaget said well we're not going to do that we're going to go run experiments on kids often individuals0:27:19but sometimes multiple individuals we're gonna we're going to observe exactly what they're doing he watched his kids in their cribs for example unbelievably intently and with great he was like an ethologist which is a person who studies0:27:32animal behavior observational II like Fran's de Waal he was like an ethologist of children not exactly an experimental psychologist although also an experimental psychologist and he more or less established the field of0:27:43developmental psychology so he said well let's empirically analyze how children learn and then maybe we can figure out how this knowledge process unfolds and0:27:52we don't have to guess about it we can we can use controllable analysis and so you could say he introduced scientific methodology even though he wasn't a scientific realist he introduced scientific methodology into the study of0:28:03child development but more importantly into the study of how knowledge structures unfold across time so he was a philosopher as well but a strange type of philosopher because he was interested in how philosophy itself emerges in the0:28:15mind of the child and so that's what Piaget was up to and so quite quite remarkable and he had incredibly wide range of interests befitting someone who probably had an IQ of like 190 I mean he was seriously smart guy like way way0:28:29outside of the normal range and so this is the sort of questions he was trying to answer well how do you on what do you base your judgments cuz you make judgments about things better or worse well how how do you come up with that0:28:42ability how does that emerge and on what basis do you make the judgments there's a famous ruling on pornography that I believe the Supreme Court of the0:28:51United States laid down and one of the justices wrote something that's become infamous or famous depending on how you look at he said well I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it and and that's and that's a notion of0:29:04the incomplete ability of the representational system to represent the contents of implicit perception or the procedural system you can know that you0:29:13know something but you that doesn't mean you can describe why it doesn't mean you can describe how you know it and you don't how do you focus your eyes like you don't know how you focus your eyes you just focus them you know how do you0:29:24smile like this well maybe less ugly but you know you you can't describe how you do it you can't describe the musculature you can represent the output of the act0:29:35and you can do it but you can't represent it and you're just stuffed full of skills like that which is another example of the way that you're way more complicated than your understanding of you you know one of the0:29:47things people often ask is how can we use the rat as a model of a person because like you know a rats not much of a person depending of course on the person but the the real answer to that is well compared to what like compared0:30:00to your understanding of a person a rat is an excellent model of a person so it's not as good a model of a person as a person is but compared to imagination0:30:10let's say it's incomparably better and you know that's because we share like I don't know what 98% of our genes or some damn thing with rats it's like it's0:30:20really up I think we share 90% of our genes with yeast for God's sake you know and so we're a lot more rat-like than yeast like so and I think with chimps0:30:29it's over 99% you know so it's not a bad model obviously it's not perfect but it always depends on what you compare it to you know and you hear animal rights activists say things like well we can replace that with computer simulations0:30:41it's like no we can't because you can't simulate what you don't know or at least not very well so that's a silly idea you know even though they have a point it's0:30:50not so great to torture animals to death and all but what are his norms well that's a good question where do norms for behavior come from you have norms when they're violated it annoys you doesn't0:31:01mean you know what your norms are but you do kind of get a sense of what they are when they get violated that really upset me well what does that mean well you don't really know you might have to think about that for like six0:31:11months why you got so upset about that but you can notice that you got upset and that means that you do have expectations and norms let's say but you don't know where they came from now obviously in part they came from your0:31:22intrinsic structure but also a core they're a consequence of your learning but even more importantly they're our consequence of your learning in a social environment so all of those phenomena which exceed your comprehension0:31:34determine the nature of your norms and often you only detect them when they're violated so because why bother paying attention to something that works you just don't know one does they take it for granted it's almost the0:31:47definition of something working it's like you know you think I'm driving my car to school and you think you're in a car but you're really not in a car you're in a thing that gets you from home to school and you can pretend that0:31:59that is so annoying you can pretend that0:32:20so you might think well the thing that I'm I'm in is it's kind of a weird example is it is this object with objective qualities that you call a car0:32:29but but that isn't exactly how you actually perceive or act towards it what happens is is that as long as it's doing what it's supposed to do which means that its function is intact not what it is but its function then you can use a0:32:42really low resolution representation of the thing the car is just what gets you from point A to point B right and so the fact that you don't understand the damn thing at all is completely invisible to you but it isn't when it quits as soon0:32:54as it quits it becomes a car it's like bang car oh my god I don't understand this thing at all now what do I do well you panic a little bit right because well what do you know about your car nothing nothing nothing at all and0:33:07worse than that now the car has become an intersection between you and whoever's going to fix your card so that introduces a whole bunch of human elements into it like are they going to figure out what's wrong with it are they0:33:18going to rip you off is your car ever going to work again are you going to get to work what's going to happen tonight so all of a sudden that thing that you were in that was a car turns into this massive complex unbelievably complicated0:33:31thing and that's actually what it is your initial representation of it it's like it's really low resolution it's like one bit and then bang it breaks0:33:40down and poof complexity complexity complexity everywhere and that complexity that's what the world's made out if you remember we talked about0:33:49William James and that crazy nitrous oxide induced pseudo hippie poetry that he was writing in the 1890s when he was talking about chaos0:33:58well that chaos that he was talking about out of which him order emerges that's the same thing as that complexity that's hovering in the background and children have to operate in a world that's actually that complex but they're0:34:09not smart enough and neither are you so they build partial representations that sort of work and the parents scaffold them so the way children manage that's0:34:18like children they don't know anything but stay they're still alive so what's up with that you know part of it is the child is laying out one of its procedures in the world in accordance with its understanding and0:34:29something goes wrong what does the child do cry right it defaults it defaults to this distress cry and what happens is the0:34:38adults move in with their superior skills and their enhanced understanding and they mediate between the partial knowledge of the child in the actual complex world and without the child that's why if you take your child to the0:34:50mall and just leave you know it doesn't take very long for them to get really really really really upset you know depending on the child some of them0:34:59almost instantaneously you know one day I was in the Boston Airport with my daughter she was about three and three and a half maybe and my son he was about two and we were there to pick someone I was just packed and so I had them by the0:35:12hand you know and I were told my daughter a bunch if she ever got separated from me in a crowd just to sit down immediately wherever she was or as close there by it I would find her don't move well somehow I got separated from0:35:26them and I looked behind them and they weren't there and I found out later she followed someone else who looked like me from behind and she I found her in about0:35:35three minutes you know which is a long time man if you're three years old at that Airport she was sitting there like paralyzed you know but her brother was with her he didn't care at all and the reason he didn't care is because as far0:35:46as he was concerned she was an adult but as far as she was concerned she was an abandoned kid in an airport you know it was very hard on her and it's because0:35:56the you know she was protected from the complexity by her primordial representations and my presence but as soon as my presence disappeared the complexity came flooding back and just overwhelmed her that's chaos and0:36:08uncertainty and then she'd cry and the cry says help I'm out of my league I'm drowning I'm drowning you know intervened and so that's how kids in0:36:17part can get along in the world with their incomplete knowledge representations always huh also how you get along in the world because you're incomplete beyond belief but you got all these other people around you in the0:36:26whole damn society filling in the gaps and so you walk around like you know what you're doing but you don't you know you just hardly know at all you know if0:36:35you can fit into that system great you've got it on your side and you can use it to fill the gaps that's also partly why people are so concerned with maintaining their social identity like the real identity on0:36:47talking about some surface identity but you see because you have set up a set of expectations and desires about how you want the world to unfold and you do that0:36:57within a social context and as long as your desires and the actions of the community match which means you're at home roughly speaking as long as they0:37:07match you stay emotionally regulated you like that that's why you can stay calm in here it's like your desires are being played out by everyone else because one0:37:17of your desires is that none of these crazy primate starts brandishing a knife for example or even twitching or any of that sort of thing you don't want any of0:37:26that and if it starts happening it's like you get weary very quickly and maybe you look and maybe you won't and maybe you'll freeze maybe you'll get the hell out of there or maybe you'll get aggressive but that match has to0:37:37maintain itself intact or your entire nervous system gets dysregulated and the reason for that is that as soon as that match is disrupted the underlying complexity and chaos of the world reveals itself and so does your0:37:48inadequacy and then your body defaults into predator mode and and the fact that you don't know anything and that everything is really complicated becomes0:37:57very evident to you very quickly and people hate that it's the worst thing that can happen to them the bottom falling out of their world and so that0:38:07happens more when your fundamental presumptions about things are are challenged and then you have to solve the problem of what constitutes a fundamental presupposition you know how do you know which presupposition is0:38:17peripheral in which one central and you can tell in part because the more upset you get about something the more central it is that that things about to your0:38:27entire structure of belief and that's one way of getting into that unconscious structure of belief from a psychoanalytic perspective so what are the things that happens to me for example as a therapist is I'll be0:38:36talking to my clients and they'll be talking about something difficult and all of a sudden they'll cry and they often don't know why so I stopped them right there it's like something went through your mind something happened and0:38:47the cry indicates that you've moved beyond your domain of competence out into the unknown world all of a sudden into chaos what's that chaos what exactly happened and people you know they're usually embarrassed that they0:38:59cry but often make remember what flitted through their mind and it's a represent it's a it's some encounter with the chaos beyond their conceptual systems that produces that emotional response and then we can dig0:39:10into that find out oh that's a trauma especially if it's more than a year - how fold and those can be of various depths and profundity you know sometimes they're so bad that the person just breaks down completely and they never0:39:22put themselves together you know that's when something's just walloped you it's hit you right at the bottom of your axiomatic structures so to speak right at the trunk but when you're doing therapy with people and you watch how0:39:32they respond emotionally you look for those tiny eruptions of negative emotion and those are like holes in their conceptual structure and those have to be sewed up by their man you in the process of dialogue you figure out okay0:39:45there was a bit of unexplored territory there that manifested itself it produced an emotional response in you that indicates that you've reverted in some sense to childhood that would be the Freudian interpretation now we have to0:39:56figure out what it was that that's in that hole what caused that tear and then we have to go back and articulate it and analyze and study it until we can sew it up and then and art and and get to the gist of it to make it into a adaptive0:40:09story and then you can leave it behind and it actually produces neurological transformation as you do that the memories in some sense actually move their psychophysiological location you could say their location in your psyche0:40:23but you can also note that the brain systems that are handling the memories aren't the same so they're much more limbic they're way lower and closer to the emotional centers when it's still raw trauma and0:40:34by the time it's fully articulated it's more represented in an articulated story a causal story and that's partly why writing about emotional events actually0:40:43helps you overcome them so and it's possible that writing about how it is that you overcome emotional events in general is actually the best kind of therapy right not how do you solve a particular problem but how is it that0:40:56you orient yourself in the world so that you solve the class of the fact that there are problems right that's that's the ultimate story and I think that's the hero myth and I also think that that's the knowledge generating process0:41:07that Piaget is talking about you that's because you have you're constantly overcoming problems in the world and the problems are that you don't know enough to get what you want from the world and so you get that mismatch0:41:19mismatch there's you've got whole brain systems that are designed to do nothing but detect that mismatch like crucial central brain structures and we'll talk about that a lot when we get into the0:41:29into the physiology so all right how does on what does an individual basis judgments water is norms how are they validated how do you know if you're0:41:38right about your norms what's the interest of such norms for the philosophy of science in general that's a really tough one it's like well you have norms and expectations as a human being and because of that they they have0:41:50a determining influence on the manner in which you conduct science so for example here's one of the problems with a straight realist view so we could be0:41:59having a discussion and I could say well you know that tile is to the right of that tile and then I could say well this brick is smaller than that brick and0:42:08then I could say you know the roof is white really quite white there and start back there and like after about 20 statements like that you're just going to want to slap me and the reason for that is that well those statements are0:42:19perfectly valid representations of fact but there's an infinite number of facts and most of them are irrelevant and that's the thing that's the thing the0:42:29facts have to be relevant like if you come to a lecture and all the person does is tell you irrelevant facts what happens you've been in lots of lectures like that what happens when you start fantasizing about something that might0:42:41be more worthwhile you know or you go to sleep because your brain is a lot smarter than you are it figures hell if all we're gonna get0:42:53exposed to here is an infinite infinite number of irrelevant facts we might as well have a nap until something important happens so it's true it's exactly how it works now this is gonna get big isn't that what happens next0:43:05No so okay so and then how does the fact that the child children think differently affect our presumption of fact itself children live in the world0:43:16they think differently about the world but yet they survive and so well I already mentioned a partial solution to that adults intercede you know around the edges around the borders children do this all the time a so it's called0:43:28referencing and they do it two ways so for example if you're in a room with your child maybe to wait and mouse runs across the child will orient to it watch0:43:37it track it that's pretty much unconscious and the mother let's say will do that too and then the child looks at the mouse and then looks at the mother and the reason is is because the child doesn't know what the mouse is and0:43:49so then it looks at the mother to read from the mothers face which is a projection screen of emotions how to classify the mouse in terms of import and if the mother is like all calm about it and gives the kid a pad it's like you0:44:00know okay whatever you know not a danger that's what the mouse is first danger not danger it's way after that that it's a mouse0:44:11you think no it's a mouse to begin with it's like these things are not so straightforward they are not so straightforward so anyways if the mother climbs up on the table it has a screaming fit then the child's already0:44:21prepared because of this anomaly to be emotionally responsive the child looks at the mothers face it's got terror on at the mouse child takes small danger0:44:30big danger it's like phobia phobia phobia now all kids that won't happen to you because some are very emotionally robust but if they're very Charles very0:44:40high in neuroticism trait neuroticism the probability that they'll develop a permanent semi-permanent fear of the mouse is extraordinarily high and that's0:44:49what should happen because the mother tells you what the mouse is and in the face does it's a mouse it says safety danger and that's the first thing you0:44:58want to know about something is it safer is it dangerous and that's a tricky one eh because whether something is safe for dangerous is not exactly an objective fact there's a guy named JJ Gibson who0:45:08wrote a book called NACA logical approach to visual perception which I would highly recommend and his claim in that book it's a real work of genius I believe is that when you see when you walk towards a cliff you don't see a0:45:19cliff you don't see a cliff and infer danger what you see is a falling off place and you infer cliff and you can tell that some of you have vertigo you0:45:29go up on the 26th floor out into balcony and it's like you don't want to go near the edge maybe you feel like you're gonna throw yourself over because people have that kind of what if what if I fell or what if I jumped over it's like stay0:45:40away from that it's like that perception of the danger precedes your perception of the balcony and the object now you know that's how your brain is wired the0:45:50dangers first object second so in people with blind sight who I've talked about before who think they're blind they can't see then they tell you that they could still detect fearful faces and you could detect their detection by0:46:01measuring their skin conductance and so their eyes are mapping right on to their fear and reflex systems without any intermediary of objective perception whatsoever so don't be thinking that what you see in the world is the0:46:12objective world and then infer its meaning it could easily be exactly backwards and it looks like if you look at how the brain is set up that it is in fact actually backwards or at least parallel but but the but the danger not0:46:24danger perception has to be very very very very fast and so it precedes the more elaborate cognitive interpretations even the perceptions because it actually0:46:34takes a while to see something because it's really complicated to see something and so you can't just wait around to see the damn thing before you act you just not fast enough so they say if you're a pro tennis player the time it takes the0:46:47ball to leave your opponent's racket to get to you is not long enough for you to plan any motor act so what you're doing is you've got them what you dis inhibit0:46:56the motor act by looking at the stance of your opponent and watching and by the time they hit it you're already prepared for the response because you just not it's coming at 120 miles an hour it's like it's going fifty feet you don't0:47:09have the reflexes for it so your your your eyes are making body ready without in some sense without your conscious perception you become conscious if you make a mistake right in fact that's kind of what consciousness0:47:21is for it's like detect error fix detect error fix that's consciousness it's not plan what you're going to do next although it's not that simple either other problems that Piaget was trying to address well0:47:33what water numbers what does it mean for there to be space what what do we mean when we when we talk about time how do we how did we come up with that concept0:47:42what does speed mean how do we know an object is permanent how do we know that an object stays the same across sets of transformation so that's a very classic0:47:52piagetian problem so let's say you give a kid a bowl of clay and then you crush it so it's now a cylinder is like is that the same thing or is it a different thing and the answer is well it's the same thing and it's a different thing0:48:04but there's something about it that remained constant across the transformations and so one of the things that Piaget is trying to figure out is what remains constant across transformations because you might think0:48:16about that is a real fact protons are like that right they remain constant across transformations and so we assume that they're pretty damn real and they last I don't know how long protons last it's like I don't know what it is it's0:48:27some tens of billions of so don't worry your protons are going to just sit right there and behave you know so they last for a very very very long time across sets of transformation so we can regard them as real he was interested in why0:48:39children play and why there are patterns in play and how that's related to dreams and he was really interested in the fact that we imitate other people and this is another part of Piaget staggering genius in my estimation because he was one of0:48:51the early developmental thinkers who understood that our capacity for learning was not so much mediated by language as it was mediated by our0:49:00capacity to use our bodies to represent the bodies of other people and that's mind-boggling it's a mind-boggling idea so you know you hear monkey-see0:49:10monkey-do but it's actually not true they're not very good at imitating octopuses or octopi they can imitate actually so if you give a octopus a0:49:20bottle with a cork in it and there's a crab in the cork it can figure out how to get out the cork and sneak out the crab but if you get an octopus to watch it our octopus do that it'll learn to do it0:49:29faster those things are smart and that's partly that's because they're all tentacley right and so they actually have something they can do something with like our hands there's our tentacles you know an octopus I can0:49:41operate in the world because they have tentacles and and you know you hear about the superhuman intelligence of things like dolphins and whales it's like ya know they're basically test tubes you know what what are we gonna do0:49:51now tap a city it's like no they're not gonna do that they can't manipulate the world so whatever their intelligence is it's way different than ours okay imitation so partly what you're doing all the time is0:50:04imitating other people all of you are imitating each other right now you can tell because look around you're all doing exactly the same thing so it's0:50:13it's mass imitation and that's really a huge part of social structure is that we're constantly imitating each other and so that means that your body and her body are very much matched physiologically right now you're in the0:50:24same state and you can tell because you basically have the same expression and as long as all you crazy primates violent primates have the same0:50:33expression on you can pretty much be sure that all of you are thinking and about to do approximately the same thing and so you can keep that match between0:50:42your desire slash expectation and reality happening and that's why we have a face it's so that other people know what the hell we're up to and that's why you're always watching people's faces because you want to see what they're up0:50:53to and that's why you have white surround your iris gorillas don't and so that's because I can see exactly where your eyes are pointing because they're highlighted by that white and I'm unbelievably good at detecting the0:51:05precise direction of your gaze and so if you stand on the corner and look up the buildings other people will stand beside you and look up because they think well that guy would be standing there pointing his eyes into the sky unless0:51:16there was something of interest to a primate like me and so this classic social psychology experiment you'll get people gathered around trying to figure out what the hell it is that you're pointing your eyes at right because that0:51:28indicates intense interest interest in something valuable that I might be able to share partake in if I can figure out what it is that you're up to and so all your ancestors who didn't have nicely defined eyes they all got killed or they0:51:40didn't mate and that's why you have these beautiful white eyes with this like colorful iris in the middle it's so that people can tell what the hell you're up to and they're more likely to cooperate with0:51:50you more likely to mate with you and less likely to kill you which is you know probably a good thing all things considered and so you know if you look at the same thing that someone else is looking at you're imitating them and one0:52:03of the things that's interesting is that if you're looking at the same thing that someone else is looking at and you would have at the same value structure then your emotional responses are going to be very much akin to one another and you0:52:14can tell that when you go to a movie and you watch the hero and you embody the hero while you're doing so and the emotions that you produce inside of you by imitating the hero on the screen enable you to figure out what the hero0:52:26is going through and you can learn from that and so that's a very complex form of imitation and we do that when we tell stories or we watch stories and those stories are really complicated because as we already outline they're not just0:52:38factual representations of someone's action during a day their representations of the important things that the person did the meaningful things and so when you go see a movie all you're doing is watching meaningful0:52:50things if the movies any good and you know that because well if the movie isn't meaningful well then you leave your board right it's and the fact that0:53:02it's meaningful is what keeps you in the seat and you don't necessarily know why in fact you often have no idea why it's meaningful it's like watching Pinocchio rescue is farther from a whale it's like what the0:53:13hell you know how I is that meaningful well you don't know but it is so moral concerns well we already talked about Piaget is concerned about morality oh0:53:23boy this is really not good0:53:40okay here's a proposition constructivist proposition knowledge does not begin in the eye by by which he means they're kind of two ways of looking at the world0:53:50there's more but we'll start with that one is is that all of your knowledge comes from outside sense data okay and now that's kind of a behaviorist claim0:54:00and before that it's a it's an empiricist claim and then the other ideas no that can't be right because you have internal structures that enable you0:54:09to look at the world and interpret it and so and and some of those might be implicit axiomatic like the fact that you have two eyes and you look at the outward into the world and that you can hear and that you can touch it's like0:54:21the fact of those senses isn't dependent on the empirical reality for those senses to manifest themselves they're already built into you and people like Kant for example made the proposition that we had a priori knowledge0:54:33structures and that we use them to interpret the world and so it's different than him it's different than empiricism and so what Piaget is saying well it's neither of those are right exactly it's not like0:54:44you will learn everything from the world through your senses and it's not as if you project everything onto the world as interpretation it's something in-between0:54:53and it's a dynamic it's a dynamic and so and it's like bootstrapping that's the right way to think about it you know when your computer boots up that means bootstrapping its off and then a bunch of simple0:55:04processes occur and then out of those simple processes some more complex processes emerge and then out of those some more complex processes emerge and all of a sudden your computer is there well that's kind of what Piaget thinks0:55:15happens to you you bootstrap yourself and so you have got a couple of reflexes to begin with like the sucking reflex for example and you've got some proclivities like maybe you can sort of flip your hand or or you develop that0:55:27and you have reflexes so you know if you blow on a baby for example a baby you'll go like this it's built into it it's like an it's a it's a startle reflex0:55:37essentially so that startle reflex is there right from the beginning so whole body reflex and you know if you stroke the bottom of their feet their feet will sort of curl up and if you put your finger in their hands even a newborn if0:55:48you put your finger in their hands you can lift them right up and it's sort of well clinging ape you know because chimpanzee infants0:55:57cling to their mother for like five years and so without reflux is still there so the kid comes into the world born with these simplistic low resolution procedures that enable it to get a foothold on the world and then out0:56:10of that the child emerges and that's so the constructivist idea is that well it isn't like you have your heads full of fully developed axiomatic structures and0:56:20it isn't that you get all your knowledge from the world it's that you have a bit of structure there to begin with that gives you a toehold on the world and then you act in the world and as you act you generate information and out of that0:56:33information you make the structures inside of you and you make the world that's a constructivist idea is that you take whatever's there this tremendous0:56:42complexity and you sort it into you and the world and so and so that that goes back to that William James idea about that initial chaos and it's a hard0:56:52conflict it's a hard hard concept to grasp because that isn't really how we think you know we think that there's an objective world and there's a subjective world and that the objective world is just there and the subjective world is0:57:04maybe a subset of that but that is not piagetian presupposition it's not a presupposition of phenomenologist sin general who we'll talk about later0:57:13but so here's one example of how to think about this in a sense it's like you know you think as Piaget said you kind of think that your representations of the world are fixed so we'll go back to the you're in a long-term0:57:24relationship and the person betrays you a scenario right so you've been with this person 10 years you assume fidelity and faithfulness and honesty and all of0:57:34that you you weave a shared narrative you both inhabit that it structures your existence and regulates your emotion then you find out that the person has0:57:43not only betrayed you once but multiple times it's like okay what you thought isn't what happened but here's the weird thing you see because you interpreted0:57:53the world obviously within the confines of that relationship and you hadn't you know obviously you had an interpretation but there was also a world that's the0:58:03world you thought you lived in it's like those were facts well all of a sudden those aren't facts they're not at all facts and so what happens that's that0:58:12descent into the underworld it's like all of a sudden what happens is that past that you thought was fixed now becomes this weird mixture of fantasy0:58:21because you're wondering what what what what is it that happened then and you're gonna run through all sorts of fantasies some of them are gonna be really dark0:58:30you know really dark about what happened in the state of the world and all that and those are unconscious fantasies and that's mingled inextricably with the world right because you don't know the facts anymore which kind of suggests0:58:42that maybe you never did know them and that's pretty strange thing because you know you're operating as if you've got this factual representation of the world but it can be upended like that and so that makes you think well what about0:58:53these facts like they're kind of they're kind of hard to get a handle on you know and you see this a lot in court room in courtroom situations because of course0:59:03what the court decides is what happened and the answer is we don't exactly know because you can keep making the context of interpretation wider and wider so you0:59:14know maybe you bring your partner to court because they've betrayed you let's say and you're trying to get a divorce settlement predicated on that but then they tell a bunch of stories about how you were just as miserable as you could0:59:24possibly be and that anybody with any sense would have betrayed you and never told you about it because you know that's just what a normal sensible person would do and so then the question is well were you actually betrayed and0:59:36if you were well who was it that betrayed you was that your partner was it you or is it your bloody mother or your father who taught you act that way or who didn't teach you it's like it's a hell of a thing because you can just0:59:47keep altering the interpretive context and within it the facts shift around and then you might say well they're not facts it's like yeah yeah you can say0:59:56that but it's it's more complicated than that by a large margin anyways so PJ's notion is essentially that well this is how I interpret it1:00:08this is sort of this is my thinking in some sense but I'm offering it to you as a scheme for helping you understand Piaget it's like junior Rome Bruner1:00:17famous famous cognitive psychologist said we seem to have no other way of describing live time SEP except in the form of a narrative and a narrative1:00:27as far as I could tell I think this is the same thing as one of PS J's knowledge representations as far as I can tell there's a representation of you1:00:36and there's a representation of the future and there's behaviors that you use to transform one into the other and so when Piaget talks about so this is1:00:45kind of where the mind meets the body that that's how it looks to me it's like you have a conception of you and you have something you're aiming at you want to have happen those are both representations but when1:00:56you act in the world those aren't representations anymore those are actually actions and some of mine transforms into body when you act out your notion and that's that's sort of how the mind is linked to the body as1:01:07far as I can tell and so what Piaget says is that the behaviors are built before the representation and so we're going to take a look at that so here's1:01:18here's a Piaget a notion of assimilation and accommodation whereas other animals cannot alter themselves except by changing their species1:01:27so that's through Darwinian means right so what happens is a bear is a kind of solution to a set of problems and they're the problems that the bear's environment presents and the bear is just a bear so it's sort of like bears1:01:38were ten thousand years ago and the only way the bear can solve a new problem basically is by generating new random bears which is what it does wouldn't reproduce us and hoping that one of those more random bears is a better fit1:01:49for whatever random change might occur in the environment that's the whole Darwinian issue right you can't predict which way the environment is going to go and so what you do is you take your structure and you vary it and you throw1:02:01those out into the world and some animals do that expensively so they have infants that they have to program to that specific environment but it takes a1:02:10lot of investment and some creatures do that cheaply like mosquitoes it's like they don't care for their kids but they have a million of them so like who cares if nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred ninety eight die there's1:02:21still twice as many of you as there were so those are two different reproductive strategies and you could think about all those mosquito offspring as new mosquito1:02:30ideas in embodied form and most of them are bad ideas and so the environment just wipes them out Opia Jays point is we do the same thing with our cognitive structures and that's the thing that's so interesting about1:02:40people in some sense that we've internalized the Darwinian problem and so when you think about the future what you're doing is generating a multiplicity of potential environments and then you're generating a sequence of1:02:53avatars of yourself to live in those fictional futures and then you watch what happens as that Avatar lives in each of those those fictional futures1:03:02and if the Avatar fails you don't act that out it's bloody brilliant it's brilliant that's what our brain does it's like it hypothesizes potential futures it runs simulations and it kills them and that1:03:15can be really painful but it beats the hell out of dying yourself or maybe sometimes you won't think so because it really can be painful but it's it's it's something that as far as we know only human beings can really do right we1:03:26invent possible futures and invent possible future selves and kill them off in our imagination and that's what you're doing in an argument that's what an argument is it's like well here's an avatar a representational avatar you1:03:39know that's based on certain axioms and all articulated and you articulate yours and we'll have them have a fight in which everyone survives we'll accept as true and we'll move forward and act that out and you know arguments can be pretty1:03:51damn intense but hypothetically they're not as intense as acting out a stupid idea that's the thing right better to have some conflict and reach resolution1:04:01in an abstract sense than to embody your stupidity and die and so you know it's sort of a trade-off between anxiety and and an annihilation or pain1:04:27whereas other animals cannot alter themselves except by changing your species man can transform himself by transforming the world and construct himself by constructing structures and these structures are his own they're not1:04:37eternally predestined either from within or from without also Piaget you know he's well he's a constructivist he believes that there's something that1:04:46your biology brings to the table and and and sets up the parameters let's say within which you can play games but within those parameters there's a very wide range of games that you could play and so it's not a biological determinism1:04:58even though it's a biological framing and you can think about it like a chess game you know let's let's assume that the rules of chess are biologically determined just for the sake of argument you can still play a near infinite1:05:09number of chess games and so it's the same with you you come into the world with a set of built-in axioms that's sort of your body and your nervous system but you can play a very large number of games within that set of1:05:20frames and one of the things that's very interesting about that something that's very mysterious to me is this is a game that I played before with students so1:05:29I'm gonna play it with you if you don't mind so we're gonna play a game you ready okay you move first right exactly you don't know what to do right and that's well that's so interesting because I basically made the1:05:40presupposition that you could do anything you're completely free and what do you do you throw up your hands it's like you don't know what to do I'm so free it's like free to do what well that's not freedom it's it's just1:05:52nothing but if I said well look what we're gonna do instead is when I move my arm right you're gonna move your arm right so let's do that okay so I'm gonna go like that you're gonna good and then I'll go like that and then we'll have a1:06:04little dance yeah yeah so you can play a game like that with it with a kid instantly and they like that they've got that man and so I've got so I've got1:06:14some pictures of that I'll show you that in a bit but even a newborn baby you stick out your tongue they can stick their tongue out back and now do you think about that that's just absolutely mind-boggling that they can do that and1:06:25they really can they really do seem to be able to do that right at the moment of birth and so you know you hear babies have no theory of mind it's like ah yeah1:06:34no they can imitate that's pretty bloody amazing man like you haven't seen robot that can do that yet although there are robots now that you can teach by moving1:06:43their their arms you move their arms and then they'll do it and so you can actually program them by moving them and then they'll just repeat it and so they're getting damn close to imitation they're really getting close and then1:06:55look the hell out man because they're gonna be imitating each other as well as us and they're gonna do it so fast you just won't be able to believe it so1:07:04that's coming the organism adapts itself by but materially constructing new forms to fit themselves into those of the universe where as intelligence extends this creation by constructing mental structures which can be applied to those1:07:16of the environment that's that there are winny an idea that I just mentioned you know the guys that are building the autonomous cars like they don't think they're building on Thomas cars they know perfectly well what they're doing1:07:26they're building fleets of mutually intercommunicating autonomous robots and each of them will to be able to teach the other because their nervous system will be the same and when there's ten million of them when one of them learned1:07:36something all ten million of them will learn it at the same time so they're not gonna have to be very bright before they're very very very smart because us you know we'll learn something you have to imitate it's like god that's hard or1:07:48I have to explain it to you and you have to understand it and then you have to act it out we're not connected wirelessly with the same platform but robots they are and so once those things get a little bit smart they're not going1:07:59to stop at a little bit smart for very long they're gonna be unbelievably smart like overnight so and they're imitating the hell out of us right now too because1:08:08we're teaching them how to understand us every second of every day the net is learning what we're like it's watching us it's communicating with us it's imitating us and it's gonna know it already knows in some ways more about us1:08:20than we know about ourselves you know there's lots of reports already of people getting pregnancy ads or ads for infants sometimes before they know1:08:30they're pregnant but often before they've told their families and the way that that happens is the net is watching what they're looking at and inferring with its artificial intelligence and so maybe you're pregnant that's just1:08:41tilting you a little bit right to interest in things that you might not otherwise be interested in the net tracks that then it tells you what you're at what you're after it does that by offering an advertisement so it's1:08:51reading your unconscious mind so well so that's what's happening so all right so what's the motive for development dis equilibria1:09:03that's a Piaget lien term well this is a life is suffering idea it's like why learn something cuz you're wrong who cares it makes you suffer you care so1:09:13you know if you run out a little scheme in the world a little action pattern you don't get what you want if you're especially if you're two years old you burst into tears and cry and why is that it's because you don't know what you1:09:25don't know where you are and you don't know what you're doing it's like time for some negative emotion it indicates that you're wrong and that's terrible in some sense because it all it almost always means that to learn1:09:36requires pain now I don't believe that exactly because people are curious you know and to go out and be curious and to learn new things can be very exciting1:09:48and so what it seems to be is that there's there's a rate of learning that's too fast and that hurts you that's what makes you cry but if you get1:09:58the rate just right you're just opening up enough novelty so that you can benefit from the possibilities that gives you a dopamine kick fundamentally1:10:07you can benefit from the possibilities without being overwhelmed by the by the unexpected element of it and you can tell when that's happening and this is one of the coolest things as far as I'm concerned this is and I learned this1:10:17partly from Piaget it's like you know in order to withstand suffering let's say your life has to have some meaning okay well that that means a bunch of things1:10:26it means that part of the way that you overcome suffering is by making the suffering into something meaningful and I don't mean that metaphysically I mean it technically you made a mistake it causes you suffering you learn something1:10:38about it you don't make that mistake again it's real adaptation it's not it's not defense against death anxiety or something like that it's real adaptation but more importantly the reality that1:10:50you learn through pain is the oldest reality will say it's it's really old it's as old as nervous systems and so you've adapted so that you've learned to1:11:00transform your knowledge structures in a way that will minimize your potential exposure to future pain they at a rate you can tolerate or maybe1:11:09even enjoy and so what's happening is you don't actually like being static it bores you but you don't like being thrown into chaos it's like no a little1:11:19bit of that's fine what you want is you want to be opening up your knowledge structures on the periphery to transformation voluntary transformation that's voluntary exploration and letting those things manifest a little bit of1:11:31interesting chaos and so you have a little bit you put a little feeler out there that you're willing to let die and it comes apart and you gather a bit of information it comes back together stronger and you do that all the time if1:11:42you're if you're smart and you're looking for new information foraging for new information and that means you keep taking little bits of yourself apart and reconstructing them and overtime that keeps you alive and active you know part1:11:55of the reason you're alive is because you're dying all the time right all the cells in your body like if they don't die you get cancer and that that's it you're done you're a very very tight balance between death and life at every1:12:07every single level including the cognitive level and it's not that fun to learn something because you have to kill something you already know in order to learn it that's another piece yet in observation because you're always1:12:17interpreting something within a structure and if that interpretation is wrong even in a microwave you have to kill that structure and it's a biological structure it actually hurts to kill it but maybe you can generate1:12:29something new in its stead and if you get the dynamic right let the rate right then you find that exhilarating not painful and that's and that's well you1:12:39can tell when you're doing that as far as I can tell you can tell when you're doing that because you're engaged in the world in a meaningful way and what your nervous system is doing is signaling to you that you're not in a static place1:12:51that's death you're not in a chaotic place that's death your balance between the static and the chaotic such that the static structures are transforming at1:13:00exactly the right rate to keep you on top of the environmental transformations and so you're surfing you know in Hawaii the surfers surfing was sacred well1:13:10that's why it's like do you can you tell someone how to surf well you can't because they have to go out there and dynamically interact with the wave but they can stay on top of the wave and that's1:13:20what you have to do and if you're staying on top of the wave properly then it's exhilarating and that's the kind of meaning that that it rejuvenates you1:13:29literally it makes you able to tolerate the suffering in life and it's not metaphysical precisely it's because that is what you're doing at that moment you're you're overcoming your limitations and of course that's what1:13:41you have to do in order to to know and to learn because you want to be doing both of those things at the same time that's what you do when you play a game properly your parents say it doesn't matter whether you win or lose this is a1:13:52PSAT and observation it's how you play the game what does that mean well it means that you should play the game in a manner that increases the probability1:14:01that you're going to be invited to play many games in the future perfect so you master the skills of the game but at the same time you master a set of meta skills which is the skills that remain constant across transforming sets of1:14:13games and that's what it means to play fair that's a bloody basis of morality as far as Piaget was concerned it's so damn smart you know because you think1:14:23all interactions have this game-like quality they're sort of bounded and but there are commonalities across all the games and you want to extract out the1:14:33commonalities and you want to learn to inhabit the universe that's made out of the commonalities between games and that's what it means to be a good person roughly speaking you know it varies to some degree from culture to culture1:14:44obviously because each culture is a game unto itself but there's something that transcends that that's the nature of games across game contexts and you know1:14:55that you know that because you can tell the difference between a game and and something that isn't a game instantly everyone knows and it's not like there's only one kind of game there's hockey say and there's there's a world of warcraft1:15:09I know it's way out of date but so am I so it's not surprising so but the fact that those things are very very different in many many ways doesn't stop1:15:18you from identifying the underlying commonalities you know they're games and they're they're like stories in a sense so and that's a piagetian that's a1:15:27piagetian observation very very smart so why do you develop well it's because1:15:36your your previous idea their your previous frame micro frame let's say doesn't fit the circumstance and so something happens it you go like this1:15:45what's up well the world isn't what you thought and there's something wrong with your knowledge structure this is partly what's makes Piaget a pragmatist you see1:15:54the pragmatist American school of philosophy William James and his followers they knew that we had bounded knowledge we don't have infinite knowledge and so they thought well that means we can't really be right about1:16:04anything because we're definitely wrong and so how is it that you can operate in the world given that you're always wrong and the answer is you you set up a1:16:15procedure that has rules for what constitutes true within the procedure itself so you play a game and at the same time you set up the rules so you1:16:24might say well is this joke funny and then the answer is well do people laugh now when I tell the joke do they laugh and if the answer is yes then it's funny1:16:34enough you've you've you've taken a particular definition of funny you've transformed it into a local phenomena and if your behavior matches the1:16:45prediction in that local area you say well that's true enough is it like transcendently funny well maybe you'd have to tell it to 200 different groups of people to figure that out but mostly it's it's funny enough so that when I1:16:57predicted what would happen when I told the joke that's what happened and you don't predict it by the way you desire it it's not the same thing because prediction has no motivation in it but desire does and we're always motivated1:17:08always always motivated so well here's a way of thinking about the Piaget teen system so two-year-olds they're very chaotic and they bounce between one1:17:22highly motivated emotional state to another and so the first thing that the two-year-old has to do is get his or her act together more or less inside and so1:17:34you know two-year-olds still have tantrums and they still cry a lot and and they still run around like mad being joyful crazily which you have to train out of them right away because it's nothing but disruptive and it's one of1:17:43the most painful things about being a parent like 90% of the time you're going stop having fun stop having fun you know and then you turn into a teenager and your parents get what they ask for and so but1:17:57because positive emotion is so impulsive and so chaotic it's really hard to manifest itself it's manifested within it within a predictable environment and1:18:06so you're dampening down your child's enthusiasm non-stop it's but it has to be regulated because happiness is impulsive and chaotic and people don't like to think that because they think well we should be happy it's like Mannix1:18:18are happy but they're maniacs that's where the word comes from like they're just you it's not good they're too happy way too happy like someone who's way too1:18:30stoned on math or on cocaine and I mean that technically because it's it's they're very similar they're very similar biochemical states so and and1:18:39cocaine produces happiness pretty much in its pure form so does meth very rapidly and so it's just not good you know you lose judgment1:18:49you happy people you don't have good judgment they're too happy maybe they get dopey it's like you know it's like irrational stock market bubbles oh boy1:18:58it's always going to go up it's like no no it's not always going to go up but that's what you think when you're happy anyways the two-year-old has to get all1:19:09these motivational systems sort of hammered into one thing internally now in some sense from the PIA jetty in perspective that happens within the child he thinks of the child is egocentric but and that that development1:19:21takes place internally and then it's not till a child's let's say about three that it can learn to bring its controlled unity into a unity with another controlled unity and make a game that happens around three and so what1:19:35happens is that instead of the child only pursuing his or her goals although modulated by the social environment the child is able to communicate with another child and establish a shared goal and that's what1:19:46happens when they play and so obviously you play Monopoly that's what you're doing but when you play peekaboo you're doing the same thing it's like with your parent you're actually playing with object permanence dad's go on1:19:58oh look dad's here haha he's there dad's gone that's here yeah it's gone dad's here like a kid man you can do that for like three hours they never get tired of it because every time you reappear it's an1:20:10it's a miracle unis watch babies it's so funny like you go like this and they go then you talk back holding like they're so happy they're just overjoyed and then1:20:20you take yourself away and they're like what's going on what's going on bang you reappear they don't have a real memory you know it's like reality is manifesting itself in all its freshness moment by moment and and they can't1:20:33remember there are neurological conditions that do that so sometimes and there are people who that this has happened to so they get hippocampal damage and so they can't move short-term information into long-term1:20:43storage and there's this one guy it's very interesting case he was a concert pianist and he had hell of a neurological injury and he could still1:20:52play the piano he couldn't remember eight he couldn't he had amnesia and he couldn't move information from short-term storage into long-term storage so as far as he was concerned it was it was always like ten days before1:21:04he had his accident he never got passed out he was stuck in that moment and then but he could still play the piano and but was so interesting you watch him there were films of him before he sat down to play the piano he'd have like a1:21:14seizure and then he could play the piano procedural memory that was intact and then at the end he'd kind of have a little seizure and then he'd go back to being who he was but he had these notebooks and all he did was write in1:21:26them over and over the same thing it's as if I have never seen this before it's as if I've never seen this before it's as if I've never seen this before1:21:35so he's in this ecstatic state where everything was novel and new and pure and paradisal but there was no continuity and so when his wife would come to visit him he would just be overwhelmed to see her overwhelmed every1:21:47time and even if she just left the room and came back in it was exactly the same thing it's just like the kid it's like no object permanence and every time the face appears it's it's a staggering and you can see that in the reflexes of the1:21:59child and that's that's without object permanence and so that's what Piaget was talking about with regards to object permanence it's very very cool so1:22:09anyways the two-year-olds a collection of these sort of random motivations more or less gets his or her act together by about three if they're being socialized properly and that means that the parents are doing1:22:20their best to make the child acceptable to other children that's your damn job as a parent you have to understand that because if your child isn't acceptable1:22:30to other children they won't play with your child and then your child will be lonesome and isolated and awkward and they will never recover because if the1:22:39kid doesn't get that right between two and four it's over they're never gonna learn it the other kids accelerate forward that kids left behind and it's not a good life for that kid they don't learn how to play with1:22:50others and then they're done and there's a huge literature on trying to rectify antisocial children say from the age of four on it's like no you can't and you1:23:00can go ahead and read three four hundred papers on rectification of antisocial behavior and figure it out for yourself but I did that for about five years and it was a while ago but I know the literature hasn't changed so you got to1:23:13get it right between that period you got to get the kid together enough so they can control themselves well enough so that they can adopt a mutual frame of reference with a peer so that they can start using that to scaffold their1:23:25development further and become more and more sophisticated in social interactions and that's what you're you're acting as a proxy for the social environment as a parent that's what you're doing now a gentle proxy an1:23:36informative proxy maybe even a merciful proxy but a proxy nonetheless because they're not going to be around you forever they're gonna be out there among1:23:45people who don't really care about them and if they don't have something to bring to the table at least the ability to cooperate they're gonna be lonesome and isolated and that's not going to be good well here's an here's an here's an1:23:57idea so as you're moving from what is to what should be you're in this little frame of reference this little game this little Piaget alien game sometimes you get what you want or predict that's on the left-hand side that makes you happy1:24:10and it validates your frame so if the frame keeps working across different circumstances you get a reward from that the reward produces a dopaminergic kick1:24:19that makes you feel good but the dopamine also enhances the strength of the circuitry that underlies that particular representation that's what reinforcement is it's different than reward reward is1:24:30what you feel let's say roughly speaking reinforcement is the effect of the dopamine bathing the neurological tissues to make it stronger and grow and1:24:39so if the neurological tissue underlies a sequence of actions that produces a desired outcome there's a biochemical kick that strengthens the nervous structures that were activated just before the good thing happens and so1:24:51that's how something you know that's valuable gets instantiated and if it fails instead you get punished pain anxiety and that that starts to1:25:00extinguish that circuitry and we don't know how that works exactly we don't know exactly if those circuits then start to die because they can degenerate1:25:09across time or if what happens is you build other circuits that inhibit them so it's like you've got this knowledge structure it's built into you and once it's there there's not really much getting rid of it but you can build1:25:19another one that tells it to shut up that's sort of what happens when you're addicted to drugs so cocaine bathes the tissue that was active just before you took the cocaine with dopamine and so that gets stronger1:25:30and stronger and stronger and stronger and so you're basically building a cocaine seeking monster in your head and that's all it wants and it has rationalizations and it has emotions and it has motivations and it's alive but it1:25:43wants one thing and the problem is once you build that thing especially if you nail it a couple of hundred times with the powerful dopaminergic agonist like cocaine that thing is one vicious monster and it's alive and it's in there1:25:55and you can't get it to go away the only thing you can do is build another structure to shut it up but the problem is is that as soon as you get stressed it interferes with that new structure and the old thing comes popping back up1:26:07not good I wouldn't recommend it and the faster acting those dopaminergic agonists are cocaine is a good example but so is math the faster they hit you1:26:19which is often why people inject them instead of snorting them say the faster that transformation from steady state to dopaminergic path the bigger the kick is1:26:28and so you know so speed of introduction of the substance matters which is why you drink shots instead of drinking say wine or beer because alcohol has you1:26:37know very similar very similar effects so all right so if you get what you want well then you feel good but not only do1:26:52you feel good but the frame itself is validated and if you don't get what you want well then not only do you not get what you want but the frame itself starts to come apart at the seams and the question part is how far should the1:27:03frame come apart how deeply should you unlearn something when you make a mistake god it's a very very very hard problem and I'll show you a partial1:27:12solution to it this very useful thing and this is a pia jetty an idea - let's see yeah I'm gonna go to this for a minute so so I'm gonna decompose1:27:24something for you and and this is partly to give you an introduction to the way behaviorists think but it's also to help unpack how the pia jetty in oceans work1:27:33and so from a piagetian perspective high-order abstractions are actually made of what's common among actions and perceptions so and those things are1:27:42unified in some sense so an abstraction isn't what's common across sets of objects it's more like what's common across sets of perceptions and actions and so that's a hard thing to understand but but this will help you understand1:27:54okay so let's say you want to be a good person it's kind of abstraction all right and then you think well what does it mean to be a good person it's a box it's an empty box no it's a box and it says1:28:06good person on outside but it's full of things it might even be full of transforming things so but you know what it means you say good person you kind of know and you kind of know but you know if we started talking about details we1:28:17might start to argue but it's like pornography you know what when you see it okay so what does it mean to be a good person well we could decompose it we could say well if you're one way of being a good person is to be a good1:28:28parent and you basically say that being a good parent is a subset of being a good person right because person is bigger than parent and maybe it'd be to1:28:37be a good employee and to be a good sister and to be a good you know to be to be a good good partner sort of on the same level of abstraction so you1:28:46decompose good person into your major functional roles let's say and you're good at all of them whatever that means well let's say if you're a good parent1:28:55well you have to have a good job because otherwise you starve and so do your children so at least you have to financially provide in some manner that's a subset of being a good parent it's not the only subset and then to be1:29:06a good to have a good be a good parent you also have to take care of your family and so you could decompose that into play with baby or complete meal you1:29:16might say well if take care of family you can either order a meal or you can cook one it's like good for you and so then you're cooking a meal and you think1:29:25well what do you decompose that into well now you're starting to get to the micro level say because let's say you're making broccoli so you take the broccoli out of the fridge and you put it on the cutting board that's actually action1:29:38that's not abstraction it's actually something you're doing with your body so the abstraction grounds itself out in micro activity actual action that's the connection between the mind and the body and so you're cutting broccoli right but1:29:51that's not abstraction and so if you take apart these higher-order moral abstractions what happens is you decompose them into action perception sequences and they're embodied now Piaget is basic claim is you build the1:30:03dam abstractions from the bottom up that's his that's the fundamental Pia jetty and claim it so the kid comes into the world with some reflexes and starts building a body of embodied knowledge out of that interaction with other1:30:16people and then they start playing games and that abstracts but but they move from the bottom of the hierarchy which is actual micro actions up to the top of1:30:25the abstraction world and so it's this is how you boot yourself up little bitty stories what little bitty stories at the bottom cut broccoli you know and then1:30:36cut corn here set table do dishes complete meal take care of your family be a good parent be a good person and you know one of the propositions that I1:30:46am offering you in this class is that to be a good person you're actually not stuck in one of these to be a good person means that you're the thing that transforms these things continually and so that's what's at the top of the1:30:56hierarchy and that's basically the hero story which is you're in a state of being and it normally occurs you allow it to demolish you and then you rebuild1:31:05and that's at the highest end of the moral hierarchy and that's also a sense reappears Yeti and claim so so let's think about emotional regulation because1:31:14this is a really good schema for understanding emotional regulation how upset should you get and how do you calculate it because if you make a mistake you wake up in the morning in your side hurts okay you it's the first1:31:26symptom of pancreatic cancer you're dead in six months 100% chats or you know you pulled a muscle well which is it you might say1:31:35well the chances of the pancreatic cancer or low but they're not zero and like infinite times any proportion is a very large number so you might be1:31:44thinking why don't you just have a screaming fit any time ever any little thing happens to you which is exactly what happens by the way if you're two years old right that is what you do so and it's because you don't know you1:31:56don't know like things fell apart what does that mean could be anything well that's no good well so let's say you're arguing with your with your partner you1:32:05know and they I don't know if they make a lousy meal or maybe no meals and you're kind of sick of it you know and so you say you're a bad person and1:32:15what's the evidence not only are you a bad person but you've always been a bad person and the probability that you're going to improve in the future looks to me to be zero it's like what's the person supposed to do punch you right1:32:28really because there's no room in there for any discussion you're done it's like you're horrible and you don't change and you've always been horrible and you've1:32:39never changed and you know inferring from that into the future you're gonna stay horrible and you're not going to change well any argument can go there immediately it's a really bad idea and it happens all the time and1:32:51this is why people can't have a civil discussion you know they can't say here's an example so you've got your four-year-old you want them to clean up1:33:02their room and so it's full of toys let's say they're three and a half you look at it you say look you know clean clean this up clean up your room so you1:33:13shut the door and you go away and you magically hope that when you come back the room will be clean but of course the child has no idea in all likelihood at that age or maybe it's two and a half something like that1:33:22they know what clean up a room means that's like way up here man it's like you told your child there's mass every be a good person you know and then you come back in half an hour and they're no better a1:33:32person than they were and you get upset it's like you can't do that you have to say you see that teddy bear and you know that that kid knows how to see a teddy1:33:43bear and they know how to pick it up because you've watched them see a teddy bear and pick it up and you know that the child knows the name of the teddy bear it's teddy bear and so you point to the teddy bear and you say do you see1:33:54that teddy bear and they go yes and you say that's good pat pat and they get a little kick of dopamine so that's happy day for the kid and then they smile at you so you feel pretty good about that too and then you1:34:04say you think you could pick up that teddy bear and they say yeah and so they go over there not every kid by the way but they go over there and they pick up the teddy bear and it's like it's a good day for both of you and then you say you1:34:15see that little space on the shelf because you know they know what a shelf is and you know they know what a space is and you say take that teddy bear and put it in the shelf and then go over there and they put it in the shelf and1:34:25then they look at you and you're smiling and so the probability that they'll do that again is now increased because but watching you smile produces a dopaminergic kick and you've just strengthened those circuits so I would1:34:36highly recommend that you do that with your children and with your partners right you watch them like like a sneaky person and every time they do something1:34:46that you actually want them to do you notice and you give them a little pat on the head yeah and then they like you that's cool but if they don't if you don't want them to like you because you hate them and then you won't do that but1:34:58and you think well I don't hate them it's like oh yes you do you just think about the last month man there's been twenty times you absolutely hated them and maybe that's the predominant emotion and that's not so good over time so when1:35:09they do something good if you really want to screw things up watch like a hawk and wait till they do something good and then punish them that's really fun that is that really messes with them and people do that all the time so if1:35:21you really want to mock things up you can even do it more subtly you can wait till they do something good especially if they've never done it before and they're just kind of tentatively trying it and then you can ignore them that's a1:35:32really good what that's even better than punishing them because at least when you punish you're paying attention if you ignore them it's like that's that's just perfect also takes hardly any effort on1:35:43your part so that's an additional plus so anyways so if you're having a discussion with someone it's like what you're doing with this kid you know it's like you say maybe you're negotiating about meals you don't start with you're1:35:55a bad person let's way the hell up here you know you blow the whole person schema right out from underneath them and you might as well get divorced which is what will happen if you keep doing that soon you'll roll it your eyes at1:36:06each other that means you're getting divorced by the way so if you ever watch it he does I'm serious there's good empirical data on that once you're at the eye-rolling stage there's no going back so you should intervene way before1:36:17that it's discussed that AI role once you've hit disease-carrying rodent status in your mates eyes there's no coming back so anyways so what you do if1:36:30you want to have a conversation with someone that's a corrective conversation is you sort of take a piagetian attitude and the attitude is go to the highest1:36:41level of resolution that you can manage so let's say and that's what you're doing with the kid it's like clean up your room be a good person it's like no they don't know any about anything about that but they do1:36:51know how to pick up a teddy bear and then maybe you think cleaning up your room is a hundred things like that and so you have to teach the child each one of those hundred things and then they learn this is the scheme they learn1:37:03what's the same across all of those different actions that's clean right pick up the teddy bear put away the Legos make your bed what those have1:37:12nothing in common really like the motor outputs completely different but they fall under the heading of clean but unless you fill the heading of clean with all the subordinate categories of the action perception sequences that1:37:24make up clean kid can't do it and so partly what you're doing by attending to your child constantly is noticing where they are in the construction of this1:37:33hierarchy and they start way down here right and so that's why you play peekaboo for example it's like they can do that and you can you know you interact with them because you can watch you do a little something and if they1:37:44respond you got some sense that you're you're at the same level and kids and playgrounds do that with each other right away so if you if you see two three-year-olds together say they're fairly1:37:53sophisticated for three-year-olds what they'll do is they'll start playing a little primitive game with each other like door like a dog you know what a dog does what it wants to play it kind of goes like that and and that's what kids1:38:03do and that's what adults do too it's a plague it's play it if it tastes like I'm ready but you're smiling it's not like I'm ready it's and so you can tell the difference between a play fight and play1:38:14and kids can too so it's an invitation to play and so if you're interacting with your little kid they got that play circuit man that thing's in there like when they're from birth I think because you can play with a kid right from birth1:38:26at least something like peekaboo and so you're on the same wavelength fundamentally and then you interact with them and you see if they're following what you're doing is what I'm doing when I'm lecturing more or less I'm watching1:38:37you guys and seeing if we're more or less in the same shared space you know and we want the space to be expanding because if it's just staying the same1:38:48well you might as well play whatever you play on your computer it has to be expanding at the same time that's optimal and so when you're playing with1:38:57your kid you put them on that developmental edge where they're undoing and then rebuilding their little skills you know you can do that like I had this1:39:06memory from when I was a little kid a while back and I remembered I used to go over to these peoples house with my father and my mom and it was way up in1:39:15northern Alberta and these people were Russian immigrants as children of Russian immigrants and they had a farmhouse way way out in the country way out by the way there where the railroad actually ended if you walk north from1:39:26there you'd walk until you hit like southern Europe without fun running into another person it was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and anyways they had a nice house it's like a warm house you know they had three kids and1:39:38they were way older than me but it was a real fun comfortable place to go and I used to sit in the living room with my father and his friend whose name was Nick and Nick was a really playful guy I really liked him he was like my1:39:50surrogate grandfather and I used to I don't think I was more than about three I'd sit there and I try to hit his foot with my fist and he would be talking to1:39:59my dad you know and my dad would say Jordan don't bother Nick and Nick would say well he's not really bothering me and his dad was checking it out to see if I was anoint were poor if I was a fun kid1:40:08you know cuz it's a fine line and so I tried to hit his foot and he would move it and now I had this memory while back and I thought wow that was a good memory1:40:18and I thought what is going on there exactly and I realized well he's sharpening he was sharpening me up you know it's like I was aiming at something you're aiming at something if you're pointing your eyes at it you're pointing1:40:29your whole damn soul out it you're aiming at something and you're trying to get your behaviors and your conceptions in line and organized so that you can attain that aim that's what people do you know we throw rocks at things we we1:40:41fire arrows at things we shoot guns at things we aim at things our whole body is that platform for aiming and I was trying to aim at his feet and he'd move1:40:51his feet you know but he'd let me hit it what now and then and so let's say you're a rat okay because like I said it rats a good model for a person let's say1:41:00you're a little rat a juvenile male and you want to play because you want to play and you'll work to play and that's how we know you want to play if we're experimental psychologists because you're Bosch put button push like mad to1:41:12get access to an arena where you can wrestle with another little rat and so rats wrestle just like human beings and they even pin each other just like human beings and they love that and so if you put little rat a in with a little rat B1:41:25and little rat B is 10% bigger little rat B can stomp the hell out of little rat a all the time so they go out there and they have a little dominance competition and little rat B is gonna win because he's bigger so now he's1:41:38dominant rat so then they play in they wrestle and little rat a loses but and then next time they both know that little rat a is the inviter1:41:47because he's subordinate so he's the one who has to go up to the big rat and go you ready and the big rat then we'll wrestle however if you repeatedly pair1:41:56them and the big rat doesn't let the little rat win at least 30% of the time the little rat won't invite him to play anymore and that was york panksepp who1:42:06figured that out and that is mind-boggling because it tells you like the bit there's a there's an ethical basis for play that's so deep that the1:42:16damn rat and their rats not known for their sense of fair play the big rat has to let the little rat win 30% of the time or the little rat1:42:25will not play anymore and even rats know that it's it's so profound that discovery like banks have discovered the play circuit in mammals that's a big1:42:34deal that's like discovering a whole continent like that's a big deal he should have got a Nobel Prize for that and to see that that's built in that sense of fair play that's mind boggling you know cuz that's evidence for the1:42:46biological instantiation of a complex morality fair play even if you can win you shouldn't all the time well so when I'm trying to hit Nick's feet with my1:42:56hand like I'm really paying attention and he's moving it pretty well but now and then I get to nail it and I'm feeling pretty good about that you know and he makes a little bit more difficult all the time so that my aim gets better1:43:07and better and I'm building up my motor coordination I'm building up my social skills cuz I don't hit too hard and I don't cry when I miss because that just makes you annoying to play with right so I'm learning really complicated things1:43:19about how to go about finessing my aim and that's what you're doing with your kids and what are they aiming at well they aim higher and higher so when my1:43:28son was about two and a half we had him start setting the table it's you don't say you know you want to take grandma's fine china and go set the table it's like no you don't do that you say you know what a fork looks like he goes1:43:41yeah see if you wanted the forks are well that doesn't work because the Drover's way up here right so you have to hand him a fork you say look take this fork and go put it on the table he's like this high you know so he goes1:43:52over to the table and he puts the fork up here can't even see what he's doing he puts the fork up there and then you know he's reasonably happy with that and you could give him a path and then you go and give him a really sharp not no1:44:04you don't do that you don't do that you give him a spoon and you say well go put the spoon beside the fork and you don't say look you're stupid kid you got to1:44:13leave enough space between the fork and the spoon so the plate can fit there don't you know anything you're stupid it's like well that's right up here right you're a bad kid no that's bad you don't do that you go down1:44:26here and you say well good micro routine adaptation there Chum well let's try it again you know when you build that up and like men1:44:35you can't extend the kid past its point his point or her point of exhaustion because it's got to be a game and a two-year-old can probably only do that for you can watch them and some are more persistent than others but 10 minutes 151:44:48minutes you pushing your luck you can take a two-year-old to a restaurant for about 40 minutes and expect them to sit and behave but after that you know1:44:58they're the will exhausts them all right well anyways that's Piaget in his nascent form fundamentally and so if you if you remember that diagram and you think about how that would be built from the bottom up and how there would be a1:45:10stage transition every time those things are learned you kind of got the essential elements of piagetian theory so we'll see you Thursday0:00:002017 Personality 07: Carl Jung and the Lion King (Part 1)
0:00:000:00:11so I think the best way to continue to walk you through the thinkers that we're0:00:20planning to cover is to do that with examples they stick better and they're more interesting and it's very difficult to understand you outside of a narrative0:00:30context and so I'm going to walk you through the Lion King today how many of you have seen the Lion King yes so how many of you haven't right okay so0:00:40so you obviously were raised in a box somewhere out in the middle of field so anyways you know it's it's it's an amazingly popular animated movie I think0:00:50it was the most highest grossing animated movie ever made made until frozen which I actually absolutely detested but the Lion King The Lion King0:00:59is actually consciously influenced by archetypes as well as unconsciously influenced by them so it's a bit of a cheat I would say in some sense but it doesn't I don't for the purposes that we're using it for I think it's just0:01:10fine and so partly what you might think about is that it's its relationship to archetypal themes that made it so overwhelmingly popular it's same being0:01:22the case with say books and movies like Harry Potter or the entire Marvel series the Marvel series is quite interesting I know somebody who wrote for Batman and0:01:31for Wolverine I know Batman he's into Marvel comic but one of the things that he told me that was quite interesting was that once these characters take off and establish a life of their own they have a backstory and which becomes part0:01:42of the mythology that's collectively held by the readers and if you you can invent an alternative universe where you can muck about with the backstory but otherwise you better stick with it or the readers are gonna write you and tell0:01:52you that you've got the story wrong and so there's a bit of a collaboration between the writers and the readers after these things take on a life of their own and so and of course the they they tend to the the comic books in0:02:05particular tend to tend towards mythological themes very very rapidly and so anyways Carl Jung was a fascinating person I think you can read his biography autobiography / biography which is called memories0:02:18dreams and reflections which in many ways I think is an unfortunate book because it's usually the only book that people read that's that is more or less by young but and it is more popular yet popularly accessible which is probably a0:02:30good thing but it's also it's not as rigorous as his other books and so the problem with someone like Jung is you kind of have to read him as much as you0:02:40can in the original because interpreting him is not a very straightforward matter he was a very visionary person by which I mean he had an incredible visual0:02:49imagination and he used that a lot he used it in his therapy practice I believe that most of his therapy clients were high in trade openness I have a lot0:02:59of clients who are high in trade openness they kind of seek me out because I'm high and trade openness and you know they watch my videos and that sort of thing and they're interested in what I'm doing and many of them are0:03:09astute dreamers and prolific dreamers and many open people in my experience have archetypal dreams whereas people who are lower in openness they either0:03:18don't dream at all or they don't remember their dreams as much or they're not interested in them and they're not interested in the mythological underpinnings of them so I've taught psychology roughly speaking to many0:03:31different types of people including lawyers and lawyers and physicians and they tend to be higher in trade conscientiousness than in openness and they're much more interested in the practical applications of psychology and0:03:42maybe the big five theories than they are in the narrative underpinnings and you know people say that when they went to um-- they had union dreams but I don't and then when they went to Freud they had Freudian dreams and I don't0:03:53really believe that's exactly true I think it was a matter of selection bias a priori selection bias on the part of the people who were likely to go see either of those two and so but I've been struck by some clients in particular how0:04:07unbelievably continually they can generate deep archetypal dreams with a really coherent narrative structure it's really phenomenal and how revealing0:04:16those dreams our problem with archetypal dreams is that they're not really personal right so if you're looking for a personal way out of a situation an archetypal dream doesn't help you that much because it gives you the general0:04:26pattern rather than a specific solution to your problem but a good dream will do both at once anyways yung was an astute student of0:04:35Freud's I will cover Freud next although generally and in personality courses the the order is reversed Freud first menuing because of their temporal of the0:04:45temporal order of their thought but I think it's better to start with Jung because it's it's as if you Freud excavated into the basement and then Jung excavated into many many floors underneath the basement of the mind and0:04:58so from if you're transitioning from an archaic understanding of archaic modes of thinking towards Freud it's better to go through young because Jung is I think0:05:07I think Freudian theory is a subset of Jungian Theory fundamentally just like Newtonian physics is a subset of Einstein Ian's physics and I think that0:05:16Freud knew that even to some degree although he was very much opposed to any sort of religious thinking or mythological religious thinking I would say he was a real 19th century materialist and he didn't like the fact0:05:28that Jung's work started to delve into religious themes in a manner that actually in some sense validated those themes and so that's actually why they0:05:37split they split when you published a book called symbols of transformation Jung was also a deep student of Nietzsche Nietzsche wrote a book called thus spake Zarathustra which is kind of an Old Testament revelation poetry kind0:05:49of book it's a strange one and I wouldn't recommend if you want to read Nietzsche that you start with that one but most people do but you get a seminar on thus spake Zarathustra which is about I've got this wrong it's somewhere0:06:02between 700 and 1100 pages long and it only covers the first third of the book and thus spake Zarathustra is actually quite a short book and so well so you0:06:12can imagine how much you had to know about Nietzsche to derive that many words out of that few words and Nietzsche was a well an absolute absolute genius and Jung was actually trying to answer the question that0:06:25Nietzsche posed fundamentally which is why part of the reason why it's incorrect historically to consider him a Freudian he was so nietzsche basically0:06:35stated let's say explicitly that scientific empiricism / rationalist had resulted in the death of the mythological tradition of the west0:06:44roughly speaking that's Nietzsche's comment on the death of God and in that comment he also said that the fact that God was dead was going to produce tremendous idiy a tional and social historical upheavals that would result0:06:58in the deaths of millions of people that that he didn't say all that in one place it's it's spread between part of its in will to power and and I can't remember0:07:07the source of the other one some of its referenced and thus spake Zarathustra but Nietzsche believed that in order to overcome the collapse of traditional0:07:16values with the idea say of God as its cornerstone people would have to become creatures that could produce their own values as a replacement that we would0:07:26have to become capable of generating autonomous values and Jung but but that's easier said than done because trying to impose a set of values on0:07:35yourself is very difficult because you're not very cooperative and you know that if you try to get yourself to do something that you don't want to do or that's hard you just won't do it and so it's not like you can just invent your0:07:45own values and then go along with that that just doesn't work and so what Jung and the Freudians did Freud first I would say was to start looking to be looking into people's fantasies autonomous fantasies unconscious0:07:56fantasies to see if they could - and and discover that values bubbled up of their own accord into those fantasies and you can imagine for example if you've become0:08:07enamored of someone that you might start fantasizing about them and if you read off the fantasy then you can tell what you're after and what you're up to and so the motivational force composes the fantasy and Freud was more interested0:08:19not in a personal sense so in in so far as your fantasies might reveal your personal history so for example if you have a burst of negative emotion in the0:08:28clinical session there'll be a fantasy that goes along with that an association of ideas that that that kind of manifest themselves of their own accord and they're not necessarily coherent and logical they're linked by emotion that's0:08:39the free association technique in Freudian psychology and they also might manifest themselves in dreams and fantasies and so Freud started doing the analysis of these spontaneous let's call them fantasies and Jung link that more0:08:52at Freud did this first with the oedipal oedipal complex but then you linked up spontaneous fantasies and dreams with with myth mythology and fantasy across history and of course Piaget did the0:09:03same thing from a completely different standpoint so and that a lot of that's embedded in this movie so we might as well just walk through it so the first0:09:12question might be well why is a lion a king right and because it makes sense to people that a lion could be a king and of course a lion is an apex predator and so which means it's at the top of the food chain roughly speaking and it's0:09:24sort of golden like the Sun so that's also useful and you know it has that Mane that makes it look majestic and of course it's very physically powerful and it's it's and and and it's intimidating and so it's something that you run away0:09:37from as well right or you're awestruck by so the fact that you know it's like snail king just doesn't make any sense right but lion king that works and and you got to think about those things because it's not self-evident why a lion0:09:49would work as a king but uh but a snail wouldn't but it fits in with the your metaphorical understanding of the way the world works much better and so the0:09:58Lion King makes sense and well and when things like that that aren't rationally self-evident makes sense you have to ask yourself in what metaphorical context do0:10:08they make sense so you have the Lion King now the movie opens with a sunrise and the sunrise is equivalent to the dawn of consciousness so that in many archaic stories the Sun was a hero like Horus if I remember correctly was a0:10:23solar king but but Apollo in particular but Apollo Greek Greek myth the idea was that at the Sun was this was the the hero the hero who illuminated the sky in0:10:37the day and so heroism and illumination and enlightenment are all tangled together metaphorically and then at night what would happen would be that Sun would fight with the with the dragon of darkness basically or with evil all0:10:48night and then rise again victorious in the morning and so it's a death and rebirth theme and it's very very very very common mythological theme and the0:10:57reason the Sun is associated with consciousness as far as I can tell is that were not nocturnal creatures right we're awake during the day and we're very very visual half our brain is devoted to visual processing and to be0:11:08lightened and illuminated means to develop to move towards a higher state of consciousness and we naturally use light symbolism to to represent that you0:11:17know like the light bulb on the top of someone's head you know you don't say I was in darkened when you learn something new and so again that fits into this underlying metaphorical substrate that that's I think deeply biologically0:11:30grounded but but also social or socially grounded so it's a new day it's the start of a new day and a day day actually means like French your name0:11:39means day the day trek in some sense and how to comport yourself during the day is the fundamental question the day is the canonical unit of time and so you0:11:50have to know how to comport yourself during the day and part of that is a journey from consciousness into unconsciousness and that's and that return so like Apollo you you've you descend into unconsciousness and then0:12:01re-emerge and of course that's not metaphorical at all that's exactly what you do you descend into the underworld of darkness and dreams and strange things happen down there and so and then you awake if you're fortunate or0:12:12unfortunate depending on your state of mind you awake in the morning and it's a new day right and so the dream world seems to help you sort out your thoughts0:12:22by the way if you keep people awake for an extended period of time then they they they they lose their minds essentially the dream that the0:12:31unconsciousness and the dream state seem absolutely critical in the maintenance of mental health although people don't exactly understand why it looks like dreams might help you forget because forgetting is really important you just0:12:42can't really wait you just can't remember everything that happened to you gets today I'm cluttered that that you you'd fall apart and so you reduce things to the gist and when you're doing that you pack them in it's like you0:12:53compress them in some sense you pack them into a smaller space and get rid of everything that isn't relevant and the dream seems to not be part of that it also seems to be a place where you deeply encode learning that might have0:13:03been done that day which is something that Freud actually noted in his interpretation of dreams which is a great book if you're ever gonna read a book that Freud wrote the interpretation of Dreams is the proper one to read in0:13:13my estimation it's a brilliant book and it laid the groundwork for a lot of what Jung did and so anyways that's how the movie starts and the animals come out in0:13:22to the light and that's that's a metaphor for the dawning of consciousness to come out into the light where you can see and so this is a baby giraffe and babies emerge into the light roughly speaking and that's that's like0:13:33I said that that's a representation of the emergence or expansion of consciousness and so this is how the movie starts it starts a very expansive music as well celebratory music and that's to indicate0:13:45to you to set the tone for the movie but also to indicate to you that you're about to watch something of import and the opening scene is actually a real scene of genius in my estimation the animators did a great job and it goes0:13:56along very nicely with the music and so you see this little a sand then you see this rock Pride Rock I believe it's called and in the middle of it and it's0:14:05the center it's the center it's like the spot that's marked by a cathedral which is an X or a cross and you're right in the middle of that and so it's the center of the light that's another way of thinking about it or it's the center0:14:15of the territory or it's the home or it's the fire in the in the wilderness or it's the tree in the center where you live it's all of those things at once0:14:24it's inhabited territory with you at the center and the rock represents tradition because people tend to inscribe their traditions on rock right or to build0:14:34them into rock like the pyramid so you could think about that as a pyramid as an Egyptian pyramid and it's the right way to think about it you could also think about it as a dominance hierarchy with the apex0:14:44predator at the top and that's the lion so it makes sense that the lion would be in the light on the rock that's a pyramid in the middle of the territory right that makes sense to people psychologically so because that's what0:14:55the state is the state is a hierarchy with with something at the top that occupies a space that has been illuminated and made safe by consciousness that's what the state is and that's all represented right away in0:15:07this movie and all the animals come to to observe what's happening in the pyramid and at the top because they need to know what happens at the top0:15:16partly to organize their world that's the pyramid but also to see how the organizational principle works and that's why they're all gathering and so they're gathering in the light in the morning to observe something new that's0:15:28going to be born that's of significant importance and that's the birth of the hero and this little bird here Zazu right the zoo is like Horus the Egyptian God who was a Falken and an I at the same0:15:40time he is the Kings I in this Kings eyes in this movie right he flies up above outside of the pyramid so he can see everything that goes on and reports0:15:50to the King and so partly what that indicates is that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid needs to be an eye and that's partly why you see an eye on the top of the pyramid on the back of the American dollar bill it's exactly0:16:01the same idea or if you look at the Washington Monument which is a pyramid at the top you see that it's capped with aluminum and you think well why aluminum and the answer to that was it was the most expensive metal at that time and so0:16:13the notion is is that at the top of the pyramid there's something that actually doesn't belong in the pyramid it's something that goes up above the pyramid and can see everything and so you could think about it this way is that you're0:16:24gonna be in a lot of pyramids in your life dominance hierarchies and different states and families and all of that and they'll arrange themselves into a hierarchy and there'll be something at the top and the top is the thing that0:16:35can do well across hierarchies so it's not stuck in any one pyramid it and it's partly associated with vision and the ability to see a long long distance also0:16:45to see what you don't want to see and to report that back to the king and so the king fundamentally as far as you guys are concerned from a psychological0:16:54perspective that's your super-ego that's the Freudian perspective or it might be the moral system by which you comport yourself but your eyes are the thing that updates that right you need it to orient yourself in the world you0:17:06need it to orient yourself among other people but your eye and your capacity to pay attention especially to what you don't want to pay attention to is the0:17:15thing that continually updates that model exactly as Piaget laid out with children so and all of that's packed into the imagery in the first you know a few minutes of this movie and that's actually why it relies on imagery why0:17:27this isn't just a lecture by a psychologist you know when you go to see the movie it's because the images they say a picture is worth a thousand words but and there's thousands of pictures in this movie obviously but maybe a picture0:17:39is worth more words than you can actually use to describe it if the pictures is is profound enough and we have many many pictures like that0:17:48any deeply symbolic picture is virtually inexhaustible in terms of its of semantically with regards to its explanation images are very very dense0:17:57so anyways the animals all gather now the animals are also in representations from the Freudian perspective and the it is the part of your psyche from the0:18:06Freudian perspective that's animalistic and and and full of of implicit drives sexual and aggressive in particular as far as Freud was concerned and that's0:18:16because those two drives say unlike thirst or hunger are much more difficult to integrate into proper social being and tend to be excluded and left0:18:25unconscious and so a lot of Freudian psychology and I would say psychology in general is focused on the integration of sexual impulses and aggressive impulses0:18:35into the psyche I would also add to that anxiety because anxiety is also a major problem anxiety and negative emotion that's pain like is also a major problem0:18:44for people and so the animals represent those it'd like impulses that have to be organized hierarchically before you can become an integrated being and precisely0:18:53the piagetian manner right because Piaget would say well the child comes into the world with reflexes and maybe a more modern psychologists would also concentrate on the implicit motivations and those have to be organized inside0:19:06the child into some kind of hierarchy of unity before the child can organize him or herself into the broader unity of the state and that's basically what's being0:19:15represented here and so so Zazu the eyes of the king comes to check out the King and that's uh what's his name what's the King's name Mufasa yeah and he's a very0:19:28regal looking person lion and he stands up straight and tall and that means that he's high in serotonin because serotonin governs posterior flexion and if so if0:19:37your dominant and near the top of hierarchies you tend to expand so that you look bigger than then you could if you shrunk down and so if you're low dominant person you wander around like this so that you look small and weak and0:19:48you don't pose a threat to anybody but if you're at the top you expand yourself so that you can command the space and that's why he has that particular kind of regal posture and if you look at his facial expression you see that it's0:19:59quite severe it like he's he's capable of kindness but he's also harsh and judgmental and that's what society is like that's what the super-ego is like and what that means is that he's integrated his aggression and0:20:10I've seen this happen in my clinical clients when they come in and they're too agreeable they look like Simba looks later in the movie when he's an adolescent and he's sort of like a deer in headlights everything is coming in0:20:21and nothing is coming out but when the person integrates their shadow and gets the aggressive part of themselves integrated into their personality their face is hardened and if you look at people you can tell because the people0:20:33who are too agreeable look childlike and innocent and the people who well a hyper aggressive person will look you know mean and cruel but uh let's see if0:20:42that's good that's still working so but I've seen people's face changes change face change in the course of therapy men and women so and what happens is they0:20:53start to look more mature and it's it's more like they're they're judging the world as well as interacting with it properly once they integrate that more disagreeable part of them it's very very necessary that's part of the0:21:04incorporation of the Union shadow or the incorporation of the unconscious from a Freudian perspective but old Musa Musa there he's already got that he's already0:21:15got that covered so and he's capable of obviously he can smile and he's full capable of the full range of expressions but he's a tough looking character and and now this baboon here who's supposed to be basically just a fool when the0:21:29story was first written he turned into what's essentially a shaman across time and so he represents the self from the Union perspective now the self is0:21:38everything you could be across time so you imagine that there's you and there's the potential inside you whatever that is you know and potential is an interesting idea because it's represents something that isn't yet real yet we act0:21:50like it's real because people will say to you you should live up to your potential and that potential is partly what you could be if you interacted with the world in a manner that would gain you the most information right because0:22:03you build yourself out of the information in the piagetian sense but it's deeper than that - because we know that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new environment new genes turn on in your nervous system they0:22:13encode for new proteins and so you're full of biological tential that won't be realized unless you move yourself around in the world in two different challenging circumstances and that'll turn on different circuits0:22:25so it's not merely that you're incorporating information from the outside world in the constructivist sense it's that by exposing yourself to different environments you put different physiological demands on on yourself all0:22:37the way down to the genetic level and that manifests new elements of you and so one of the things that happens to people and this is a very common cultural notion is that you should go on a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere0:22:50central and that would be say like the rock in the Pride Rock and the Lion King because you take yourself out of your dopey little village and that's just a little bounded you that everyone knows and that isn't very expanded and then0:23:02you go somewhere dark and dangerous to the central place and while you do that you have adventures and they tough on you and pull more out of you like partly because you're becoming informed which means in formation it means you're0:23:15becoming more organized at every level of analysis but there's also more of you too and so that's a very classic idea and then in in cathedrals in Europe especially at Chartres there's a big maze on the floor a circular maze which0:23:27is a symbolic representation of the pilgrimage for people who couldn't do it and so it's a huge circle divided into quadrants which is a union Mandela and0:23:36you enter the maze at one point and then you have to walk through the entire maze north east west and south before you get to the center and the center is0:23:45symbolized by a flower that's carved in stone it looks like this it's big this maze a it's it's large so that you can walk it and that's a symbolic pilgrimage0:23:54it takes you to the center that's the center of the cross because it's in a Cathedral and that's the point of acceptance of voluntary suffering that's what that means and so you walk through you can call that a circumambulation you0:24:07go to all the corners of the world to find yourself and so well the self is the baboon in this particular in this piece of mandrill actually in this0:24:17particular representation and he lives in the tree he lives in the tree of life it's a bale bob tree in this particular so he's the spirit that inhabits the tree of life and he's the eternal wise man that's a way of thinking so is the0:24:30king but he's sort of a superordinate king or an outside king in some sense he's the repository of ancient wisdom and the king is the manner in which that wisdom is currently being acted out in the0:24:41world and so they're friends and that means that the king is a good king because if they if the king was a bad King he would be alienated from himself and that would make him shallow and one-dimensional and that would make him0:24:53a bad ruler no Union with the traditions of the past to be a good ruler you have to rescue your father from the underworld and integrate that and of0:25:02course that's a main theme in this entire movie so hey a new mystery to0:25:11solve0:25:35okay so the hero is born and that's what the Rising Sun represents and everybody goes oh oh isn't that cute and the reason for that is because you're biologically wired especially if you're agreeable to respond with caretaking0:25:47activity - cute - cuteness and cuteness button nose big eyes small mouths round head symmetry and helpless movements and you'll respond to that across the entire0:25:57class of mammalian of mammalian creatures even maybe down to lizards you know isn't that cute it's no it's a lizard but you know so so so that's an0:26:07archetype as well that's the archetype of the vulnerable hero at Bohr the vulnerable hero newly born and that should invoke a desire mostly on the0:26:18part of males to encourage and mostly on the part of females to nur it to nurture but males and females are quite cross wired among human beings and so there's encouragement from the women and there's also nurturing from the men and of0:26:31course those those curves in some sense overlap so there's more nurturing males and more encouraging females but that's roughly the archetype and so he looks cute and everybody goes on and that's because the animators nailed that they0:26:42caught the essential features of cuteness and he's also in the light right and so then the shaman mandrel basically baptizes him nots essentially0:26:53what he's doing and he uses something that symbolic of the Sun which is this ripe fruit and fruits are symbolic of the Sun because of course they need the Sun to ripen and they're round like the Sun and so and people know that they0:27:04need light but and and so anyways the animators make a relationship between the fruit that the shaman is going to break and the Sun and so he's also being0:27:14baptized into the Sun and that means that he's being baptized into the light or that he's being transformed into a hero and so then everyone's happy and0:27:23that's basically you know the divine father and the divine mother and the divine son and the self who's taking care of that and there's a union between the baby and the wise old man because the baby is all the potential that's0:27:35realized in the self and there's an old idea that the way to full maturity is to find what you lost as a child and regain it it's a brilliant idea and that that0:27:46that echoes through mists all over the world and that means you have to regain your capacity once you're disciplined and you know how to do something you have to regain your capacity for play and sort of for0:27:56wide-eyed wonder and that's maybe the childlike part of your spirit and the reintegration of that childlike part with the adult grown-up part Reviva Faiz0:28:06the adult grown-up part and allows the child to manifest itself in a disciplined way in the world and so that's all being hinted that there and then they showed the shaman shows the baby the newborn hero to the crowd and0:28:19it's very cool what happens in the movie all the animals spontaneously Neil and I can give you an example of that kind of spontaneous action in a crowd it's imagine you're watching off gymnastics performance right and and0:28:33it's like at a high level world-class performance and someone comes out there and they do this routine that's just dead letter-perfect you know and they stop and everybody claps like mad right and it's perfect0:28:45and so then the next contestant comes out and they're basically in real trouble because you know this person just got nine point seven out of ten and it was perfect so how do you beat perfect and so will they come out there0:28:55and then you watch them and you're right on the edge of your seat because what you see them do is something extraordinarily disciplined just like the last person did but they push themselves into that zone that's just0:29:06beyond their discipline capacity and you can tell every second you're watching it that they're that close to disaster and so you're right on the edge of your seat and and you know that they're doing a high-wire act without a net and so when0:29:18they finally land triumphantly you'll all stand up and clap spontaneously and it's because you've just witnessed someone who's a master at playing a game who's also a master at improving how to play that game at the same time and0:29:30people love that more than anything to see that it's just absolutely overwhelming because it's a testament to the human spirit and you'll respond automatically and unconsciously to that and that's why that's an analogy to why0:29:42the animals all spontaneously bow when now what happens is they shows the Lion King and the Sun breaks and shines on that the hero at the same time so0:29:53there's this concordance between an earthly event and a so-called heavenly event and you would call that synchronous that's his idea of synchronicity where something important subjectively is also0:30:04signified by something that appears in narrative keeping with that in the outside world that's one of the most controversial elements of his theory but I've experienced a variety of synchronous events and they often happen0:30:16in therapy especially around dreams but they're very hard to communicate because they're so specific to the context in which it occurs they're very difficult to explain so anyways it's the synchronous event that make drops all0:30:29the animals to their knees so there's the Sun coming out and there's shining on them and all the primates go mad for that and that's of course exactly what we do when we applaud and then we switch to scar now scar is mufasa's brother0:30:44evil brother the king always has an evil brother and so does the hero the hero always has an adversary and the reason for that is the king always has an evil brother and that means that the state always has a tyrannical element and the0:30:57tyrannical element exists for two reasons one is the state deteriorate of its own accord and that's an entropy observation what that means is that the0:31:07state is a construction of the past right but the present isn't the same as the past and to the degree that the past is mismatched with the demands of the0:31:17present then it's then it's then it's a tyrannical it's malfunctioning and so it's it's a continual problem with the state it's always two steps behind the0:31:27environment and so then that means that the awareness of living people has to update the state and so Eliot and Maria Eliot who's a great historian of0:31:36religions looked at flood stories from all over the world because there are flood stories from all over the world partly because there are floods all over the world but that's there's a psychological reason to so imagine that0:31:46New Orleans was wiped out by a hurricane right a flood didn't you say well that was an act of God but then you think wait a second wait a second they knew0:31:55those dam dykes weren't gonna hold they knew they weren't built strong enough they took the money that was allocated to the dikes and spent it badly and that was willful blindness and so you could say that it was God who caused the flood0:32:07so to speak metaphorically but you could also say that it was the degeneration of the state and the willful blindness of the politicians that call the flood in Holland they build the dikes to withstand the worst storm in0:32:1910,000 years in the you southern US they built them to withstand the worst storm in a hundred years and they knew that that was insufficient and so the flood0:32:29if there's a flood well you can say well that's an act of nature but you can also say just wait a sec maybe if there was a flood because we looked the other way and because our systems were out of date and that's why in flood stories there's0:32:41there's a continual theme which is the the people get wiped out by the flood because God judges them harshly for their senility and their willful0:32:52blindness and it's a story that's very much you'll have a flood in your life right it'll be a flood of chaos and you'll find of one form another and0:33:01you'll find when you investigate the causes of the flood that some of it will be and sometimes this is cake the case it's just random you just got singled out you got a terrible disease and that's the end of0:33:12you or something like that but there'll be other situations where the flood comes and you're surrounded by chaos and you'll look into it you'll think I knew this was coming I knew I wasn't paying attention I knew I hadn't sorted things0:33:23out and the consequences of that will have cascaded and wiped you out and then you're in real trouble because not only did you get wiped out but you also know it's your fault and that is not a good thing that makes you bitter and0:33:35resentful and murderous when that happens so anyways scar is scarred right so what that implies is he's had a pretty rough life and he's kind of0:33:44skinny and he said he was born in the low end of the gene pool and so he has reasons to be resentful he's also hyper intelligent and rational and it's one of the things you see very commonly about the evil adversary of the0:33:56state or of the individuals often intelligent and hyper rational and the best commentator on that was probably John Milton and Paradise Lost because0:34:05that's how he represents Lucifer or Satan who's the spirit of rationality and enlightenment strangely enough hence Lucifer the bringer of light and the0:34:14reason for that as far as I can tell and this is something that Milton figured out when he compiled all these ancient stories about evil and tried to make them coherent was that the problem with irrationality with rationality is that0:34:26it tends to fall in love with its own product right and so then it comes up with a theory that makes that a totality and then it won't let go so the rational mind has a totalitarian element and we0:34:37know that to some degree because that kind of rationality seems more left hemisphere focused and the left hemisphere tends to impose structured0:34:46order on the world and be updated by the right hemisphere and the right hemisphere generally updates it with negative information and with fantasy and so the left hemisphere will impose a coherent structure on the world which is0:34:57really necessary for you live in it but the problem is there's a tension between coherence and completeness and that's partly why you need two hemispheres you need one to represent the world and you need one to keep track of the exceptions0:35:09and to feed those slowly into the representational system so that it so that it can stay updated without collapsing into complete chaos so anyways scar and he's got this like droopy mouth and this whiny arrogant0:35:24voice and he feels hard done by and he's resentful and and in in classic heroes stories stories of the state as well the so this is an Egyptian take on it Osiris0:35:35was was the god of the state and set who later became Satan that name became Satan as it transformed through Coptic Christianity Osiris had a brother named0:35:45set and set he didn't pay attention to set enough attention and set was always scheme scheming to overthrow the kingdom just like scar is and the Egyptian said0:35:57straightforwardly that the reason that Osiris got overthrown by said he got chopped into pieces and his pieces distributed throughout the state in the mythological representation and those pieces were actually the provinces of0:36:08Egypt technically speaking so and that's what the Egyptians thought so that's quite cool but the Egyptians said explicitly that the reason that Osiris got overthrown by set was because he was willfully blind old senile and willfully0:36:21blind same idea as the flood myth you don't see that quite here because Mufasa is sort of on to set or to scar but scar is more treacherous than Mufasa believes0:36:31and he gets at he gets at Mufasa by going through his son by by by playing on on the impulsivity and and juvenile qualities of his son0:36:42so obviously there's some antagonism between these two as you can see by their facial expressions there and there is a good example of scar you know he's0:36:51got that droopy kind of whiny malevolent face and that malevolent voice that Jeremy Irons pulls off so incredibly well and he's always skulking he's a0:37:01creature of the night he always skulks around he's not a creature of the day in any sense of the word and you know obviously Mufasa is golden like the Sun0:37:10and scars dark like the night that's another thing another clue another hint okay there's the tree that's The Tree of Life we already talked about that I0:37:19think that represents the multiple levels at which you exist simultaneously all the way from the subatomic all the way up to the cosmic so to speak and that's a different kind of dimension and that's the that's the place that the0:37:31self inhabits and it can kind of move up and down those dimensions but anyways that the shaman lives inside that tree and and that's our first introduction to0:37:42him basically but he's the spirit of the ancient tree that's another way of thinking about a very very common element in stories right the spirit of the ancient tree and so all right so now Mufasa has taken taken Simba up to the0:37:56top of the pyramid right so that's the the aluminum place let's say or the place of the eye where you can really see a long ways and he's explaining to him what his kingdom is going to be and you see the Sun of course appears that0:38:08that to begin with and that's another hint about being at the top that's the illuminated part of the pyramid and so they're up there talking and what Mufasa tells Simba is that his kingdom is everyplace the light has touched and0:38:21that's so brilliant so one of the things you'll notice if you move into a new apartment you're like a cat cats don't like changing houses and they have to zoom around in every corner to see exactly what the hell's going on there0:38:32before they calm down they need to know where they can hide and where the potential dangers are and what you'll find if you move into a new place that you will not be comfortable there until you've investigated potentially cleaned0:38:44and repaired every single square inch of it the more attention you pay to it the more it'll become yours and that's far more than mere like material ownership0:38:54which is also relevant but in order to feel comfortable somewhere and to dominate that place to be in meshed in that place you have to0:39:03attend to it you have to shine light on every corner and you have to do that with yourself and with your relationships as well and so anyways Mufasa tells Simba that his kingdom is everything that the light shines on and0:39:15that's exactly right and then there's a metaphor there too which is that what you've Shawn light on which is what you've come to understand and master is surrounded by an Otherworld of all the things that you don't understand and0:39:27some of those would be natural things and some of them would be tyrannical things and some of those would be things you don't want to know about yourself but they're outside of where you've managed to shine the light and so that's0:39:37exactly what Mufasa tells Simba says we live in this pyramid we're at the top there's a domain of light around it that's explored territory outside of0:39:46that there's explore unexplored territory and that's partly the unconscious because you fill it with fantasy and it's partly what you just don't know and then Mufasa tells Simba and it's sort of like God telling Adam0:39:59and even in the Garden of Eden not to eat the apple Mufasa tells Simba there's that this outside place that's dark that's not part of your kingdom and you should not go there and that's really interesting because Simba doesn't even0:40:11know about that place yet and so Mufasa is doing something very contradictory there it's like telling him that it exists and and heightening his curiosity0:40:21but also saying that he should go there almost ensuring that that's exactly what Simba is going to do you see this in the Pinocchio movie to where Pinocchio is0:40:30planning to jump into the ocean to go get Geppetto from the underworld and he's following his conscience is along with him Jiminy Cricket and the cricket is warning him about all the dangers that he'll face down there0:40:42and telling him that he will be fish food personally and while he's doing that Pinocchio ties a knot around his donkey tail around a rock so he can sink and and the little cricket helps him tie the0:40:53knot so well he's warning him about the adventure he's going to undertake at the same time he's encouraging him to do it and there's that paradoxical thing which is that if you go outside what you know it will cause a fall because it'll0:41:05damage your knowledge structures and you'll go down into chaos and that can really destroy you so you should do it but by the same token if you do do it and you do it successfully then the new you that are' arises can be stronger0:41:17and more complete than the previous you so you should do it and you shouldn't do it and that's anyone sensible says look don't bother right but sensible isn't0:41:26enough that's the thing you have to also be not sensible enough in order to live and your typical hero and Harry Potter is a really good example is always a0:41:35rule breaker always but he you know the rules he breaks are like there's judicious nough speaking the hero breaks a rule in the service of a higher good0:41:45but he's still breaking the rules and that's what puts them outside the boundary of the social of the social establishment so now at this point Simba0:41:55also gets introduced to scar and that that that has two meanings one is that scar is the tyrannical element of the state and so as a child when you're0:42:04being socialized you encounter the tyranny of the state and one of the best you can't yet there's no way around it one of the best examples of that is that0:42:13children are always running around having fun and they're really bubbly and and impulsive and joyous and playful and that causes a lot of trouble because positive emotion is very disruptive they'll run around and break things0:42:24they'll hurt themselves and they'll get into trouble and so you're always saying calm down sit down behave don't do that and it's it's not because they're crying or angry it's because there's a day I'm happy and impulsive that no one can0:42:36stand them and so and so that's a tyranny it's like that the state puts puts pressure on you to regulate your emotions positive negative and positive0:42:46and it crushes you it crushes the life out of you a lot of it and so you end up you know your age and you're all mopey because the holes especially because you've been forced to sit down in school for like 17 years you're all mopey and0:42:58it's no wonder you know you've had the spirit taken out of you by the process of discipline but without that you'd be completely useless so it's another one of those paradoxical you know gifts and and catastrophes that you encounter as0:43:11you move through life so anyways Simba look at how happy he is you know I mean he doesn't know a damn thing he's so naive you can tell but oh look it's my uncle Scar it's like you know and this is not a guy you smile at0:43:24clearly but he's all positive emotion and joy and enthusiasm and that's not good because that means this character can take serious advantage of it and that's exactly what he does and so scar pretends to be on his side which is what0:43:37a good pedophile always does by the way and so you know you you take advantage of the child's trusting nature and openness in order to exploit them and that's that's what horrible people do that all the time including the parents0:43:49of children and other children themselves so you know there's this false I mean look at the animators are so damn brilliant Hey look at that expression really like you know you just look at that and you think well that's0:44:00just a facial expression but of course it's not some damn animators worked really hard to get that they're really observant and they distill the facial looks like the face is right it covers the whole head and and they've got the0:44:13eyebrow lifts proper and they've got this horrible sanctimonious smile and the tilt of the head then you know and he's sort of crushing him while he's hugging him at the same time and really really and you know it took a lot of0:44:25thought for every single one of these frames to be put together right there's a tremendous amount of cognitive effort that went into that so none of this is accidental yeah well that pretty much says0:44:34everything it's like whoo I hate that kid and to hardly wait till he's gone and didn't I pull one over on him you know it's a real testament to an adult's0:44:43genius when he can fool a kid so then Simba encounters the anima that's the anima the Jungian anima and the anima is the feminine counterpart in the soul and0:44:53she well yeah you could tell what she does to him right because she's got this supercilious and and what would you say judgmental and teasing look on her face0:45:03and she's really trying to put him down and it's work it like bad he's not very happy about that at all and she's the thing this is what the anima does the soul she's the thing that teaches the exploratory hero that that it's not0:45:17everything it could be right and that's part of this can be read multiple ways but it's part of the eternal tendency of women to makes men self-conscious by0:45:26their sexual selectivity that's part of it because that makes men self-conscious like nothing else and it's also perhaps been one of the phenomena that's produced the evolutionary arms race in this in the0:45:37sex is among human beings that's caused our rapid cortical expansion and our quick movement away from chimpanzees who aren't selective mater's by the way so0:45:47look at him Jesus you just want to slap him right he's a he's the son of a king so he's very very privileged and he confuses his privilege with competence0:45:56rich of course all of you do because you're all sons of the King which is why you can sit here in the university and you confuse your privilege with competence as well because it's not has nothing to do with any of you that the0:46:08lights are on and that's the place is so peaceful right but you take that for granted and it can make you false and arrogant like like Jesus that's just so sad you look at that kid you think he's he's in for0:46:19real trouble man he thinks he knows everything and of course then he has a wrestling match with what's-her-name what's it was it Nala yeah he has a0:46:28wrestling match with Nala and she just pins him every time right gotcha again pindy again and that's basically right one of the things that happens with men when they meet a woman who they really desire that Myers they project an idea0:46:41onto her immediately that's an anima projection and then that Adam a projection judges them and they act all inferior and stupid and it's partly because they are that's why and so then they they go down in defeat constantly0:46:53to this thing that they're projecting which at least has some concordance with the actual woman but not that much so okay they keep wrestling and then they're on the fringe of the kingdom this wrestling match between this pairs0:47:04of opposites takes them to the edge of the kingdom and they end up in the elephant's graveyard right and and there's there's bones everywhere and so0:47:13now they're out into the kingdom of death and what that means is that these two kids as they've grown up encounter death right they go outside the light it's very very shocking for them they're very curious about it obviously they go0:47:26to explore the skeletons and all of that even though they were told not to but their curiosity they can't stay away from death they're too curious about it and so they developed knowledge of death and that and then of course out there in0:47:38the Deadlands is where the hyenas are and that's exactly right because hyenas are scavengers right and they can break bones with their teeth they're really really quite the animal and you know you kind of have a shudder of repugnance0:47:50when you see those things and I think it's partly I mean we shared an evolutionary landscape with the ancestors of hyenas for a very very long time and like vultures too you know you couldn't imagine something that would be0:48:02more well designed to look like it was a horrible thing than a vulture right and there's this weird concordance and crows and ravens are like that - carrion0:48:11eaters you know the Eagles are kind of an exception but they look just as creepy as they are which is really quite interesting and of course hyenas fall into that category and they laugh - which is you know really you you also0:48:23have to laugh really with all these other things you have going for you and anyways the hyenas and hyenas are enemies of lions and they can take lions down they're tough things and you know they're not one high in obviously but a0:48:35bunch of hyenas can give a lie in a pretty damn rough time and so and these little lines are really no match for the hyenas so they get threatened very very rapidly and one of the hyenas of course is just completely0:48:48out of its mind and one of the things that's really interesting and you see this with the Muppets - there was often a puppet that was like a crazy puppet and its eyes would move in different directions you know and one of the0:48:58things that happens with people who are schizophrenic is they show involuntary eye movements and it's because you have a brain center that controls your eyes voluntarily and you have another one that controls them involuntarily so you0:49:09can see that look ahead and try to move your eyes smoothly back and forth you can't do it you'll see that they jerk hey but if you watch put a finger in front of your face and then do this they'll move perfectly smoothly and0:49:21that's because you're using different eye control centers one voluntary and one more involuntary and the involuntary one is actually more sophisticated and so in schizophrenic the involuntary eye control centers tend to disrupt the0:49:34voluntary eye control centers and that's likely part of the hallucinatory process you know because you have the ego in this schizophrenic that's being disrupted by processes underneath fantasies and that sort of thing and0:49:46that looks like it's reflected in involuntary eye movements like like dream movements so anyways so much for the crazy hyena and they're in real trouble now the Kings I who's supposed to be keeping an eye on this and was0:49:57supposed to be watching Simba is trying to intervene but I mean look at him he's a like a delicious little bird and so that's not working out very well anyways and then you see this immediate juxtaposition of the domain of death and0:50:11the hyenas with hell right and everyone looks at that and they think well they know exactly what that means it's no surprise to anyone that that happens and I suppose that's partly because on the veldt where we evolved in large part but0:50:24not by no means all part fire was an ever-present danger in the grasslands right and so and so that's a good that's a good example of Hell so huh well I0:50:37guess that's it we'll do some more of this when we meet on Tuesday bye0:50:52you0:00:002017 Personality 08: Carl Jung and the Lion King (Part 2)
0:00:000:00:11so we'll continue with our union analysis of the Lion King today we ended at the point where remember Mufasa had taken Simba up to the top of Pride Rock0:00:25and described to him the fact that his kingdom essentially constituted everything that the light touched and you can think about that as the domain0:00:36of the roughly speaking of the great father with the domain of the great mother on the outside of that being symbolically equivalent to the underworld or to death or to nature all of those things seem to be approximately0:00:49equally true and he forbade Simba from going to investigate what was beyond the confines of the light and in some sense that's exactly what a tradition does for0:01:00you it because the tradition is precisely what defines the domain of the light and to be moral from the perspective of the tradition it's akin0:01:09to playing a piagetian game but only adhering to the rules you know how Piaget described the fact that when kids first master a game they learned they learn how to act it out and then they learn what the rules are and then they0:01:21regard the rules in some sense as sacred you can't go outside the rules and then later in moral development if they get to that stage then they start to recognize themselves also as formulators of the rule or formulators of the game0:01:34and culture tells you don't go beyond the rules that's the definition of morality within the box of culture and you don't go outside of that and so that's why Mufasa plays that particular role and it's wise because if you go0:01:47outside the domain of what you already understand then it's dangerous out there clearly it's dangerous out there but the downside of that particular message and0:01:57this is perhaps this is the mythological reason why Mufasa isn't as aware as he could be of scar you know his knowledge is bounded and he's no I'm not aware enough of what lies outside of that in this realm let's0:02:10say of death and destruction and so scar is he is able to overcome his his brother one you see this sort of thing happening to people very frequently for0:02:22example who developed post-traumatic stress disorder and one of the things that's not as well known about post-traumatic stress disorder as might be known is a it happens to you if you encounter an0:02:33experience that sort of blows out the axioms of your knowledge system that's one way of looking at it it's so unexpected that you can't account for it0:02:42within the confines of this of the system that you're using to interpret the world that often happens to people when they encounter something that's truly malevolent and that can be within them or it can be in the form of someone0:02:54else who is genuinely out to hurt them they're often people who develop PTSD are often but not always somewhat naive and they're not aware of the full0:03:05catastrophe of the world that might be one way of looking at it and then they encounter someone who's truly out to hurt them and they can detect that even0:03:16in in the way the person's face looks or they encounter a part of them that's much more malevolent than they had ever imagined it could possibly be and then0:03:25they do something terrible and then they don't know what to do about it so delay or the the Canadian General wrote a book called shake hands with the0:03:35devil and it was about what happened to him in Rwanda when he was stationed there as a UN warrior or a UN soldier and I mean Dallaire was not naive but0:03:46what he encountered was truly malevolent and it just blew him into pieces and and that that's what happens and so there's real utility and staying within the0:03:56bounded domain but the problem is is that there may be information that's outside of that domain that you absolutely need to know and so part of the problem with being alive is that you have to continually determine how much0:04:09you're going to maintain your stability and how much you're going to explore and you have to explore because the stable part of you gets outdated but if you0:04:18explore too much or too too unwisely then you can encounter things that flip you upside down it's actually one of the problems with being high and trade0:04:28openness especially if you're also high in neuroticism because if you're open you're creative you're always looking for for ideas that are outside of your current systematic way of thinking but if you're high in eroticism so you0:04:39parents a lot of anxiety and emotional pain and that sort of thing you can continually upset your own apple cart now the other thing that you might want to think about this is really useful as far as I'm concerned is you might want0:04:49to think about this politically and we've been doing a lot of work I'm gonna have one of my graduate students actually come and talk to you about the work we've been doing on personality and Paul and political belief so what0:04:59happens with political belief is that if you're high in openness and low in conscientiousness you tend to be a liberal the openness being the particularly important part of that and if you're low in openness and high in0:05:09conscientiousness especially orderliness you tend to be a conservative now it's kind of strange because openness and conscientiousness aren't very highly correlated so it's not obvious why those two traits would combine to determine0:05:22political belief and and the relationship is actually quite strong between temperament and political belief if you measure political belief comprehensively but it seems to me that the fundamental distinction and this is0:05:33the political game at least along the liberal conservative axis this boils down to one thing it boils down to how open borders should be compared to how close they should be and you know you can see that reflected for example in0:05:46the attractiveness of Trump to a large part of the general population because he's going to close the borders build a wall and fortify the borders and0:05:55conservatives like that they like to have borders between things stay tight and they don't even care if it's state borders or political borders or town0:06:04borders or ethnic borders or borders between ideas or borders between sexual identities conservatives like to have things stay in the damn box where they0:06:13belong partly because they're orderly and partly because they're lone openness they don't get any real they're not interested in what happens if you free up your conceptions all they see in that0:06:23is the probability of disorder whereas liberals who are high in openness and low and conscientiousness slash orderliness they get a real charge out0:06:32of letting things out of the box so that they can creatively interplay now the issue is who's correct and the answer is you don't know because the environment0:06:42underneath the political landscape moves and so sometimes the right answer is tighten up the borders and fortify and sometimes the right answer is no no loosen things up because everything's good0:06:53to static and tight and we need more information and the dialogue that occurs in the political landscape with this is why dialogue is so important is0:07:02fundamentally between these two opposing views of borders and because you can't say with certainty which one is right at any given time an open dialogue has to0:07:12maintain itself so that the entire political State can maneuver properly along that moving line it's absolutely crucial it's really really really useful0:07:22to know that people vote their damn temperament it gets you it gives you more of an understanding at least in principle of your of those who sit on the other side of you on the political fence and there's been recent newspaper0:07:34articles quite interesting I tweeted a couple of them about this company and UK called Cambridge analytics and they're using the damn big five they can extract0:07:43out big five information from your Facebook Likes they've got a model of every single person in the United States big five personality and they help Trump0:07:53craft political messages right down to the level of apartment buildings to appeal to people based on their Big Five temperament and that's all recent work0:08:02and so one of the things that's very interesting is we are teaching computers to understand us so fast you can't believe it and we really do risk walking0:08:11into an electronic world where you will only see what you want to see I mean obviously the marketers are trying to do that as fast as possible right they only want to send you ads that you're going to be interested in because it's0:08:23expensive and foolish to send you anything that will annoy you or that you'll ignore and so the marketers are trying like mad to map who you are even by watching your eyes they're trying to figure out who you are so they can send0:08:35you the right information but the danger is that that will happen say in the domain of news and broader information increasing this tendency for people to be siloed in their exposure to the external world it's a big sort of like0:08:47each of us is becoming a micro celebrity surrounded by electronic sycophants who do nothing but tell us exactly what we want to hear it's a real problem0:08:56Karl Popper a famous philosopher science said that one of the things that you should do and this is akin to the PIA jetty and view is you should always look for information that contradicts your cur0:09:07viewpoint now that's painful right because who wants their axioms contradicted it can take you apart but it's the only way that you can ensure that you're learning at the same time that you're maintaining your stability0:09:18and that's another reason why it's really necessary to engage in dialogue with people that you do not agree with because they're the ones who will tell you things that you don't know it's crew it's crucial importance in the0:09:29maintenance of your own stability the worst thing that can happen to a person know because there's many horrible things that can happen to a person but one of the worst things that can happen is that you find yourself in a situation0:09:39where no one is offering you corrective feedback anymore because you rely on the corrective feedback provided by other people to keep yourself sane to keep0:09:48moving in the ever-changing environment and if you cut yourself off from that feedback then well then you end up static and shrinking it's really it's0:09:58really not good you get less and less competent you get less and less confident and the threats outside of you loom larger and larger so that's all to do with the you know the domain outside the light see young would also say that0:10:13out in this domain that sort of beyond what you understand that's also where you encounter the archetypes of the collective unconscious now that's a really really complicated idea but what he means by that is that if you're put0:10:25outside the domain of your competence you're going to start to use fantasy to organize your world so I can give you an example of that so you you I presume0:10:36most of you are old enough to have a conscious memory of when the Twin Towers came crashing down and so everybody in the days after that was wandering around0:10:45like they were in the days and the reason they were in the days is because well it wasn't exactly clear what fell right there was the physical towers fell but that was only a tiny bit of the problem because those physical towers0:10:57were embedded in a network of meaning like a very very sophisticated network of meaning but also a political network and an economic network and a military network and like they're they're nodes inside a very complex system and so when0:11:09they come crashing down you don't know what's come crashing down right so you're out there in the unknown and and wondering what's going on and wandering around in the days which is exactly what happened to people and then what bush0:11:20did George W was immediately turned that into a good versus evil drama instantly and that's an archetypal idea so that's when he came up with the idea of the axis of evil I think that was Iran North0:11:33Korea and I don't remember the other one at the moment but but he yeah he immediately turned the political landscape into a good versus evil drama and he said to everyone in the world that they were either with him or0:11:44against him fundamentally and that was the that was part of the retreating into a I guess a more protected landscape that's one of the ways that human beings0:11:53deal with the encounter with a traumatic threat and so the reason you meet the unconscious and even the collective unconscious on the border of your0:12:02knowledge is because when you hit the border of your knowledge you start to use fantasy in order to bring the the newest form of order out of the unknown0:12:12so that you can start to make sense out of it and that's what artists always do that's what they do and so from the Union perspective people who are engaged in creative art are the ones who are on the perimeter of knowledge structures0:12:24and so what they're doing is taking the absolute unknown which would be in Rumsfeld terms they're unknown unknowns and turning them into partially known0:12:34unknowns that's what an artist does and and especially the more classical artists who deal with mythological and religious themes which was the case for art right up until really until the late 20th century0:12:45they're they're using these mythological ideas to sort of extend the domain of human knowledge out beyond its current parameters and so artists do that and0:12:55literary people do that and and dramatists do that and they help us extend our knowledge now that's where open people live that's another way of0:13:05thinking about so think about it this way so you're in a city you know what and the city has parts of it that degenerate and so you could think about that as order degenerating into chaos and then the open people who are0:13:16creative come along and they find places in the city that have degenerated but that still have interesting potential right and then they move in there where it's cheap to and they start producing art they start producing galleries and0:13:28then the coffee shops move in and then the thing starts to get civilized and then of course the more all conservative types move in those would be the yuppies roughly speaking so they're they're much more conservative0:13:40than the artists but they're still liberal compared to the bulk of the population and so the more daring people move in after the artists have civilized it and then after that you know then the chain stores start to move in and soon0:13:52it's completely turned into Zellers or something like that and then the artists have to go somewhere else and find another place on the boundary where they can live and it's a fizzy elizacass much as a mental boundary and so you because0:14:05you think each of those personality traits there's five dimensions each of them represent the possibility of inhabiting a kind of niche right an ecological niche so if you're an extroverted person your niche is the0:14:17social environment if you're an introverted person the niches I think nature I don't know that for sure because I've never figured out exactly what introverts are adapted to but it's not exactly the social world if you're0:14:29agreeable then your niches relationships if you're disagreeable your niches competition if you're conscientious your niche is duty and effort and so and and0:14:39that those niches are partly social because so much of our environment is social but they're also partly natural because our social being is nested0:14:48inside the natural world and so you can think about the big five traits as different kinds of adaptations to different kinds of niches and that's the niche that the open people the open exploratory types occupy so that seems0:15:02to make a higher-order super factor extraversion and openness called plasticity as opposed to stability which is conscientiousness agreeableness and emotional stability and there's a play off between those two things because the0:15:14stable people obviously are stable but the plastic types of people are more dynamic and they're they're more concerned with transformation and in0:15:23order to get a system optimally stable and dynamic you have to have a continual interplay of those of those factors because static doesn't work because0:15:32everything changes that's the problem with conservatism and the problem with liberalism fundamentally is yes everything changes but you have to bring forward some structures from the past so it's very it's very very difficult to0:15:45get that balance correct so all right so anyways out there in the underworld in the place beyond your current conceptualizations that's the0:15:56place of death and nature and it's beyond the light and it's also the place of Hell and that's what you see here and what do you how do you conceptualize that well one of the things you'll see if you're interested in this sort of0:16:08thing if you ever go read the writings of the Columbine killers the teens they're very interesting they're very much worth reading especially I think0:16:17it's Dylan Klebold who was the more literate of the two but he tells you exactly where he went after brooding and brooding and brooding on his his0:16:26isolation and segregation from mankind so he's out there beyond he's out there in a chaotic domain and because he's tortured by that his thoughts take an0:16:35unbelievably dark turn like it's unimaginably dark if you're interested in that sort of thing you could read that there's another book you could read called panzram PA and Zed ra m and it's a fascinating book it's about this guy0:16:50who I think he raped 1200 men so that sort of tells you what sort of guy he was extraordinarily physically powerful and brutal and malevolent and he was0:16:59kind of a juvenile delinquent type and they put him in a reform school and he was not well treated in that reform school it's sort of like the worst of the Canadian residential schools and when he came out he was not a happy boy0:17:11and so he spent the rest of his life trying to be as destructive as he could possibly imagine and purely consciously with malevolent intent and then and and0:17:23believe me he was pretty destructive he kept track of the dollar value of all the buildings he burned down he tried to start a war between Britain and the United States like he was all out for all-out mayhem his dying words they're0:17:35gonna hang him he told the guy who was going to hang him he said hurry up you who's your bastard I could kill 12 men in the time it takes you to hang me and that's exactly the sort of person he was and he made friends with this physician0:17:48in the in the prison who he thought was like the first person who ever did something nice for him gave him a dollar for cigarettes if I remember correctly and the physician encouraged him to write his autobiography and so he did0:18:00and it's it's available and so if you want a view because you know you you always think of people you think well people have good intentions you know that you especially think that if you're naive and agreeable so all of you who0:18:12are sitting there out there thinking people have good intentions you're probably high in agreeableness but that's not always the case people can have very dark motivations that are fully conscious and very well0:18:25elaborated and panzram was know he was smart and his book is very well written and he tells you exactly why he thought the way he thought and so it's a good0:18:34glimpse of exactly this sort of thing where you can get to if you want to by brooding on your specific misfortune you know and his his basic credo was that0:18:43human beings were so reprehensible that they should just be eliminated and believe me that's what he was trying to do and these people who do terrible things like the Columbine shooters that's exactly what for black of a0:18:54better word they're possessed by its sheer malevolence and the Columbine kids had a much more spectacular catastrophe planned than the one that actually occurred and they knew it was going to be a full-blown media circus and lots of0:19:07these people who engage in those sorts of mass murders they know about the other mass murders and they're engaged in a competition and the competition is who can do the most brutal thing the fastest something like that so you can't0:19:19just be thinking about people who've you know who have good intentions but have somehow gone wrong if you ever meet someone who isn't like that and you think that you're just a tree with ripe fruit to be plucked so you don't want to0:19:32be in that situation you have to keep your eyes open and so anyways that's basically what's encapsulated in this part of the story now the hyenas go after the little lion obviously but they managed to escape0:19:44it's very malevolent scene and Mufasa shows up at the last minute to rescue them so and you know that there's also a mythological trope there which is that0:19:56if you go outside your domain of confidence and you encounter something you don't understand the first thing that you're going to do is look to the knowledge structures that you already possess to explain it right and that's0:20:06the you could say from a symbolic perspective that that's the manifestation of the father as of course that's what you're going to do and you you know what's really interesting - is because I've had a lot of clients0:20:17who've had PTSD and and without exception every single one of them was induced by one form of malevolence or another they have to develop a very sophisticated philosophy of good and evil to get out of it because they have0:20:29a worldview in which those things don't really exist there's no such thing as pure malevolence well that's fine unless you encounter it and then as soon as you encounter it as soon as you encounter it you won't know what to do and then you0:20:42won't be able to get on with your life you'll do nothing but think about that and think about it and think about it and think about it'll disrupt your sleep it'll put you into a permanent state of preparation for action because the part0:20:54of your brain that's detected that which in my estimation by the way is the same part at least in part that detects snakes it's the same damn circuit once0:21:03it's seen something like that it is not gonna let you go till you figure it out and that's basically what post-traumatic stress disorder is and you know to some degree each of you will have experienced that maybe not all of you in here but0:21:15many of you and you can tell that so if you go back and you think about your past and you have any memory that's more than about eighteen months old and when0:21:24you think about it it produces a fair bit of negative emotion then that's like a minute that's like a place where there's a mini post-traumatic stress problem and what's happened you remember I showed you that hierarchy moving from0:21:37tiny motor actions all the way up to high order abstractions well you can imagine say you have good person at the top and and you you kind of use that that scenario to construe other people people are basically good well then you0:21:51run into someone who is not good and boom the whole bloody system comes tumbling down because it's violated that highest order axiom so that's post-traumatic stress disorder if something has violated an axiom0:22:03that's more differentiated you know closer to the actual motor output not quite so high in the abstraction chain then all it does is wipe out that part of the structure it doesn't wipe out the whole thing and you can tell if you have0:22:15holes in your perceptual value structure by checking to see if you have memories that are still alive in a negative way that are old enough so that they should0:22:25have been incorporated into your personality and so one of the things you can do you're doing one of the exercises that's on myself authoring site you guys do the personality analysis but there's another0:22:37program there called the that's called the past authoring where you write down an autobiography and thinking through these things that have happened to you0:22:46in your past that are negative is a good way of making them go away and thinking them through kind of means you have to figure out what happened right and then0:22:55you sort of have to figure out how to make it not happen again what you're trying to derive is some kind of causal analysis how is it that I was put into a situation where I was made vulnerable you know and that could be well because0:23:07you're only four and you couldn't protect yourself and now it's time to update that because you're a fully functioning adult or there may be things that you have to think through and change in your own personality or0:23:17attitudes that you've been holding on to since you were tiny I have this client once and she came in and told me that she had been sexually assaulted by her0:23:27older brother and she told me the story and I kind of got the impression that maybe she was like eight and he was like 17 or something like that and she was about 27 when she came and talked to me and then I found out by further0:23:39questioning that she was 4 and he was 6 and I thought she still had this story in her head of her being tormented by this older person right that's how she0:23:48told the story and what I told her was well look another way of looking at this is that you two were very badly supervised children because I mean he0:23:57was 6 for God's sake you know he's a little kid that doesn't mean that what happened to her was any less traumatic but but he wasn't 17 right if the story0:24:07was different than the one she had in her head and you know by the time she left after we had that conversation it was clear that the way that she was construing the experience had radically shifted and it was very interesting0:24:18because you know you think of the past as fixed but and it is in some sense but the reason you remember the past isn't to make an objectively accurate record0:24:28of the past it's so that you can use the information in the past to prepare you for the future and your mind won't leave you alone unless that has happened so if0:24:37you've encountered something that's negative and you don't know why and you don't know what to do about it if that have again in the future then that will stay with you and I think one of the things0:24:47that does too is it increases your overall physiological load is actually physiologists who've been talking about this I can't remember the damn phrase0:24:56but you could imagine that your mind is doing something like this all the time it's it's it's it's got a record in some sense of your autobiographical experiences and what it's doing is calculating how frequently you've been0:25:09successful versus unsuccessful and the more frequently that you've been successful the higher you are up on the dominance hierarchy that's one possibility so your serotonin levels go up and you're calmer but also it's0:25:22reasonable to assume that the environment is less dangerous right because that's sort of what constitutes danger you're somewhere in and you act and and something you don't want to have happen happens that's danger and so your0:25:34brain is always trying to figure out how to calibrate how anxious you should be and one of the things that does is by sort of keeping track of your past success failure ratio and so to the degree that your past has been0:25:47characterized by will call them failures that those are situations where you do not get what you want then your your body your brain puts your body on constant alert because if everything that you've done has resulted in0:25:59catastrophe then you're somewhere insanely dangerous and you should be like like a you know like a prey animal that's ready to dart in any direction and how much you should be a prey animal is dependent on it's an0:26:12estimate partly your trait neuroticism partly your your success as adjudicated by other people right because they'll pop you up the doorman its hierarchy if0:26:22you've been successful but also partly on your record of failures and successes in the past and so you can go back and you can find out where you have holes in0:26:31your in the structure through which you're viewing the world that's one way of looking at it and you can sew those things up and that's a very that's in some sense that's what you're doing in psychotherapy you know partly it's0:26:42exposure to things you're afraid of and disgusted by and are likely to avoid that's a huge chunk of it but if you go back into your past and you start talking those things through it's really the same thing it's more abstracted so0:26:55Freud of course was always when he was doing his free association process with his clients he'd find that if he just let them talk that their0:27:05speech would circle until it hit a place like that where they were confused and doubtful and then their speech would sort of wander around that and and then0:27:14they'd have an emotional expression that was a consequence of that he thought the emotional expression was what was curative it was cathartic in his terms but later James Pennebaker upon whom these writing exercises I described his0:27:27research it is based on that my read my exercises are based on his research he found that if you brought college students into the to the lab and you had0:27:37them write for 15 minutes three times over three days about the worst thing that had ever happened to them or the worst thing they ever did if I remember correctly they got worse in the short term but better in the long run for0:27:49example they went visited the doctor less and markers of their physical health improved and so I think the reason for that is because what does0:27:58that called is called something load just about it got it right from the physiologist it doesn't matter they got healthier as far as I can tell0:28:07because they basically calmed down once they had gone through the negative memory and sorted it out properly and told a properly articulated story and0:28:16figured out how to deal with it then their physiology calmed down and so then they weren't as stressed they weren't producing as much cortisol and so0:28:26cortisol suppresses your immune function and so they were more likely to stay healthy and so well so that's all very much we're thinking about that's all in0:28:36the domain outside of the light that's one way of thinking about it now of course Simba and his and what's the girl's name mala yeah they're you know pretty cowed about what has happened because they0:28:48sort of stumbled stupidly out into the unknown they stumbled foolishly out into the unknown and this actually highlights another union archetype and that's the0:28:57archetype of the trickster and the trickster is like the Joker in the king's court and the trickster is someone who will be or play the fool and the thing about the fool is that the fool is close to the truth because you0:29:09can't learn anything new unless you're willing to be fool right you know what that's like you you know exactly what that's like your chart you have to master a new skill but you're avoiding it because you know that0:29:19you'll be bad at it when you first do it and if you're perfectionistic you're gonna say well I can't allow myself to be bad at anything I can't allow myself to be a fool and no wonder but the problem is is when you try something new0:29:31you're always a fool and so unless you're willing to be a fool you can't learn anything new and that's also why you can regarded the trickster as the precursor to the Savior architect Lee speaking is because you cannot do the0:29:42right thing unless you're willing to be a fool first and that's really worth knowing lots of times you guys are gonna make a stage transition in your life and0:29:51you're gonna feel like an imposter when you get a new job or when you get a promotion or something like that you're gonna feel like an imposter and you are because what do you know when you make that first transition right but it's0:30:03gonna make you embarrassed and it's gonna make you ashamed and all of those things but you have to understand that you are a fool when you first try something new but you're a worse fool if you don't try it now that doesn't mean0:30:14you should you know make like you know everything as soon as you're promoted or you have some transition in status that's that's foolish of the wrong sort0:30:23but to know that to know that you have to be fallible in order to progress is an unbelievably useful thing it can free you up you know what I was talking to a0:30:33writer the other day about his process for beginning writing he's written many books he writes a very very very bad first draft right and that's a good way0:30:43to think about things is throughout your life you're gonna be doing that is writing the next draft of you and it's pretty bad to begin with but that's okay0:30:52because it isn't gonna get any better unless you put yourself out into the domain of the unknown to begin with and you know you might you might it might go badly I mean that's what happens here0:31:04anyways Mufasa has a chat with Simba and you know tells him that he's he did what he wasn't supposed to do although you know even in that situation with fauces0:31:16discipline is paradoxical because there's part of him because he's reasonably wise that knows that breaking the rules like that is actually necessary even though you still have to say play0:31:27by the damn rules you know you have to leave that door open so that the rules can be broken an appropriate amount so he forgives him and and and peace is made between them and then they're there they involve themselves in sort of0:31:41gazing at the night sky and so the two of them do that together and the night sky is an interesting place you know because that's where the absolute unknown resides and one of the things young wrote a lot about was astrology0:31:53strangely enough slash astronomy and one of young contentions this is a very interesting one was that because the night sky was completely unknown people0:32:02could project their fantasies into it and that's what they did without with astrology so astrology is this cumulative fantasy that's going on in0:32:11the in that roughly speaking in the deep unconscious projected on to the sky and so if you analyze old astrological writings what you're really doing is0:32:20analyzing old fantasies and because of that you could develop some insight into the structure of the mind and so he did the same thing with alchemy and his later writings which are very very difficult to understand but extremely0:32:32worthwhile ok so anyways back to the to the hellish domain now I told you that that domain that's outside of knowledge you could think about that as the underworld or you can think about it as nature the negative element of nature in0:32:44particular and so I mentioned that one element of that is hellish and that's exactly what the movie explains next it does exactly that we go back out to this0:32:53domain that scar the adversary or the negative king that's another way of looking at him this is his his the domain over which he rules and so you0:33:05can see him there surrounded in fire same ideas the you know as the hyenas surrounded by fire earlier although this is green fire and smoke which I think is even worse and this is where the movie starts to draw on essentially Nazi0:33:19symbolism at least the symbolism of totalitarian states and you know you think about you think about a totalitarian state you think about the Nazis and they're goose-stepping what's happening is that every single0:33:30person in the military becomes an identical unit right a unit they're all uniform and they're all in some sense imitating0:33:39The Dictator in in an absolutely perfect way and so the dictator wants to impose strict uniformity on the entire population that's order order and one of0:33:50the things we've discovered that's really interesting is that discussed sensitivity is associated with orderliness and that's associated with0:34:00conscientiousness and one of the things about Hitler was that he was very disgust sensitive and a lot of his hatred for non-aryans so imagine inside0:34:09the aryan box it was all uniform outside it was all parasites and predators and so and that was a manifestation of disgust not of fear it's a whole different thing and if you read Hitler's table talk0:34:20which is a collection of his spontaneous dinner speeches from 1939 to 1940 - it's a very interesting book you see that his metaphor for the Aryan race was a body a0:34:32pure body unof salted by parasites or predators and that he was trying to erect a border around it to keep all of that away so it's an immunological disgust like metaphor and there's some recent work0:34:45that was published in PLoS ONE about three years ago showing that brilliant study should have got much more attention showing that if you went around and looked and sampled political attitudes in different countries or even0:34:57within the same country what you found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious diseases the higher the probability of totalitarian political0:35:06attitudes at the local level and you can imagine well what happens if there's infectious diseases is you want to put borders around everything you don't want free movement between ideas or people because that's partly how the disease0:35:18spreads you're going to have much more strict sexual rules for example because that's a great way for diseases to be transmitted and before Hitler went on0:35:27his rampage against the non-aryans he'd cleaned up all the factories and like he went in there and fumigated them it was part of the law he went on a public0:35:36health campaign to get rid of tuberculosis and he got rid of the bugs in the factories as well he used cyclone B that's an insecticide and that's the0:35:45gas that he used in the gas chambers eventually so first it was the bugs in the rats and then it was people who were then it was euthanasia that was the neck move and forced you euthanasia and the the rationale for that was compassion by0:35:58the way just so you all know it's it's it's merciful to put these people who are burdensome to themselves and their families and the state who are living0:36:08second-rate lives its merciful to euthanize them and that was a huge campaign in Germany it was after that that the more racial purifications began0:36:20and so that's the disgust thing that's unbelievably important it's it's it's because lots of times people think that conservatives are more anxiety sensitive0:36:30than liberals and that's why they're closed in terms of their ideas that doesn't look right first of all conservatives are less neurotic than liberals although the effect isn't that big so it doesn't look0:36:40and they actually are there they score higher in measures of well-being the most unhappy people are liberal men by the way so but you know people are often0:36:51accused if they're conservative of being fearful and that's why they you know suppress other people's viewpoints but that doesn't look right it's low openness and high orderliness and that looks like it's associated with disgust0:37:01and that looks like it's associated with something called the extended immune system which is the proclivity of people to to keep themselves away from potential sources of contamination it's really terrifying because one of the0:37:13things people often said about Germany was that you know it was a very civilized country and yet it descended into barbarity but conscientiousness is a very good predictor of long-term success and so0:37:26you could say well conscientious societies are more civilized but they're also more orderly and that makes them more discussed sensitive and so what it might have easily might have easily been in Germany was that it was an excess of0:37:38civilization rather than its lack that produced exactly these consequences and that's a far more frightening proposition and one that's I believe much more likely to be true Hitler bathed four times a day and he was also0:37:51an admirer of willpower so he could stand like this for eight hours in the back of a car and the thing about conscientious people is they're very willpower oriented and so if you're unfortunate enough to be sick0:38:02chronically in the house of someone who's conscientious if it's a mental illness you're more likely to relapse because the conscientious person is going to be judgmental and they're going to say to0:38:12you if you're schizophrenic they're going to say well if you just organize yourself and get up in the morning and try a little harder you could overcome this which is of course true except you can't because0:38:22you're schizophrenic and so the pressure put on you by the anger and the contempt is going to increase the probability that you'll relapse so orderly people are very judgmental and you know orderliness is very highly associated0:38:35with things like anorexia and the anorexic is basically someone who's so disgust sensitive that they become unable to tolerate their own body and0:38:44they see it as a source of corruption and imperfection which of course is exactly right it is and it's very difficult thing to maintain order around0:38:53so anyways so what happens out here in this terrible domain where scar rules is that things turn into a totalitarian state you know and he's presented here0:39:04as as a Nazi like leader and see there's another thing that's really interesting this even deeper than this from a mythological perspective I don't know if0:39:13I can even go into it well not really I guess what I'll have to do is satisfy myself with this observation there's always been some antagonism for example0:39:23between the Catholic Church and rationalism and everyone knows that it's a very long-standing antagonism that sort of runs its way through at least0:39:32the last thousand years or so of Western civilization and the people who regarded kaathal catholics as antithetical to science take the Catholics to task for that and describing it as prejudicial and super0:39:45and superstitious and fair enough but there's something else going on there that's more important and that's the observation and this is at a deep level again the observation that rationality has one big problem so it's0:39:59it can easily become arrogant and believe in its own theories so if you're smart and there's gonna be some of you people who are like that to some of you your primary the primary trait that distinguishes you from other people over0:40:12the course of your whole life was that you are more intelligent than most and you may have staked your identity on that and an over value and rationality and the problem with that is that you you make a theory of0:40:23the world and then you tend to assume that it's 100% correct that's the tendency to fall in love with your own theories and that's what a totalitarian does the totalitarian says here's the damn theory and it's exactly right and0:40:36you're gonna act it out exactly and if you don't well we've got some special treats in mind for you and one of the most terrible things that that I0:40:45encountered while reading about totalitarianism and this was even more true of the Soviet Union under Stalin was that the true believers and and0:40:54there were many of them we're in a terrible position because according to their own doctrine they're already involved in the process that was going0:41:03to bring utopia to mankind the problems had already been solved but many of them were still suffering terribly as individuals but if you're a totalitarian believer in Utopia your own suffering becomes heretical right because your0:41:16suffering is an indication that the damn theory isn't correct and so then you're in a terrible position because you either admit that the theory isn't correct and fall apart because of that and maybe face terrible punishment as0:41:27well or you have to separate yourself from your own suffering and lie about it fundamentally and of course that's exactly what happened in places like the0:41:36Soviet Union where everyone lied about everything all of the time to themselves to their family members to their friends the entire system was completely0:41:46permeated by lies and so you get this terrible place that scars the ruler over which is totalitarian and brutal and murderous and resentful and deceitful0:41:58and arrogant all at the same time and that's brought about so mmm-hmm the0:42:07columbine guys for example when they're justifying their murderous nests and their plans to shoot up the schools they keep making reference to the fact that0:42:17people had slighted them for example you know and insulted them and that they were alienated they weren't bullied exactly the way the press made it out I don't know if they were bullied anymore than people usually are in high school0:42:28but they took their alienation personally and we guarded that their isolation from common humanity as indication of the pathology0:42:38of everything and then they went out to destroy and that's exactly what this sort of thing represents that's the uniformity and you see he's got this0:42:47kind of vicious grin on his face which is malicious and and pleased all at the same time there's no fear in that it'sit's quite quite the opposite and0:42:57there's another image of you know using what's essentially imagery of Hell which everyone understands strangely enough and that associates him with the0:43:06crescent moon and the crescent moon is well it's a symbol of darkness and and the underworld fundamentally so all right so anyway so that's we see the the0:43:16underworld we see that which bullet lies beyond the light and in there we see a fragment of that that's basically hellish and all of that's incorporated into the story and everyone understands that when they see it even without I0:43:28would say the overt references to Nazism okay so now scar has a plan he's going to kill the king and he's going to do that by putting what the King loves in0:43:39danger and so scar feigning sympathy has enticed Simba down into this ravine and scars minions are going to cause a wildebeest stampede right so a mindless0:43:53stampede to to to put to put Simba in danger and so that's what happens here the Whale debate start to march into the ravine and everyone is making a scar0:44:09tells Mufasa that Simba is down in that ravine and entices him down there and so they're all off running to see if they can save Simba and then you see Mufasa0:44:22running in front of the wildebeest herd trying to try to find his son and trying to stay ahead of them the mad mob that's put his son in danger and so he tries to0:44:32escape climbing up the Butte which is almost a sheer cliff and when it gets to the top mmm his brother is waiting for him there and he asks him to pull him up0:44:43and scar basically before he indicates that he's betraying him and puts his claws into Moo fusses paws and throws him off the cliff and so that's0:44:56that and it's a sad part of the story it's a hard part that's very hard on kids because the father has died and you know it's a rare kid who won't cry about that scene in particular where you see Simba very upset and his father dying0:45:09now this is a hard part of the story to interpret and I don't know if it's because of my lack of ability to interpret her because the story takes a weird twist here but there-there is this confusion in the story about whether0:45:21Simba is an innocent victim who set up for the murder of his father or whether he actually bears some guilt for it you know and he's broken some rules and and0:45:31that and and so on so he's not exactly placed in the position of innocence but of course he's also been set up by scar in any case scar tells him that it's his0:45:40fault pure and pure and that because of that he's going to have to leave he's gonna have to be banished beyond the kingdom now you see this motif quite0:45:54quite frequently in heroes stories where the hero has to be raised outside of the kingdom that happens with King Arthur for example and it happens with Harry0:46:06Potter right because Harry Potter is raised by muggles instead of being inside the Magic Kingdom so it's a very common theme and partly what it means is that it means two things one is that you do grow up alienated from your culture0:46:18to some degree there's no way around that because the culture doesn't match you perfectly and it doesn't work for you perfectly and it's old and it's kind0:46:27of corrupt and it alienates you as it's shaping you and so you're going to develop some separation from it and you see that in intergenerational rhetoric0:46:36you know we're the new generation has the proclivity to blame the previous generation for everything that's wrong with the current system and fair enough you know because you do inherit everything that's wrong of course you0:46:47also inherit everything that's going well which is a good thing to also notice but the idea is that you can't help but be alienated from let's call it0:46:57the patriarchy for for lack of a better word because it's got a tyrannical element and because it's not matched well to you so but then there's also0:47:06this other issue which is well maybe you're not being successful by the terms that are by the values that are instantiated in the current system and0:47:16you might say well that's because the system is set up in an unfair manner and fair enough but it's also possibly because you're just not very good at acting out those values right so part of the reason you get alienated from your0:47:28culture is because the culture is corrupt but another part of the reason is you're just not doing as well as you could be you're not playing by the rules properly and so you get alienated and you're unsuccessful because of your own0:47:40inadequacies and so the movie plays both of those it's obviously Simba is set up but there is an intimation that he's not entirely blameless as well anyways he's0:47:52very broken up about this and no wonder it's also partly a story of the emergence of adolescence because you know when you're a child and you're0:48:01ensconced right inside the familial framework then you sort of exist within that system of rules like you would under the piagetian scheme but when you0:48:10become an adolescent then there's much more of a proclivity to break free and to start breaking rules and so that's also akin in some sense to the death of0:48:19the father and that's a necessary developmental stage anyway scar comes down into the ravine it's all foggy now because that goes along with the sort of0:48:29murkiness of death and tells Simba that it's his fault and that he's going to have to leave he's going to have to leave the kingdom of his father which0:48:40makes sense now his father's dead so how are you gonna once your father has died how are you going to stay around in his kingdom so to speak so and then scar0:48:49tries to get these hyenas to go track Simba down and kill him so and Zazu goes0:48:58back to tell all the rest of the Lions that Mufasa is dead and that Simba has disappeared and then scar takes over Pride Rock and so what's happened now is0:49:09the malevolent element of the King has obtained control over state right and so this is the king the wise King wasn't paying enough attention0:49:21that's one way of looking at it and so the malevolent part of the state has now got control this is a very very old idea I've traced it back at least several0:49:31thousand years in its in its representation in stories you can see it in Egyptian mythology for example so the idea is that as the social structure builds in complexity it offers you the protection of a functioning complex0:49:43system but it also becomes increasingly likely to turn into a tyranny and because it's more and more powerful the fact of its potential for tyranny becomes more and more of a danger and so then the question is well what are the0:49:57factors that encourages it turning into a tyranny and one factor would be the wise part of it is not paying enough attention to the malevolent part of it0:50:06and you could say that's true at the state level it's also true at the individual level right you have to watch your own proclivity to upset yourself and other people and and take that into account and pay careful attention to it0:50:19because otherwise it can gain control especially because you're gonna avoid looking at it and one of the characteristics of the wise King who0:50:28gets overthrown by the tyrant is that he has an evil brother and he won't pay enough attention to him he avoids he doesn't look and so the the evil King0:50:37gets the upper hand and that's what's happened here and so notice now he takes possession of Pride Rock not in full daylight right but at night so that ties0:50:47his rule into the rule of unconscious processes and and malevolence alright so Simba runs away from the kingdom out into the desert now why is0:50:58that well you remember maybe you remember and maybe you don't maybe don't know it the story of Exodus when Moses takes the Hebrews out of Egypt they end up in a desert well why well it's because when you leave Kingdom no matter0:51:12how ironical you still fall into disorder you're out in a place that's desert there's no civilization there you know that's what happened to Iraq after0:51:23the Americans went in you know the the Americans the neo-cons were all convinced that the Iraqis would Oh welcome with open arms and there would be this smooth transition to democracy same idea0:51:32and Libya it's like no that's not what happens what happens is the state devolves into a desert chaos and maybe then you can make order but probably not0:51:43and so Simba has left the kingdom and the first thing that happens is he damn near dies in the desert and so you know if you have an old belief system and0:51:52it's not working very well and you abandon it well good for you because you're out of the old belief system but now you're nowhere one of the things that happens to alcoholics for example and and draw a draw other drug addicts0:52:04as well so imagine that you're trying to stop drinking alright fine maybe you have to undergo some medical treatment so when you first stop you don't die of0:52:16seizures because that often happens to people who are addicted to alcohol so and then they get valium or something like that from a doctor to see them through the first bits of what do you call it well of sobering-up and so they0:52:31get through it and then then maybe two weeks later they're not physiologically dependent on alcohol anymore the same thing is true of cocaine but if0:52:40you take them back and you put them in their environment say they go back out of the treatment center back into the normal world they start drinking or using right away again and the reason for that is that well let's say you've0:52:51been an alcoholic for 20 years okay first of all that's all you do for entertainment you drink and all your friends are alcoholics right and so if0:53:05you're gonna stop drinking not only do you have to rid yourself of the of the0:53:17physiological addiction but you have to completely learn a new way of living because what do you know you have to get rid of all your friends because they're all drunks pretty much or if they're not there at least people who are0:53:28facilitating your drinking so you have to build a whole new social network you don't know how to amuse yourself because of course the way you've done that is by going to the bar sitting at home drinking and so there's a huge hole in0:53:38your life you abandon the previous pathological mode a patient but that just leaves you with nothing and then you have to rebuild0:53:47that thing from from from from scratch it's extraordinarily difficult and that's why so many people fail when they're trying to overcome a major addiction so alright so anyways Simba's out there in the desert he's0:53:59left his family and the comforts of home and he's he's discovered by these by Pumbaa and who's a little rats named Tim Timon0:54:11yes he's a meerkat right which are very cool things and they discover him and this is sort of his transition into adolescence and he he kind of finds and0:54:20this is I would say more typical of the male transition into adolescence because females of course hit puberty so much younger the males who aren't very attractive when they're young like and just starting to undergo puberty they're0:54:34not very attractive to females they tend to clump together in in gangs and and and manage the transition over what could be seven years so and that's what0:54:43happens here is Simba joins this little gang of you know these guys are alright but you know they're a little on the primordial side you might say you know0:54:52one of them is basically just a walking gastrointestinal tract and the other one is he's not so bad but he's like you know a foot high really what good is he and so he he's got some second-rate companions out here past the desert but0:55:05he enters he's out of childhood now and now he enters the adolescent world and what happens here is that very quickly in the film he goes from being a little cub to a full full adolescence and there's about a five minute transition0:55:16and so it's the next stage in his development and now he's out there in this paradise which is kind of strange because adolescence really is no no picnic but the idea here is that he really doesn't have any responsibilities0:55:28right none and that is one thing about adolescences and even the stage of life that you guys are out is you have lots to do but you're not really responsible0:55:37for anyone other than yourself and so even though you might be quite burdened with your current responsibilities it's nothing compared to what it will be like when you you know you have responsibilities for four children for0:55:49example or for the people that are working for you or or whatever so anyways out here it's a kind of of place as well and adolescence is like0:55:58that we've had high school students try to do the future authoring program you know where they have to think three to five years down the road it's like0:56:07forget that they just can't do it and I've watched them and what happens is you you immediately become aware of just how little high school students know when they're like fifteen or sixteen three to five years forget it0:56:18they don't have the world knowledge to project themselves out that far in the future not even close and so we've built a high school version that helps them design a better future three to six months down the road and even that's0:56:29really pushing it but you know adolescents are more impulsive and they live more for the moment and there's some utility in that I mean being0:56:38impulsive and living for the moment is one of the things that gets you pregnant as a teenager and that is certainly one way that the species has managed to propagate itself and so positive emotion and impulsivity are very tightly linked0:56:51and so he's out there in this adolescent delusional fantasy that might be one way of thinking about it but more important he's out there where he's in a domain0:57:01now where the impulses of the moment basically take precedence and so and I think they sing some song about yeah Hakuna Matata right which basically0:57:15means do whatever you do whatever you want and tomorrow will take care of itself or something like that so it's very impulsive and lacks all responsibilities one of the things that I would recommend to you if you want to0:57:26protect yourself from ideological possession shall we say is that when you hear people speak politically and they don't say anything about your0:57:35responsibilities you should probably stop listening to them because whenever they're trying to offer you something if it doesn't come along with an equivalent cost there's something being hidden from you and they're appealing to the part of0:57:47you that's well I would say at best adolescent so alright so anyways he's out there in his little adolescent paradise and with his dopey chums and0:57:58back at at Pride Rock things are not good right Skaar who's arrogant and refuses to learn and who will not establish a reasonable relationship with0:58:11the females all he does is tyrannize over them he ends up ruling over a completely barren landscape and that's really what happens in totalitarian states and we also know quite interestingly is that one of the best0:58:23predictors of economic development in a state is the degree to which they extend rights to women it's one of the best predictors and I would say well if0:58:32you're going to terrorize your own women you're gonna Tarin eyes everything you're gonna Terran eyes ideas you're gonna Terran eyes structures like if you have to enslave your own women you're you've del adapted a pretty damn0:58:43pathological view of the world and the probability that that narrow constrained restricted viewpoint is going to pay off for you economically is extraordinarily low so anyways Skaar it's like what happened in the Soviet Union no part of0:58:56the reason it collapsed by 1989 is that it just could not move any farther it was like this really complicated motor that was worn completely out that no one0:59:07had ever taken care of and it's just ground to a halt it just stopped working because it because it didn't work and so if your0:59:16totalitarian and you won't update your system and adjust it then it wears out and grinds to a halt and everything becomes unproductive no it's it's not0:59:25easy to figure out what makes a society productive because you might say well it's Natural Resources or something like that first of all natural resources are very often a curse to a country because they produce corruption they call that0:59:37the Dutch disease there's a reason for that you can look it up but natural resources in and of themselves are by no means sufficient to guarantee the well-being of a country Japan has virtually no0:59:49natural resources at all and it's really rich and one of the prime natural resources actually seems maybe there's two one is honesty another is trust and0:59:59if you can set up a society where people are roughly honest which means they do what they say they're going to do and where the default bargaining position on1:00:08both sides is trust then the probability that that culture will become wealthy is very very high so and a functional legal system is also a natural resource of1:00:18tremendous tremendous value you know it's partly why people in China for example wealthy people in China are dumping their money into the real estate market in North America like mad because one of the things you do know if you buy1:00:30real estate in North America is you actually own it it's still gonna be yours 20 years in the future 30 years in the future there's no doubt about that and so that fact of ownership is embedded in the functioning legal system1:00:42and that's what gives those sorts of properties crazy value you know much to the much to the problematic situation for all of you people who are at some1:00:53point most of you are gonna try to buy property in Toronto and that's really going to be entertaining so now look the the other thing about scars he's got the little bird locked up right that's the vision of the king well he doesn't want1:01:05to know anything he already knows everything so why does he need this stupid bird flying around telling him what's going on the last thing he wants to know is what's going on yeah Stalin I mean1:01:16God he gave that guy bad news or good news he was going to have you killed it kept the bad news to a minimum and that's a real problem right because if1:01:25you torture people who bring you bad news then you're never going to learn anything well you don't have to if you already know everything anyways and so that's the situation here well his little minions the hyenas are getting1:01:38pretty unhappy because they haven't had anything to eat and the reason for that is they've just stripped the landscape bare right I mean and I read at the1:01:47demise of the Soviet Union that something like 10 to 15 percent of the entire land mass of the Soviet Union had been rendered permanently uninhabitable by industrial pollution so you know that I don't remember if that included1:02:00Chernobyl you know where that terrible nuclear accident took place but but there were massive domains of devastation and in those countries that you know will take hundreds of years to fix so anyways when scar rules everyone1:02:14starves that's a good way of thinking about it or everyone dies but that's okay because that's really what he's after anyway so that works out quite nicely now back out here in paradise I mean look at him how pathetic can you1:02:25get look at the expression on that creatures face you know he's he selfs he's sated like someone who's just eaten a gallon of ice cream and he's got this1:02:34pathetic self-satisfied naive clueless unconscious grin on his face which the1:02:44animators did a very nice job of capturing like that's a complicated expression and you just want to slap him and that's exactly what should happen and that's exactly what does happen so anyways he's out there be an unconscious1:02:55dingbat well his society is degenerating and that's bloody well worth thinking about because that's an archetypal trope right it's like things are sinking around you the question is what are you doing about it you know are you just1:03:07staying in kind of a blithe unconsciousness because you can get your next meal are you gonna wake up and do something about it well that's the call of the self so now we go back to two Rafiki here and he knows what's going on1:03:20in the kingdom he's a symbol of the self and he also has some inkling that Simba is still alive so so the son of the king is still alive1:03:29despite the fact that the land has become ruled by a tyrant and the son is absent he's still around somehow and so in a union from the Union perspective1:03:40there isn't much distinction between the self and the and the and the child the self is the sum total of all possibility and the child is possibility itself and1:03:51so so let's say you've become an adolescent you're all cynical right and everything's falling apart around you which is the typical state of human1:04:01beings right because adolescents are cynical generally speaking and everything's falling around falling apart around them generally speaking and so what do you have to do in order to to do something about that well one is you1:04:13have to be drawn by the call of wisdom and the other part is that you have to rediscover that part of yourself that's a childlike part that's associated with1:04:22the son and associated with that early you know the early exposure of Simba to the son you have to find that again and then trust that some childlike1:04:31exploration and a bit of manifestation of faith might get you to the next place and so that's what's happening here with a little you know the baboon and the1:04:40tree and the and the drawing so anyways he knows that Simba is alive now and so he goes off to find him and meanwhile Simba and his dopey companions are out hunting for bugs you know because he's a lion you know he1:04:52should meet bugs for crying out loud but they're easy and so you see this scene where Pumbaa goes after this bug and then another lion shows up and chases1:05:01him so she's gonna kill him and eat him and ha see that's an interesting thing because one of the things that happens I suppose you could think about this one1:05:12of the things that happens in late adolescence is that the formation of male gangs is often broken up by the proclivity of one or more members of1:05:22that gang to get involved in an individual romantic relationship and so the idea that the female lion is the carnivore the female is the carnivore1:05:32that will devour the group is exactly right and so what a girl will do often if she's in relationship with you know somebody like a young man or an older1:05:43adolescent is she'll try to separate him from his dopey friends and like no wonder you know why wouldn't she do that because he does have dopey friends and it'd be better for him if he could get beyond them and so anyways they're1:05:55pretty freaked out about this and so then Simba goes out and has a fight with this lion to protect his dopey chums and I'm sure you don't need any explanation1:06:04about what that means and they have this huge fight and neljä who it turns out to be pins him and so that goes back to the beginning of the story where when he1:06:15first encountered her she pinned him all the time she's an animal figure right and now what she does immediately is shame him so she he's an atom a figure1:06:25in part she's an animal figure in part because she actually does shame him right so she's the gateway to higher consciousness she makes him self-conscious and rightly so but he's also a she's also a psychological figure1:06:37because he imagined that when a young man is establishing a relationship with a young woman and he's he's enamored of her he's falling in love he projects an1:06:46idea onto her and that ideal is going to be partially fulfilled by the relationship the degree to which is unspecified and sometimes it'll collapse completely but he projects an ideal on to her because otherwise he wouldn't be1:06:57attracted to her and then the ideal judges him and so that makes him feel all self-conscious and and useful which is useful because he is useless1:07:06and should feel that way and so it's part of the impetus to growing up so and of course one of the you need necessity in order to mature you because to mature1:07:18is to take on responsibility and you're not going to feel that impetus unless adopting the responsibility has some sort of payoff and women tend to mate1:07:28across an up dominance hierarchy so they tend to actually like men who are useful and so if they encounter a man who isn't useful at all they're gonna that's1:07:37exactly what's going to happen they're gonna not be happy about that in the least and so and no wonder and I think the reason for that it's an economic and1:07:47a biological reason the reason is is that women are in the position of having to take care of infants primarily and an infant is a very heavy load and so even1:07:57a woman who's extraordinarily competent is going to find herself substantially limited in her possibilities if she has an infant and so then she's looking around for someone who'll pick up part of the load it's perfectly reasonable1:08:08and you're not gonna pick up part of the load if you're completely useless and so it's in the woman's best interest not to have two children roughly speaking so1:08:19anyway she pins him and then he's all resentful about it immediately because she's calling him on his stupid friends and the fact that he's out there gallivanting impulsively in paradise when there's real problems to be solved1:08:29and so look at him he's all resentful and useless and and you know feeling put upon and picked upon and you just you got to slap him again fundamentally and1:08:38she's just completely stunned by that it's like and tells them you know where's the sim buy used to know right well he's a little doubtful about the1:08:47whole situation there the animators do a very nice job of this part of the movie because one of the things you see is that his eyebrows are always pointing up in the middle whereas his father's eyebrows were pointing down in the1:08:58middle and so that's the difference between this which is sort of like things are happening to me and this which is more like I'm imposing my will on things and that's an immature face and and the animators capture that1:09:10brilliantly so here's where she shames him again she tells him how much she liked him when he was little and you know a potential king and how hurt she is that he's this useless you know wide-eyed naive impulsive1:09:25pleasure-seeking adolescent and she tells him that she missed him and god only knows why because look at him again it's like completely appalling palling1:09:37creature and this is when Pumbaa and Timon sing that song about the fact that you know their friends doomed because you know this girl's got him and and1:09:48then they switch into another archetypal scene and so they're falling in love here and so the paradisal imagery is really highlighted in the movie and so1:09:57they go off and have this like romp self-reflective romp through this new paradise and they wrestle around and and play and then he pins her more or less1:10:11and she licks him that's that's not so good and this is one of the most brilliant shots I think that the animators manage1:10:22because she's obviously pushing this a little bit farther than he knows what to do with and so they're wrestling and he she licks them and then she lays down1:10:31and makes this face which is every single class I've ever showed this to all laugh when they see that image and that's a good example so Freud said that1:10:41jokes were a good route into the unconscious so the question is and this is an archetypal facial expression and everyone knows exactly what it means there's something sexually seductive about it and something very sexually1:10:53seductive about it despite the fact that it's a lioness and the animators do an extraordinarily good job of capturing that and so that has a huge effect on1:11:02him while these guys know that hey the game's up man it's like they know they're dead whatever attractions they can offer are paling in comparison to1:11:12this so so anyways things don't really progress past out but you know he gets a hint of her longing for him what's waiting for him if he grows up and the1:11:24fact that she's completely disappointed in him because he's so completely useless and so now he's lounging about you know like some basement with cheeto dust all over his chest and and trying to justify his absolutely1:11:38useless life and you know saying that he doesn't have any responsibility to the devastated Kingdom and he's out there where Hakuna Matata you know I can just do whatever I want and and follow my impulsive pleasures and she thinks he's1:11:50pretty pathetic and the reason for that is because he is actually pretty pathetic and she she tells him that you know she's extraordinarily disappointed1:11:59he gets all pouty about it I mean even here you see when he when he's got kind of an aggressive look on his face there's still nothing about it that's commanding it's petulant right it's like well now I'm irritated but he's got no1:12:12force and and still completely appalling in this in this particular situation so she judges him very harshly and leaves and that makes him think yeah he make1:12:23gets all self-conscious because this female that he admires wants to have nothing to do with him and so he's first of all then he thinks1:12:32well maybe I'll just hate all women which is you know pretty pathetic conclusion and but a very common one and the next is well maybe there's actually something wrong with him right which is a very painful bit of self-reflection so1:12:43he he had he notes that there's something wrong with him and then he calls out to his father and says look you said you were always going to be here for me and you're not and so what's happening is that he's become aware of1:12:56the insufficiency of his current adolescent value structure and he wants something beyond it which would be associated with identification with the father but he can't he can't find the father the father's dead it's like when1:13:07Pinocchio goes down to the bottom of the ocean to bring Geppetto up from the depths right that's the situation that that Simba finds himself in right now1:13:16the father's gone and has to be brought up from the depths so this is where the movie takes the the archetypal pathway of an initiation ceremony so he says he1:13:26wants to change now one of the things Carl Rogers one of the clinicians that will talk about pointed out was that if if someone was going to come to psychotherapy there's some things that had to happen before they went into1:13:37psychotherapy and one thing that had to happen was that they had to admit that there was something wrong and they had to want to change you had to have that before went into the psychotherapeutic1:13:47situation and what happens here is Simba is actually he's dropped his arrogance and he's looking upward kind of like Geppetto wishing on the star in1:13:57Pinocchio he's looking upwards he looking towards something higher and he wants to transform himself so he's asked the question how can I change for the1:14:06better and he doesn't get an answer and then Rafiki shows up so what does that mean it means that as soon as you know you're wrong about something as soon as1:14:18you admit that you're wrong about something and you open the door to potential change that part of you will respond so and you know this because1:14:27think about this you're thinking so you ask yourself a question because that's what you do when you're thinking and then you generate some answers it's like1:14:36it's very strange the thinking will actually work you can actually come up with answers if you think about something and so this square this issue is okay I thought I was real good in my little impulsive paradise but then it1:14:48turns out that I'm just a half-wit and I noticed that and I want to do something about so the question is now the question is has now been posed and what1:14:57young would say is the deeper part of yourself the part that still contains your undeveloped potential will respond to that posed question and change the1:15:06way that you look at things and change the way that you act it'll start it'll start changing things so that you can tap those parts of yourself that are not yet developed and you certainly do that in psychotherapy but you can do that1:15:18young said that psychotherapy could be replaced by a supreme moral effort and by that he meant was that if you really wanted things to be better if you wanted to get your act together and you admitted that you were insufficient in1:15:29your current state and you meditated on the issue and tried to figure out what you should do next to make to put yourself together that you would be able1:15:38to find out that there's something in you that guides the process of development that's the self that's a higher its the higher self in some sense it's the thing that remains constant across transformations you know because1:15:51you're somewhere then you fall apart then you get somewhere else but there's something outside of that that's guiding that process and that's that's also the self that's what you would be and you can communicate in some1:16:02sense with what you could be and that's a very strange thing about human beings anyways Rafiki shows up and Simba is sitting by the water self reflecting1:16:11there's a little pebble that drops into the pool to attract his attention and up pops the self and Rafik he's a trickster he tells him weird jokes and he hits him1:16:20with a stick a bunch of times thank God because someone really needs to and he he makes some stupid jokes about bananas and kind of entices Simba into following1:16:30him right he lets him know that he has a secret and he entices Simba into following him so simha's all of a sudden become interested in something so if you1:16:39ask yourself what the next developmental stages and you really want to know that all of a sudden you're going to become interested in things that might move you to the next stage and that'll happen more or less unconsciously so anyways1:16:51Rafiki entices him and then runs away and Simba follows him and well that's where he reveals himself as a sage and then he tells Simba to follow him and he1:17:03goes underground and this is the initiation scene right which we talked about at the beginning of the class this is the descent into the underworld and it's a it's a prerequisite to radical personality transformation so anyways he1:17:18goes through this horrifying underground tunnel system where everything's all tangled up which is you know if you ever fall into chaos that everything down1:17:27there in chaos is tangled up it's a tangled mess and he's quite and there's horrifying music going on in the background and he goes deeper and deeper until Rafiki says he finds a pool in the middle of the chaos a deep pool and1:17:41that's another symbol of the self it's it's the deep unconscious to something down there that's alive that can be drawn up to the surface and so Rafiki1:17:50shows him the pool and Simba who's quite terrified at this point looks in it and the first thing he sees is he only sees himself he only sees his own reflection1:17:59and Rafiki says look deeper now you see what the animators do here it's very cool so there's Simba and there's his reflection but you see that is already half is farther and you look at the1:18:11difference in the eyebrows and the so there's a there's a tightness of jaw and a firmness of face that's starting to manifest itself there and that means1:18:21that he's starting to see the man he could be beyond the adolescent that's a good way of thinking about it and then all of a sudden well they're you know that's a whole different face right that's a seriously different face that1:18:34everything's going in and that it's like get out of my way because things are going to happen around me very judgmental as well so it's not it's not naive by any stretch of the imagination but you know we know as far there's a1:18:47good guy and so there's something archetypal about this and so he sees the man he could be reflected back to him and then that's which is that actually becomes a cosmic event and we switch up to the sky instead1:18:59and so Mufasa manifests himself basically as a solar deity and he tells Simba that he's forgotten who he is which is the son of a king and that he1:19:13should remember that and start acting like it and that's an archetypal idea so if you're just a useless adolescent then1:19:22you've forgotten who you are and the consequence of that is that the state is going to fall around fall apart around you and you're not going to do anything to fix it and you're not going to be good for anything and no one's gonna be1:19:32able to rely on you and you're gonna be all whiny and resentful and then after that it even gets worse and so that's basically what Mufasa tells him and so1:19:41Simba is like blown away by this vision right because he sees what he could be and also what he's not which is pretty damn horrifying so anyways the storm so1:19:54to speak clears and Rafiki comes up and and Simba's a lot more thoughtful and not quite as whiny and resentful anymore and Rafiki leaves and so Simba now knows1:20:06what he's supposed to do he's supposed to stop being useless and take on the moral requirements of setting the Kingdom straight and so he runs back1:20:16across the desert there's all sorts of impressive music happening and then he comes back to his kingdom and it's not looking so good and that's the consequence of his his abandonment of it that's a big1:20:27part of it so now it's dead but also his abandonment of it - nothing but malevolence and chaos and so he's pretty taken aback and what's happened and that1:20:38he exaggerates his guilt or it should anyways and neljä shows up and and they decide they're gonna do something about this so in the meantime1:20:51Simba's mother is complaining about the fact that there's no food in the kingdom anymore and that they've gone as far as they can and Skaar doesn't want to hear this so he he attacks her and Simba decides to go to war and so this is1:21:05where he wakes up and he's willing to encounter the shadow at this point and so he confronts scar and scars very concerned about this because actually1:21:15Simba is looking pretty impressive now and he thought he was dead besides and so he tries to use treachery and whiny Nessun and subordination to excuse1:21:26himself but he's planning to overthrow Simba nonetheless to resist him so he tells scar to leave he's going to banish him to the nether regions outside of the1:21:38kingdom like scar did to him and scar basically refuses and then a storm gathers right and lights the Deadwood around the rock on fire so we have1:21:52another kind of descent into hell seen here very common in Disney movies this this this notion of the hero fighting the evil force on the edge of something1:22:01that's burning it's quite a common motif you see it in Sleeping Beauty for example so they have a big war and scar ends up putting Simba in the same position that Mufasa was in and then he whispers to him that he killed his1:22:13father so Simba has been thinking all along that it was only his fault and it is sort of his fault but he didn't know that there was a more archetypal theme playing out in the background which is that societies are always endangered by1:22:26malevolence always and that's independent to some degree of Simba's decisions and his and his lack thereof anyways scar tells him because he thinks he's won and that energizes Simba to have this sort of final battle he leaps1:22:40out from the and they have a big fight and he pins him basically and the female lioness has come to his aid and Simba tells him that1:22:52again that he has to leave and so they have a big fight that's a particularly good bit of animation so there's real demonic aspect to scar they're sort of1:23:01King of Hell imagery and but he loses and then ha he blames his minions he blames the hyenas for everything terrible this happening forgetting that1:23:11they can hear him and then he falls off the cliff and the hyenas go in and finish him off so it's pretty brutal ending for poor old scar eaten by his own minions and then scars dead and Simba has one and so1:23:27the rains come immediately and so what does that mean well it means that when proper order is restored in a kingdom then everything starts to flourish again and so the rains come and then while it's raining Simba climbs up to the top1:23:42of the rock and now he's completely mature right that the facial the pathetic facial expression disappears entirely knee straightens himself up because now he's full of serotonin after having defeated good old scar and all1:23:54the lionesses are roaring and he climbs up Pride Rock and they roar at him which is good they're tough and he's tough and they showing their teeth it's it's not1:24:03it's not a society of naive and harmless creatures it's it's something that's got some bite and the rains come and then the next thing you see is the1:24:15restoration of the kingdom and so basically that what that means is that if the individual is willing to confront their own shadow and then to take on the1:24:24malevolent forces that continually undermine society then harmony can be restored and everyone can do well and so then we have a return to the beginning1:24:33right and so Simba and nella are now a couple along with Pumbaa and Timon and they have a baby and Rafiki shows up and does the same thing you know he's gonna1:24:52present the baby to the Sun and have all the animals bow again and and that's the end of the movie so that's all packed1:25:05that's all packed into an archetypal tale and and so one of the things that young would point out is that you all understood this right while you were1:25:16watching it because otherwise at some level all these things made sense they all cohered and the narrative appeared to be an appropriate narrative even when1:25:25you're a little kid it because it strikes a chord inside you and well that chord the thing that it strikes inside you that's the archetype because if1:25:34there wasn't something inside of you so to speak that this could communicate with and it would fall on deaf ears and it speaks to the part of you that's most1:25:43particularly human and it's a story of the development of the sovereign individual that's that's the right way to think about it's a hero archetype that's another way of thinking about it and people are going to get that story1:25:56one way or another and now and then a piece of public art comes along like this that does a good job of encapsulating and it captures everyone's imagination and so that's why you've all seen it and why I presume you all1:26:08enjoyed it when you were kids and maybe still enjoy it now so well that was1:26:17actually faster than I thought it would be today so this is what I'm gonna do we've got 20 minutes so why don't you think for a minute or two and I'll take some questions which I don't often do but and they can be any questions about1:26:28anything we've covered in class so take a minute and yes1:26:43- movie you feel like you know the character but it's not exactly that character like become so - you know can1:26:55like it feels like you know for a wise old man archetype yeah yeah well there's not much difference between Gandalf and1:27:08who's the wizard in Harry Potter Dumbledore they could be the same guy it's right right and so well that that is precisely the indication of the1:27:18existence of an archetype it's like an a movie one time a student asked me well if if there are these archetypes why don't we just tell the archetype over and over why do we need fiction for example which is like a bridge if1:27:30there's individuals here and the archetype is up here you know at a high level of abstraction fiction sort of fills the gap between them and so what you want is a story that's archetypal so that you understand its basic structure1:27:41but you want enough variation and specificity so that it's new and interesting and also applicable to you so you have to humanize the archetype to some degree otherwise it's so abstract you can't you can't relate to it and and1:27:53good stories really do that they bridge the gap and some of them are more personal and less archetypal but if they're completely non archetypal1:28:02there's nothing about them that captures you it doesn't have any force and then if it's two archetypal well it gets to be too abstract and you can't relate to it so good fiction writers and and good purveyors of dramatic entertainment we1:28:15think about it as entertainment are really good at occupying that middle position so yeah and they reveal the archetype through the individual that's one way of thinking about it and and that keeps it fresh and you know one of1:28:28the things that you pointed out to was that you're you're going to be manifesting archetypal patterns of behavior in your life whether you know it or not even when you do something like fall in1:28:39love because that's going to be a very particular experience for you but it's also a very common experience at the same time right and and romance is older1:28:49than people that's one way of looking about looking at it I mean because sex is older than human beings and so you're in the grip of something that's really1:28:59ancient but at the same time it's really personal and so a good novelist or a writer of fiction is able to capture both the personal element of that to1:29:08show show the transpersonal within the personal and so and in some sense your destiny property study from a union perspective is to1:29:18consciously express an archetype and so be the archetype there's a bunch of them but one of them would be the archetype of the hero and you're supposed to manifest that in the conditions of your own life so that makes the archetype1:29:29real in the conditions of your own life and Jung would also say that when you're doing that your experience will manifest itself as meaningful and so it's because1:29:38in some sense you're acting in accordance with your deepest instincts technically speaking right you're you're acting out what it means to be human in the world and you're gonna find that meaningful so yes1:30:01like1:30:14like I just like because it's mine process from life like happy but is like appreciating to1:30:27help so like you know like love and subsidies1:30:40okay so the question is about the relationship between the shadow and the okay so the first thing you have to understand with regards to trying to1:30:53come to terms with the conception of the shadow is to understand the idea of persona and persona is the you that you present when you want people to accept1:31:02and like you often like let's say that you go to a party and you're trying to1:31:13impress the people that are there and you're trying to get them to like you and so you maybe get jabbed out a little bit and you laugh and you know you're1:31:23you go along with everyone so that they like you and then you go home and you're bitterly resentful about the way that you were put down at this party and that's going to make all sorts of aggressive I wish I could have said it's1:31:35gonna make all sorts of aggressive and vengeful thoughts sort of flashed through your imagination well the first part of the problem is that you were too1:31:44much persona right you sacrificed yourself in some sense at the party so that people would like you and in the second part you're refusing to admit to1:31:54the existence of those elements of you that would have actually protected you from doing that so let's say you go home and you're all bitter and resentful and you have fantasies of revenge I mean that reveals to you the shadow part of1:32:07you that's aggressive and the thing is you actually need that because if you would have integrated that more successfully into your personality when you went to the party you wouldn't have had lit you wouldn't have had to let1:32:17people put you down to get them to like you you know instead of having a face like this which says I'll take anything that's coming my way you know you have a1:32:27face and a stance that's more determined and assertive and if you manifest that properly people aren't gonna mess with you to begin with but you know you may have already adopted a morality that says well I have1:32:38to be likeable and I shouldn't do anything that causes any conflict and I shouldn't ever you know hurt anybody's feelings and so you're just to present yourself as a punching bag and you think that that makes you a good person but it1:32:50doesn't and there's no integration of the shadow in that situation so you see that at the end of the movie we know I mentioned this when Simba1:32:59climbs up the rock to take control of it all the female lionesses bare their teeth and he roars it's like that aggressiveness is integrated into him and so resentment is a really good emotion for making contact with the1:33:13shadow side because if you're resentful about something it basically reveals two things it either means that you're immature and you should stop whining and1:33:22get on with things you know someone's ass this often happens with adolescents who are asked say by their mother to clean up the room they get all resentful about it it's like shut up and clean up your room you know it's not that much to1:33:33ask or so that can be a gateway into the observation of your own immaturity or it's possible that you're resentful because people really have been poking1:33:44at you too much and taking and and taking shots at you and oppressing you but what that means is that you've got some things to say that you haven't been1:33:53willing to say or don't know how to say right you can't stand up for yourself properly and in order to do that you have to grow some teeth and be willing1:34:02to use them and again that's something that might violate your morality because you might say well I shouldn't be able to bite people and the thing is yes you1:34:11should be able to bite people hard and if you're able to bite them then generally you don't have to but they need to know that you can because otherwise especially people who are badly socialized they'll just keep1:34:23encroaching on you and encroaching on you and encroaching on you and encroaching on you until you you put up a wall like someone who's really well put together won't do that you know because they're sophisticated but if you1:34:37run into people who only have boundaries because other people impose them on them and you won't do it you're gonna be the bullied one in the office for example1:34:46you're not gonna get a raise people aren't gonna credit you with your own work other people are gonna take credit for it you know and you're gonna go home angry because you're doing your best and you're trying to get along with everyone1:34:57and nothing ever goes your way well it's because you're a pushover and you think that's good because you confuse harmlessness with with with1:35:07reality it's it's about it's not right just because you can't do any damage doesn't mean your morale just means your you don't have the capability for mayhem1:35:16and that makes you a pushover I mean the yogya stuff is very very dark you know it's very dark because his notion of what constitutes a moral human being is1:35:27much different from the typical view he really thinks you get that horrible side of yourself integrated so it's up there where you can use it because otherwise1:35:36you're you're dangerous you can't say no to people and you'll go along with the crowd and then if the crowd does something particularly pathological1:35:46which it's liable to do you won't be able to resist it you won't have the strength of character and so then you'll fall prey to to crowd pathology and1:35:57it'll be because you're too agreeable with a you know with a shadow resentful side that the crowd and its murderous intent is gonna act out so yes yes so1:36:15the question is the relationship between archetype archetypes and the idea of memes well oh yeah that's a complicated one so1:36:25Richard Dawkins was the guy who originated the idea of meme and his notion was that you could produce an idea or a set of ideas that had the capacity to propagate across minds for whatever reason it was catchy let's say1:36:38like a like a song that gets stuck in your head you know it and that those he called those memes which was sort of a play on the idea of genes so there are1:36:51these stable sets of ideas that can be transferred across minds well I've often thought when I was reading Dawkins that if he would have kept thinking he would have turned into Carl Jung because an archetype is a meme but it's a really1:37:03really really deep meme so you can imagine that an idea has been sold around for so long and that people have acted out for so long that it's actually1:37:14become part of the landscape that does the selection so think about it this way1:37:26so it's more or less a truism that if you take a male dominance hierarchy the probability that the men at the top of the hierarchy will leave offspring is1:37:35much higher than the probability that the men at the bottom will leave offspring and it's true in many many species now there's a much higher probability of the average female leaving offspring than the average man1:37:47so so now then imagine that there's characteristics that push a man up a dominance hierarchy okay and then imagine that there are characteristics1:37:57that push a man up a set of dominance hierarchies so that each dominance hierarchy has something in common with all of the others it's sort of like the1:38:06idea of a good player of a game being a good sport across games so then imagine that the idea of the successful male starts to become encapsulated in in in1:38:22biology because this species is going to the male part of the species at least is going to be adapting to the selection pressures placed on the male by the male1:38:32dominance hierarchy so what happens is you have a competition between men the men that win the competition find partners in mate so the the male is going to start to adapt to the fact of the selection1:38:45that's implemented by the dominance hierarchy then you can imagine that that's going to take case take place across dominance hierarchies because this is happening in many many situations spread across time and so1:38:58then the idea of how the proper man should act starts to become incorporated in the biology and also in the expectations of the society and then1:39:09that starts to loop so as the expectations become clearer and clearer the notion of what it constitutes success becomes clearer and clearer as1:39:19well and the two things get tangled together now and I think you can see that a manifestation of that whenever you go watch a movie because you1:39:30immediately identify the hero and you identify with them it's like he's the person that your mythological imagination grasps on to and you play1:39:40that out using your body as a representational platform when you watch the movie and so maybe you admire the hero if he's a successful hero you do1:39:49well that admiration is the manifestation of the instinct that drives you towards that kind of behavior and not only can you manifest it in1:39:58which case you're likely to feel good about yourself because you know that sometimes you can feel good about yourself and sometimes not but you're also going to be able to recognize it when you see it in the world and that's1:40:09going to manifest itself in admiration and admiration is the proclivity to imitate so the meme can be soul so you can imagine dominance hierarchies are1:40:21very very old they're like 300 million years old they've been around a very long time and the idea that we have an image of what it takes to climb the dominant targets it's more or less self-evident because1:40:35that's the landscape that selected us and at the same time you know the the archetype the pattern that propagates you up the dominant arc is also the same1:40:45pattern that makes you attractive to women they're the same thing so and of course that's a massively powerful selection mechanism and sexual1:40:56selection has really shaped human beings it's turned us into what we are and that's an interesting thing too because you know this is one of the things that really bothers me about the emphasis of evolutionary scientists on randomness1:41:10it's like the the general mutation generation process is random or quasi random we don't know that for sure because there is evidence now that you1:41:19can inherit acquired characteristics and that was nobody thought that was possible 20 years ago so things are have taken a very weird twist in the Darwinian world but for the sake of argument we could say that the mutation1:41:31process is random but the selection process isn't random it's not even close to random ever since creatures have been able to evaluate one another the1:41:42selection process hasn't been random and so basically we're selected by you could say by the manifestation of mind in the world unless you believe1:41:51that women for example exercise no conscious choice in their made selection which seems completely absurd first of all men consciously choose who's going1:42:00to lead them at least in part you know who's going to succeed in a hierarchy and women consciously choose their sexual partners so the idea that the1:42:09selection process that the evolutionary process is random is it's an absurd proposition sexual selection makes it non-random and Darwin knew that he1:42:18emphasized sexual selection a lot but modern biologists since the time of Darwin except for the last about twenty years down played the role of sexual1:42:27selection and I think the reason for that is that it brings mind into the evolutionary process in a way that they don't like and no wonder it's1:42:38complicated you know it's like to some degree we're consciously directing our own evolution at least through the mechanism of selection so1:42:55yes yes well Dawkins just thought of memes is something that weren't he never thought about them is something that could last long enough to play a role in selection itself you know he thought about the Moroz parasitical cognitive1:43:08entities I would say that just sort of floated on the surface of the mental landscape he never he never grappled with the idea that a meme could be1:43:18something that could last for hundreds of millions of years roughly speaking so we got time for one more question if anybody has yes yes from a political1:43:34perspective like if you divide people by their political affiliation it looks like liberal men are the most unhappy they're higher in neuroticism1:43:45I think the openness probably contributes to it as well but we don't and also possibly the low conscientiousness when my graduate students come in or one of the many ways we're gonna talk about this in some1:43:56detail because she's going to tell you because we've also looked at the personality predictors of political correctness which is extraordinarily interesting as well because it doesn't really seem to fall exactly on the1:44:06liberal conservative continuum so we'll talk more about that when we get into the Big Five part of the course okay good we'll see you on Thursday when1:44:17we're going to do a speed review of Freud0:00:002017 Personality 09: Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious
0:00:000:00:10So on to Sigmund Freud We're going to give him somewhat short shrift. I'm afraid because we only have an hour to talk about Freud, but that's okay We could get a fair way through it0:00:21He's still persona non grata, I would say among experimental psychologists and probably clinical psychologists as well But that seems to me to be very unfair0:00:31Freud Freud is one of those thinkers who? All that's left are his mistakes and the reason for that is that everything that he0:00:41Discovered or put forward is so entrenched in our culture now that we think it's self-evident and so everything correct has been assimilated and that just leaves everything that's more or less floating on top to look wrong and0:00:54But Freud is also one of those thinkers who was always wrong in an interesting way and that's very useful. And so I also think that many of the things that he put his finger on that are of0:01:06still disputed for example, the idea of the Oedipus complex are much more useful than people are willing to admit especially in the clinical realm because the eatable complex which we'll talk about quite a bit is actually a0:01:21description of a fairly stable form of familial psychopathology where child gets trapped within the confines of a family because the relationship with one parent or the other or both is so tight that0:01:37they can't break beyond it and maybe because of their own inability to move towards independence but more frequently because of0:01:47What you might describe as a kind of conspiracy between the son and and the parent or the child and the parent that prevents them from moving towards0:01:58Autonomous life and keeps them in a state of essentially a state of childhood dependence Freud said I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients under the influence of an older friend0:02:13And by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious and psychic life The role of instinctual urges and so on out of these findings grew a new science psychoanalysis0:02:24A part of psychology and a new treatment for the neurosis. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory0:02:35Resistance was strong and unrelenting in the end I succeeded in inquiring pupils and building it up in international psychoanalytic Association But the struggle is not over he made that recording just shortly before he died. He moved to to England to escape the Nazis0:02:52Before Freud I guess The mind was It's complicated because Freud of course was not the only person to be thinking along the lines that he thought Pierre0:03:05jennae who was one of his teachers had originated and started to develop many of the ideas that I would say were popularized by Freud but0:03:15The idea of the unconscious mind was not Certainly not as well developed prior to Freud as it became afterwards and0:03:26Before that I suppose You might say that insofar as people thought of the mind at all They thought of in philosophical terms and the mind would be that part of you0:03:38That's that you're aware of like in the dark in The Cartesian sense Descartes said I think therefore I am and it kind of seems in some sense0:03:47Self-evident that you're aware of and have control over the contents of your own mind But that was what Freud really questioned and he questioned it deeply said well0:03:58first of all the idea that you're one thing like one mind is a dubious idea to begin with because People are full of internal contradictions. And then the idea that your mind is all of one type0:04:11it's it's all of one form was also very questionable as far as Freud was concerned because you could be fractionated into subcomponents and0:04:20You know the idea for example that your anger or your sexual desire could be an autonomous part of your personality in some sense It could overtake you and control you. That's really a Freudian idea and0:04:32one of the classic Freudian ideas really is that people are made out of sub personalities and Those sub personalities are alive. And that's one of the things I really like about the psychoanalytic thinkers because even the0:04:46Psychologists who say over the last thirty years are they're about Since maybe longer now anyways, since the demise of behaviorism as an ideology and0:04:57the admission by psychologists that there were There is an active unconscious or many active unconscious which is a better way of thinking about it0:05:07Psychologists still really haven't come to terms with the idea in any deep sense that these unconscious Processes are living things, you know there0:05:16When psychologists talk for example about the cognitive unconscious they're talking about something that that they describe it more machine-like with more machine like metaphors and that's not reasonable you you understand things a lot better if you0:05:30understand that the sub components that make up people the fragmentary bits of them and also the biological subsystems that that are part and parcel of your being are0:05:40Much more intelligently viewed as personalities there there are kind of uni dimensional personalities in some sense so that for example, if you're angry you're nothing, but angry I mean0:05:50That's an overstatement obviously or if you're afraid you're nothing but afraid or if you're hungry you're nothing but hunger well That's certainly true If you get hungry enough or thirsty0:05:59Or too hot or any of those things you you kind of collapsed to a simpler personality. That only has one Motivation in mind and we'll talk a lot as we progress about the grounding of those uni-dimensional0:06:11Motivational systems in biology, but I'd have to say that Freud was among the first at least the first to Synthesize a coherent theory of this multiplicity and to put it forth0:06:24while also insisting that much of what was happening to you and inside of you was not immediately accessible0:06:34To your awareness and it's a very profound. It's a very profound discovery it means among any among many other things that you0:06:44can formulate ideas First of all, it means that you can act out things That you don't understand for reasons that you don't understand it0:06:53also means that Your memory can contain things that's represented in one way, but that can't be understood in another So for example, and we know this is true because there are independent memory systems. There's an independent memory system for procedures0:07:08That's for actions. There's an independent memory system for what you might describe as imagination for for the memory that uses images and then there's a another system that0:07:19articulates knowledge that's the semantic memory system and it's not obvious at all that the contents of all of those are equivalent and that's why for example0:07:30you can dream things that you don't know because one of the things you might think is that your dreams watch you act and they Watch other people act and then they make a little drama out of that and that drama has information in it0:07:41But you don't necessarily know what that information is in that you can't describe it consciously Right. It's it's akin to the PA Chetty an idea. That kids can play a game0:07:52and you can take them away from the game and then they won't know how to describe the rules even though they can play the Game and so dreams can contain information. That's full of the encoding of behavior that has information in it that you're not consciously aware of and so then you can become0:08:06consciously aware of that in a kind of a revelation side Maybe that's what you do when you become aware of the meaning of a dream or the meaning of a fantasy or something like that and0:08:15That's all all our ability to think that way in some ways can be traced back to Freud Now Freud concentrated mostly I would say at least in terms of pathology on0:08:29sexual and aggressive Impulses and I I don't think that there's any mystery for modern people about why aggressive impulses might be particularly difficult to integrate into the personality and might remain underdeveloped or will say0:08:44repressed although those aren't the same thing and I think in order to you might think that in different times in society0:08:53Some things are allowed to surface express themselves and other things are less allowed. And so Victorian times had a number of characteristics that made the repression of sexuality particularly likely and perhaps also the repression of aggression and we're talking about0:09:07Victorian times in in Europe, obviously and only one time in one place As Henry or Ellen Burgess says this is a great book by the way0:09:17the discovery of the unconscious if you're interested in If you're really interested in psychoanalytic ideas Freud Jung and Adler and also the history of those ideas There's no better book than the discovery of the unconscious. It's an absolutely remarkable book a great work of scholarship0:09:31I think it it goes for about 250 pages before it even gets to Freud and so it places Freud's discoveries in their historical context So that's a really good thing to know0:09:40Allen Burgess says it was a world shaped by man for man in which women occupied the second place Political rights for women did not exist the separation and dissimilarity of the sexes was sharper than today0:09:52women who wore slacks their hair shorter smoked were hardly to be found and the universities admitted no female students, man's Authority over his children and his wife was unquestioned education was authoritarian0:10:04The despotic father was a common figure and was particularly conspicuous only when he became extremely cruel Laws were more repressive delinquent youth sternly punished and corporal punishment was considered indispensable0:10:16now So the times themselves I would say were harsher and more repressive but then there was an element to sexuality that was also0:10:26Extraordinarily Problematic. I mean the first thing you might notice might consider and people generally don't it's almost impossible to overstate0:10:35how revolutionary the birth control pill actually is You know people like to think that the political rights that women have attained have been a consequence of a political struggle0:10:47But I don't buy that for a second. I don't think that's true even in the least I think that what happened was that we underwent a biological revolution in the 1950s late0:10:561950s with the emergence of the birth control pill and that for the first time in human history gave women Pretty reliable control over the reproductive function not really transformed them into entirely different biological0:11:08beings in many many ways like here's an example a subtle example, so, you know if you track women through their Ovulation cycle and you show them a picture of a man same man0:11:19And you do nothing but vary his jaw width When they're ovulating the guy with the wider jaw is more attractive and when they're not Ovulating the farthest away from that the guy with the thinner jaw is more attractive and that's associated with testosterone levels0:11:33And so women who are fertile like more masculine men and basically if you're on the pill then you're never in that Ovulation phase and so one thing that may have happened and I don't know this for sure0:11:44but it's it's interesting to consider is that Since women have been taking the birth control pill their preference for less masculine men has become more pronounced and that could easily be one of the things that's fueling at least some of the tension that's0:11:56Existed and exists now politically between men and women, but the point is is that you just cannot ignore The massive consequences of a biological revolution like that and to make any other factor causal when you're trying to understand0:12:10The political movement movements especially in the last say 40 years. It's you're putting the cart before the horse now It's reasonable to point out that the pill wouldn't have been accepted as a technology if certain0:12:23Political changes with regards to the emancipation of women hadn't already been in place, right? No one would have even been allowed to do something like investigate contraception0:12:33So you can't separate the biological from the political entirely but it's still it's still very useful to organize your organizing your thinking to realize just how profound a0:12:45Revolution that was but now back in the Victorian times There's another thing about sexuality Modern people like to think that there's nothing dangerous about sex and that is like the stupidest thing you could possibly ever0:12:56Hypothesize because everything about it is dangerous. It's dangerous Emotionally it's dangerous socially it's dangerous because of the Possibility of unwanted pregnancy and it's dangerous because of the possibility of sickness and that's a major one0:13:09I mean So when aids emerged in the 1980s that could have easily killed all of us now the fact that it didn't was wonderful But it did kill hundreds of millions of people. So it was no joke. It was a big deal and0:13:22ADEs mutated to take advantage of promiscuity and so the Relationship between sexual behavior and the transmission of disease is actually mediated at the biological level. But anyways back in the 1890s0:13:34They had the same problem, right? They had the problem with syphilis and syphilis is one nasty disease it's it can mimic almost any other disease and it's devastating to your nervous system and you can pass it on to your children and0:13:46so part of the reason that sexuality was heavily repressed in the Victorian period was not only because of the possibility of unwanted pregnancy the relative poverty of people0:13:57You know back in 1895 in Europe the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in in modern terms You know it's almost impossible to understand how poor people were and so0:14:08sex in a poverty-stricken place is also a lot more dangerous than it is in a rich place because especially if you were, you know, given the lack of employment0:14:18opportunities for women back in the Victorian period if you happen to get pregnant out of wedlock you were and You were in serious trouble and so the fact that sexuality was repressed is hardly as hardly a0:14:30surprise because it was so difficult to integrate into the full-fledged personality, you know, and it has it as it still is so Sexual repression0:14:39supposedly characteristic feature of the Victorian period was often merely the expression of two facts the lack of diffusion of contraceptives and the fear of venereal disease it was all the more dangerous because of the great spread of prostitution and because prostitutes were almost0:14:52Invariably contaminated and therefore potential sources of infection we can hardly imagine today how monstrous silithus syphilis appeared to people of that time Well, we can imagine that a little bit better than they could in 1970 because it hasn't you know, AIDS is still with us0:15:06Although it's nowhere near the plague that it was say 25 years ago Well, here's the Freudian world Freud0:15:15so let's let's take a look at the history of or the idea of the Unconscious to begin with and one of the things that you might want to consider Conceptually is that there are many different forms of unconscious0:15:26There's not just one and so Alan bursae points out that by 1904 functions of the unconscious had been described There's a conservative function. So the unconscious stores memories often unaccessible to voluntary recall0:15:40Well, that's a strange one, you know obviously you remember your past but you don't remember all of What you can remember at any given time and you don't really have access to that full store of memories0:15:51although you can try to remember so the unconscious is the You could imagine the memories are represented somehow Neurologically, but neural the neurological structure isn't exactly the mind like the neurological structure isn't exactly your consciousness0:16:06There's some relationship between them that we don't know and the unconscious from a conceptual perspective is the place that your memories are that you0:16:15Sometimes can get access to and sometimes can't and so you might think well that there are the memories that you can't get access to there might be a variety of reasons you can't get0:16:25access to them one might be that you've just forgotten them and One might be that they're so painful that you don't want to bring them to mind You'll you'll engage in tricks to stop yourself from getting access to them0:16:36And or maybe they're memories that are so complex that and painful that even if you did get access to them You wouldn't exactly know what to do with them0:16:45and so there's not a lot of reason for you to bring them to mind because all it is is pain without any without any Utility and when you understand that a little bit you understand more about what Freud meant by repression0:16:57The thing about Freud is that he kind of believed that like many people believe now that when you remember an event in the past It's it's almost as if you're using a video tape recorder and that when you experience that the memory is somehow0:17:11Recorded in you like it happened But that's not a very accurate version of how memory works I mean We know that memories can be easily distorted0:17:22for example if you interview someone about an event and You make suggestions that there was something present in the event that wasn't there and then you bring them back a couple of weeks later0:17:31And you ask them about the same event? they'll often incorporate the thing that they were told into the event and So and the idea that you can make an objective record of something that's happening to you is kind of a strange notion anyways0:17:44because so for example if you're having an argument with someone and Later you I asked what the argument was about and the other person has asked what the argument is about0:17:53there's no necessary reason why the accounts will Jibe at all because a lot of time when you're having an argument with someone you're arguing about what the argument is about0:18:02Right say well, you're angry at me. Well why this is why I think you're angry at me You say no this is why I think this event has occurred and you're thinking about especially if we know each other0:18:13Well, you're thinking about the contextualization of that event across our entire history and I'm doing the same thing and I'm gonna highlight things that you're not gonna highlight and I'm gonna draw causal inferences that you're not0:18:25Going to draw and for us just to get on the same page about the memory. It's going to be very difficult So the idea that in specially with complex interactions with people that you can somehow0:18:35make a video recording of the memory and actually capture what happens is is very very It's it's not true. You you can't I mean you might be able to extract out certain objective facts, but0:18:48But generally if it's a dialogical issue if it's a relationship issue It spans such a long period of time that just cutting a slice of it out doesn't constitute a reasonable record of what it means and0:19:00That's what you're more concerned with - like when when you have an experience, you know I'm not so much concerned about what happened from an objective perspective You're more concerned about what the experience means and then you might ask0:19:13Well, what does it mean to mean something and that was the question? I was trying to answer in that paper I had you read right at the beginning of the class but one of the things that meaning means is that it has0:19:25Implication for the way you look at the world or the way you act in the world. And so if I tell you something meaningful what that's going to mean is in the future you're going to act slightly differently or maybe0:19:35Radically differently depending on how meaning it meaningful it is but also that the way that you look at the world has shifted And the way that you look at the world is actually an unconscious. It's actually an unconscious process0:19:46I mean You don't know While you're looking at the world how it is or why it is that you're looking at the world in that way I mean because well0:19:55First of all, it would just be too complicated and second you wouldn't be able to concentrate on what was actually going on So your attention? For example is mediated by unconscious forces and you know that you know that perfectly well and this is another Freudian observation, you know0:20:10if you're sitting down to study for example your conscious intent is to study but you know perfectly well that all sorts of0:20:20Distraction fantasies are going to enter the theater of your imagination Non-stop and annoyingly and and there isn't really a lot you can do about that except maybe wait it out, you know0:20:30So you'll be sitting there reading and your attention will flicker away. You'll think about I don't know Maybe you want to watch the G in the virgin on Netflix or something like that Or maybe it's time to have a peanut butter sandwich0:20:40or you should get the dust bunnies from out from underneath the bed or it's time to go outside and have a cigarette or maybe It's time for a cup of coffee or it's like all these subsystems in you that would like something aren't0:20:52Very happy just to sit there while you read this thing that you're actually bored by and so they pop up and try to take Control of your perceptions and your actions non-stop. Maybe you think well, this is a stupid course0:21:03Anyways, why do I have to read this damn paper? And what am I doing in university? And what's the point of life? It's like you can really well You can really get going if you're trying to avoid doing your homework and and and then you might think well0:21:15what is it in you that's trying to avoid because After all, you took the damn course and you told yourself to sit down. Why don't you listen?0:21:25Well, because you're you're a mess now. That's basically why you haven't got control over yourself at all And no more than I have control over this laptop0:21:38Okay, so there's the memory function of the unconscious and there's the dis dis eluted function That's an interesting one the unconscious contains habits once voluntary now are tamo ties and dissociated0:21:51Elements of the personality which may lead a parasitic existence. That's an interesting one I would relate that more to procedural memory, you know, so what you've done is practice certain habits, whatever they might be0:22:02Let's call them bad habits and you like those things to get under control? But you can't so maybe when you're speaking for example, you use like and you know And you say I'm a lot and you've practiced that so you're really good at it and you'd like to stop it0:22:16But you don't - because you've built that little machine right into your being right? It's Neurologically wired and it's not under conscious control and anything you practice0:22:26becomes that It becomes part of you and and that's another element of the unconscious a different part And then there's a creative part which is that well0:22:35You know you're sitting around and maybe you're trying to write something or maybe you want to Produce a piece of art or a piece of music or maybe you're just laying in bed dreaming and you have all these weird ideas0:22:46And especially in dreams. It's like what where do those things come from and even more strange? One of the things that's really weird about dreams and almost impossibly weird is that you're an observer in the dream0:22:58It's like a dream is something that happens to you. Well, you're dreaming it theoretically so how is it that you can be an observer? It's almost like you're watching a video game or a movie but you're producing it that at least in principle0:23:12Although the psychoanalysts would say well, no not exactly your ego isn't producing it. Your unconscious is producing. It's a different thing It's a different thing. And of course Jung would say well it's deeper than that. The collective unconscious might be producing it0:23:24It's in some sense It isn't you? exactly or it isn't the you that you think of when you think of you and that's the ego from the Freudian perspective the you that0:23:33you identify with that's the ego and outside of that is the unconscious the it'd That's more the place of impulses and you could think about those as the biological0:23:42Subsystems that can derail your thinking right and that govern things like hunger and sex and aggression and your basic instincts is another way of putting it and it's a reasonable way of thinking about it because these are0:23:53Subsystems that you share with with animals you share them certainly with mammals You share most of them with reptiles you share a lot of them with em Finian's and even going all the way down to0:24:03Crustaceans there's commonality for example in the dominance hierarchy circuits and so these are very very old things and the idea that you're in control of them is0:24:14Well, you're not exactly in control of them and I would say the less integrated you are The less you're in control of them and the more they're in control of you and that can get really out of hand, you know0:24:27You can be like with people who have obsessive compulsive disorder. For example which which which is Which seems to be I would say that dissolute of elements in some sense of the unconscious the way that it's portrayed here0:24:39Poor people with obsessive-compulsive disorder they can spend half their time Doing things that they can't really control and they have very strong Impulses to do them and it's very hard on them to block them0:24:50You know, they they'll almost panic if those things are blocked and then you have people with Tourette's syndrome you know that they'll be doing all sorts of weird dances and0:24:59spouting off obscenities and and and and imitating people without being able to control it and and Sometimes a little bit of anti-psychotic medication can dampen that down but it's as if there are these autonomous0:25:12semi spirits inside of them that grip control over their behavior and make them do things and you know, you find that to some degree in your own life because maybe0:25:21You've become very attractive to someone even maybe you don't want to be attracted to the person and then you find yourself You know texting them when you know perfectly well that you should be going to bed and you know0:25:31you're you're in a grip of something and and you can't control it and that's all part of the unconscious and all part of what Freud was studying The dynamic unconscious it's alive and it's a compass that the mind is a composite of contradictory drives now0:25:47The way Freud thought about this basically was that with the end and the ego and the super-ego so if you think about the end as the place where these contradictory drives emerge0:25:57So it's sort of nature within the ego is the thing that's sort of being pushed back and forth by those Contradictory drives and the super-ego is the thing that's on top saying you better behave yourself you better behave yourself and so it's a different0:26:10model than the Piaget daeun model because Piaget assumed that what would happen is that As the child and I like the Piaget and model better I think I think in healthy development the Piaget daeun model is correct0:26:22But in unhealthy development I think the Freudian model is correct that Instead of integrating say the aggressive and sexual drives for the sake of argument into your personality as you develop0:26:33What happens is the super-ego just represses them instead so they don't become a dynamic part of you Integrated into your ego. They're just repressed. You just don't manifest them and0:26:44That's how you be a good person and you can be the victim of a very harsh super-ego and that often happens if you've had a particularly tyrannical Parent one or both or maybe a tyrannical grandparent or maybe you're your own inner tyrant0:26:58And you've picked up tyrannical voices through your whole life and aggregated them into this terrible judge that's always watching you that's criticizing everything you do and0:27:07Restricting you badly and really badly and what you're allowed and not allowed to do you see that with anorexic women? Well men could be anorexic too, but it's much much less rare0:27:17They have super egos that are just or one way of thinking about it That's just they're just deadly they're just criticizing every bit of them. Well right to the point They're really criticizing them out of existence right is you have to be so perfect that the perfection is not0:27:32Aligned with the ability to live you don't get to eat, you know and and people like that They look at their bodies they even look at their bodies incorrectly like0:27:42anorexic seem to be unable to see their bodies as a whole they can only see their bodies as parts and When you start seeing your body as parts you're really in trouble because you can't get a sense of actually what it looks like and body perception is very very complicated, but0:27:57anyways Piaget thought about the ego as in some sense as the game that's played by all these Dynamic drives that's shaped by the broader community. And so that could all be integrated0:28:08But Freud would say well look when that doesn't happen instead You're subject to the tyranny of the super-ego and it just says you should never be angry, right? You should never express yourself sexually because if you do there's something wrong with you0:28:20you're a bad person and you're a bad person if you ever get aggressive or and so and then people who are living like that under those circumstances You know they get they well they're they're repressed is the right way to think about it0:28:38Now Freud was interested in the idea that mental disorders could be caused for two reasons one would be purely Bodily, like maybe a head injury or say in the case of schizophrenia0:28:48Which is a good example of manic depressive disorder we have reason to believe that there's something Physiological going on even though but identifying that has been very difficult and it's because there isn't one form of schizophrenia0:29:00there's probably many pathways of brain injury that lead to schizophrenic like symptoms and there's likely not one form of manic depressive disorder either if you think of the form as having a0:29:11Standard causal pathway. We know that there are because we've done genetic Studies on people Who have manic depressive disorder in their family and you can identify genes within a family that seemed to be contributing to the disorder?0:29:23but the problem is is that those genes don't seem to be so then you'll take another family group with manic depressive disorder and it'll be a different genetic combination that causes that so0:29:33so part of the reason why It's difficult to associate the even the more biological Mental disorders with with biology all the way down is because they're so complex and then there are other forms of mental0:29:47Disorder that don't seem to be structure at all structural at all They seem to have more to do with well Let's call it the psyche right and that it's more like the contents of your thought have a problem rather than the structures0:29:59Underlying your thought and of course that distinction is difficult to make in a fine-grained way But you kind of get the point I mean just because there's an error in your thinking doesn't mind really mean that the underlying biology in some sense has been0:30:13compromised it's complicated because if the air is bad enough, then it can compromise the underlying biology but but whatever it's a conceptual distinction and part of the conceptual distinction is is0:30:25Helpful, if you're trying to think at least in part about how you might cure it because if you're thinking about a brain disease then that0:30:34Implies a different course of treatment at least in principle then it does if you're thinking about a psychological disorder where you might think about talking to someone for example and straightening out their thoughts or helping them learn to behave in a different way and0:30:48It was really Freud Who started to? Think that he was the first person to really pause it and this is pretty interesting that directly pause it that dialogue or conversation0:30:59Or speaking could be curative And now that's another thing that people don't like to give him credit for I mean there wouldn't be all these helping industries social social work and psychology and and0:31:12Biological Psychiatry insofar as that also involves communication and counseling and all these things now that would have existed In all likelihood if Freud wouldn't have made the original0:31:25hypothesis that There was something about communication that could be curative. No Freud believed that0:31:35Experiences that hadn't been now. He thought about experiences has repressed and this goes back to the videotape idea of memory so the idea would be that you have a record of everything that's happened to you and the records actually accurate and0:31:49then some of those things that happen to you were very very shocking to you were very hurtful or very depressing or very threatening and so you've decided that you're0:32:00Those have become repressed you're not paying any attention to them now He has a complex mechanism to account for that and I actually think this is a place where his theory went badly wrong0:32:10because you don't have a videotape memory and It isn't obvious that the memories that you have of traumatic events are fully fledged and causally0:32:21appropriate but just not paid attention to it's more like they're murky and Unclear in and of themselves and they contain too much and I don't think that people so much repress as they do0:32:34refuse to attend to or are unable to attend to so it's more like a passive avoidance than a Passive avoidance of something that needs to be explored and gone through rather than it is0:32:45something you know that you don't want to look at that you are part of you has put away and and I think that's a major weakness in his theory and has led to a lot of Problems with the idea of repression per se. But anyways, that was his idea that0:32:58Terrible things have happened to you and you or some part of you doesn't want to To know about them to know about them. And so they live this those repressed experiences live an autonomous life of their own - and0:33:13You here's an example of a trivial example of how that might work imagine that you're at work and Your boss says something to you that disturbs you maybe it makes you question whether your job is stable0:33:26So you're kind of set about that But it's a casual offhand comment and you go back to work and you just sort of forget that that even happened, you know Maybe because you're attending to something else0:33:36but then you go home and you're just Crabby as can possibly be and you go home and one of the people there says something a little annoying and you snap at them It's like well that's analogous to what Freud would call a complex, right?0:33:47Is that this because you could imagine what's happened is that the boss's words have brought up a whole little sub personality predicated on doubt0:33:56Up to the surface and who knows how deep that would be? Well what happens if I lose my job and if I lose my job, well, what sort of person am I? Exactly. And what about all these other times that I've failed and then maybe you remember the other times that you failed and what am0:34:09I going to do in the future. So it's this whole cluster of ideas that surrounds that doubt and that's been activated It's a little part of you and then maybe you're not attending to that because you're busy doing some other work0:34:20But when you go home something triggers it and like it's already there It's all you get way more upset than you should and that's that's what a complex is except in a much more0:34:29complicated manner like a complex might be a whole series of experiences that you've had that are united by some emotion like threat0:34:40That aren't haven't been transformed into a coherent representation But that can rise out of the unconscious and possess you if you guys many of you guys have been0:34:50Depressed at at least one point in your life, you know, it's actually very common for University of Toronto students especially in their first year0:35:00It's about one in three if you if you have students the Beck Depression Inventory But one in three taught University of Toronto students in our research have have hit criteria for hospitalization0:35:11I mean the back is a little oversensitive as far as I'm concerned, but but you know what? It's like when you're depressed It's like it's it's it's a part of your personality sort of subsumes the whole and depression quite classically is well0:35:23You can't think of anything good that happened to you in the past and you can't think of any reason why the present is good For anything and you're pretty damn hopeless about the future and so that's a complex as well0:35:33and it's a complex that consists of nothing but negative emotion and it structures your Memory and your percept and your plans for the future all at the same time0:35:42now Freud had a very lengthy list of ways that people could be treacherous towards0:35:51Experiences they had that they wanted to repress and so he called them defense mechanisms This is how you fool yourself into believing that you don't have to take into account a certain set of negative experiences0:36:04you know, it's like Well, we'll go through the repression. Okay. Well we talked about that denial. Well that often denial is a very complicated one0:36:18See if I can come up with a good example It was a classic example for people who have I think it's called anis Ignasi, I don't remember exactly it's neglect0:36:29That's a less technical way of thinking about so let's say you have a right parietal Damage from a stroke and you lose the left side of your body so you can't move it anymore, but worse you don't know0:36:39It's there and you don't know that the left side of anything Is there anymore and god only knows how that happens but like you'll only eat half the food on your plate only on the right hand side and if someone asks you to draw a clock you'll cram all the numbers into the one side and so you kind of0:36:53Lose the idea of left and I think it's sort of like, you know how when you're looking forward There's nothing behind you. You can't see anything back here. It's it's not black. It's not even gone0:37:03It's just simply not there at all. And so if you could imagine that sort of stretching around halfway That seems to be something what neglect is like, but anyways, if you if you take someone with neglect according to Ramachandra0:37:16and then if you irrigate their ear with cold water the Ear on the opposite side, then they'll kind of have a little convulsion and then all of a sudden0:37:26They become aware of their missing left side If you talk to them before you do the irrigation, you say well well what's up with your left arm and they'll say well I0:37:35My arthritis is bothering me and I don't want to move it they come up with some Something that sounds akin to denial, you know And then if you can snap them out of that with that irrigation and they'll have a catastrophic0:37:47emotional response logically enough to the loss of their entire left side and Ramachandran report that lasting about 20 minutes and then they'll snap out of it and go right back into the denial and0:37:58sometimes people deny things because They can't update what's happened to them is so overwhelming that they cannot Construct a new model. They just rely on the old one and you see this0:38:10Well, imagine first that you've just had a tooth pulled and you know How many how long your tongue takes to like remap the inside of your mouth? It's really hard to come up with a new concept of you if something catastrophic happens, and so sometimes the denial is just that0:38:25Something the thing that has happened is so overwhelming that the person can't model it But then maybe also they refuse to think about it and you see this0:38:34emerging in lots of strange ways so for example, if people develop diabetes, for example They're often not very good at taking their medication or regulating their diet and you might say well they're denying the existence0:38:44of their illness and to some degree They're probably doing that because who the hell wants to think that they're diabetic but even worse than that It's like it's complicated to be diabetic0:38:54You're no longer the same person that you were and so you have to learn a whole bunch of new ways to be this new Person what to eat when to eat how to check your blood0:39:03you have to be careful whenever you go out and eat like there's there's a Hundred new things a day that you have to learn and so separating denial from inability is a hard one0:39:12But you can also understand that people might deny. No, that's just not happening. That's that's I'm not going to admit to that Reaction formation. Oh, that's one. Maybe you hate your sister and maybe you have your reasons, but you shouldn't hate your sister0:39:26So what you do is act as if you really really like her. That's an overcompensation So that's another form of defense mechanism0:39:35displacement My boss yells at me. I yell at my husband. My husband yells at the baby the baby bites the cat Well, they're not really dealing with the problem, which is the boss. It's just pushed on down the road and0:39:48Identification you're bullied and instead of coming to terms with the fact that bullying occurs. You start bullying other people0:39:58Rationalization, well, you know what that means already, you know Maybe you don't do your homework you're procrastinating. I bet you can come up with fifteen rauch0:40:07No problem for why it's actually not necessary for you to do your homework right then Intellectualization what Woody Allen's movies are about like that. He's got all these neurotic problems, but he's smart and so he can come up with0:40:21Intelligent reasons why he's so messed up even though he knows he's messed up and it doesn't help sublimation Well that that was one of the things that Freud thought characterized art0:40:32So for example, there's a lot of erotic content in art and so if you're having trouble establishing a relationship or if you want to have a relationship with many people then maybe what you do is sculpt nudes or paint them and then0:40:43there's projection which is I'm having an argument with you and I'm unwilling to admit to my moat my dark motivations, and I'm very skeptical of you0:40:53And so I assume that you're characterized by all the dark motivations that I won't admit to in myself so0:41:02Now Freud also believed that it was unconscious ideas that were at the core of psychological conflicts and he Described those conflicts as incomprehensible distress0:41:12psychosomatic symptoms and so those would be the manifestation of psychological of The manifestation of psychological content in bodily form that might be stress a stress-related illness might be one way of thinking about that0:41:27I've had clients who had hysterical epilepsy. So that was quite interesting. So that was a somatic manifestation of a psychological problem0:41:36back when Freud was practicing Hysteria was much more common and maybe that was partly because Victorian society was so0:41:45Centred on the theater and so dramatic and people would come in with like a paralyzed arm or something like that that he could Sort out with hypnosis, and so they were manifesting their0:41:55Psychological distress in bodily form often in a manner that was representative of that psychological conflict in some way0:42:05Behavioral anomalies hallucinations and delusions. He thought that all of those could be manifestations of inner internal psychological conflict with their sets of unconscious ideas, so0:42:19You know, let's go back to the - the boss example Your boss says something nasty to you. Come home Someone says something a bit Provoking and you fly off the handle and then you have an argument about what the hell is up with you because they say well0:42:32Look what I said was, you know this big and you reacted like this and you're gonna say, well no No, you're always annoying like that And which is kind of a denial thing and maybe the person doesn't let up and they say no0:42:45No, I really know that something's wrong And you do like six other things to keep them the hell away from you and finally they're persistent enough so you break down crying and you say well I had this terrible day at work and you didn't even really notice that you0:42:56knew that until the moment of the moment of the tears and you see that very frequently in psychotherapy - if you're talking to people for example0:43:05Maybe they're relating a story about their their marriage that collapse badly and they're talking and all of a sudden they'll say something and they'll tear up and Then they'll continue and you can grab that you say look you just said something0:43:17I noticed that your eyes filled with tears when you said that what was going through your mind Now often they'll they unless you catch it quick they'll forget0:43:26So they're talking and they'll have and the talking about the past is you know flashing off imagistic memories and you'll say well that made you cry and0:43:36And they often don't like that because for obvious reasons that something's come up that they don't want to talk about and So you say well what was flashing through your mind and the person will tell you like quite a lengthy0:43:48little memory fantasy about a sequence of events that you know is still a Hot-button issue and that's another example of this underlying complex, you know0:43:58and if you watch people You can watch people in normal conversation this happens all the times their eyes will move or they'll smile or you can see as They're speaking that all sorts of different ideas are flitting through their head0:44:10It's dreamlike in a sense - it's sort of as if the person is talking and they're dreaming at the same time There's this image Laden set of memories that's going on at the same time and that can be quite broad0:44:21far broader than they could encapsulate in the words and so you can catch that and if you're really listening to someone really paying attention to them you can see when they're doubtful or when0:44:31They pause for a long time. That's another one You know that some things come up that that that's occupying their mind and interfering with the flow of conversation0:44:40Freud was very good at listening in that manner While that happens with jokes too, you know and Like for example when I was showing you guys the Lion King0:44:52Stills the other day and I showed you that picture of nella laying on her back with that peculiar expression on her face everybody immediately laughed and the you be Freud would have considered that an entry point into the0:45:04Unconscious because there is a reason you were laughing about it. It goes along with it well it would have gone along with a sexual complex in that situation and everybody recognizes it instantly and they laugh about it and0:45:15Comedians are really good at that because if they're good comedians They say what everyone's thinking but no one will say and it's a relief to everyone. You know, he What's his name?0:45:28Canadian comedian so he's making racial jokes. No. No, it's Canadian. Uh, yeah Russell Russell Peters I mean, he's a great example of that, you know He feels a whole stadium with people of all different ethnicities and every single one of them is dying to be0:45:42Insulted because of their racial background, you know it's a relief to everyone so he had salts the herbs and then he insults the Jews and then he insults the Christians and he's going0:45:51Oh, I'm so glad finally someone said that No, so so he's speaking to part of their unconscious and it's the part that's actually uncomfortable with all of that kind of discussion0:46:01Being repressed and staying below the surface It's way too weighty for people so jokes expressed in playful language what culture will not?0:46:10formally express so You know to that when the culture starts going after the comedian's that things are not good So you should leave the damn comedians alone Because there are the people that can tell the truth and if you start to get annoyed at them, then that's not good0:46:23so So a Freud was also extraordinarily interested in dreams0:46:33Poor Freud who were just not gonna be able to cover him in enough detail. Well, um, How will we do this because I should tell you about the dreams0:46:46Freud wrote a book called the interpretation of dreams and he he was the first person I would say who subjected dreams to a really comprehensive analysis and he used them to0:46:58Investigate the place of complexes in his psychotherapeutic practice. So his clients would recount their dreams to him now He believed that dreams always expressed an unconscious wish and that was tied into his theory of repression0:47:11And so for example if you were very very sexually repressed which was very common at the time then you'd have dreams with sexual content that we're expressing the the0:47:23expressing the Undesirable fantasy essentially and by analyzing the dream you could get down to what you could get down to what was being repressed0:47:32now Freud believed that the dream more or less tied itself in knots trying to hide its Content in some sense and Jung believed instead that the dream was actually trying to be as clear as it could it just wasn't part0:47:45Of the let's call it the semantic memory system It was it was more like a feeler out into the unknown it was trying to Represent things as clearly as it could and so its use of symbols and that sort of thing wasn't so much to hide the actual0:47:58Unpleasant content from the dreamer but to express it in the only language that the dream could use and so Freud Of course also believed that some of that was true0:48:08All right. Well, we're gonna have to stop there. So since it's 2 o'clock, so we'll see you on Tuesday0:00:002017 Personality 10: Humanism & Phenomenology: Carl Rogers
0:00:000:00:13All right. So... We're going to leap out of the psycoanalytic domain, now.0:00:22and start talking about a form of approach to personality and its transformations that's predicated on0:00:31a different... a set of different philosophical assumptions. And...it's a bit tricky to navigate this because...0:00:41it requires the adoption of a different frame of mind and, of course, that's the case with all the theorists that we're going to be discussing. Uh...0:00:54Phenomenology probably had its most thorough explication in the philosophy of0:01:04Martin Heidegger. And Heidegger was actually trying to reconstruct western philosophy0:01:15from the bottom up. He tought that we had been pursuing an improper pathway conceptually really ever since the time of the0:01:26Ancient Greeks. Back around the turn of the century0:01:35-- the previous century, that's from the 19th to the 20th century -- a new form of geometry was invented0:01:44and that geometry was predicated on different axioms than Euclidian geometry. Now, people had thought for thousand of years that the world was properly described by Euclidian geometry.0:01:55and, you know, when you employ a system like Euclidian geometry you have...there's axioms that you have to accept and they're like the rules of the game and, once you accept0:02:04the axioms then you can go ahead and play the game. But there are other forms of geometry invented and...in the...in the later part of the..0:02:1519th century and it turned out that those forms with different axioms actually described the world better than the Euclidian forms, sort of like0:02:24the transformation from Newton to Einstein...this was the.. transformation from Euclide to, say, -- I think I"ve got his name right -- Rie...Riemannn, R, I, E, M,0:02:34A, N, N., who developed a new form of geometry and turned out to be just the geometry that Einstein needed when he was putting his theories forward. And, the reason I'm teling you that is because0:02:46you can think of systems that have different axioms as... as different tools Same idea that Piaget was trying to express when he talked about how children's0:02:56cognitive representations underwent stage transformations so that they were starting to apply new principles. Not only a new way0:03:06of looking at the world but they were fundamentally retooling their presumptions about how the world operated. And Heidegger tried to do the same thing with philosophy. And so...0:03:18And it's tricky to figure out exactly what he was talking about but I'll give it a shot and then, we can move forward with Rogers So...0:03:27Since the dawn of the scientific world and, likely, before that, we have tended to believe that we are subjects in a world of objects.0:03:36And that 's obvioulsy a very useful way to view the world and you can tell that because, formalizing that in the form of science, has enabled us to extend0:03:47control over the world in ways that we were not able to before. Uh...To formulate the idea of an objective truth has been an extraordinarily useful maneuver0:03:58and so, the idea, roughly, is that everyone's perceptions can be contaminated by their own biases and their own fantasies, that subjective0:04:07biases and fantasies and you can overcome that by stringently specifying the conditions under which an observation takes place0:04:16-- so that would be an experimental method -- Having multiple people view the consequences separately, have them detail out what the consequences are0:04:25and then look for commonalities across them. And, you think, well, the commonalities across a set of observations constitute a description of the objective world.0:04:34And that's been insanely powerful. ..uh....crazily powerful. I mean that's not all there is to the scientific method but it's a big part of it.0:04:45Now... there is an emergent problem with that perhaps, It's complicated but one of the emergent problem with that is...0:04:55maybe, a consequence of stripping the subjectivity out of the world So... What science does is..consider0:05:05anything subjective as a form of bias or error in the observation and then, get rid of it and so what you're left with, when you... formulate the scientific world, is a world that's stripped of0:05:16subjectivity. Now, the problem with that is that you're a subject and so, when you strip the world of its subjectivity, that sort of leaves you isolated, like an isolated being0:05:27with no necessary connections to objective reality, in the midst of a set of impersonal facts. And, that seems to have psychological consequences0:05:38and the psychological consequences are that, well, for example, I think it's easier to develop a nihilistic sense of being, for example, if you believe that the0:05:49world is nothing but objects and that you're,... fundamentally, an object among many and not a particularly important one, at that.0:05:59So...there are psychological consequences to adopting the scientific worldview. Prior to the emergence of the0:06:09scientific worldview, people were more embedded in what you might think about as a mythological landscape, you know, where every element of being had its place in something that0:06:19approximated a master plan or, at least, a meaningful plan. And so...the idea of ... the meaningfulness of life was not necessarily0:06:28such a pressing intellectual concern. And then... well, and so, we don't know the full extent of that0:06:39...I mean... I've talked to you a little bit about Nietzsche's idea that's expressed at the end of the 19th century about the death of God and his prognostication that0:06:48the collapse of... classic systems of meaning open up people to posession by nihilism and also by potentially totalitarian0:06:59political systems and that seems to have been what happened Now, Heidegger was very concerned about that, among other things. And so, he decided to0:07:09reconsider reality from the bottom up. And so, what he did was generate an alternative set of axioms. He said something like "what if we0:07:19decide to make reality everything that we experience? Forget about the subject/object divide.0:07:28And...One of the other problems with the subject/object divide for example, is accounting for consciousness, right? because it's a problem that science really hasn't got any distance with0:07:37at all, as far as I can tell. I mean, people have been trying to crack the secret of counsciousness, obviously, for a very long time but they've been trying to do it formally0:07:46and using scientific methods, at least for the last 50 years and my sense of that is that they've got absolutely nowhere. Maybe, that's a bit unfair. We're better at0:07:57representing how conscious experiences manifest themselves in the brain but we're but we're certainly no better at understanding how it is that we experience things. And that's the problem of0:08:08"qualia". That's how the philosophers describe it. And qualia is the quality of your experience, like the fact that pain, for example...A pain you feel0:08:19is by no means identical, at least, as far as your concerned, to some pattern of neurological activity, right? It's pain. It seems to be a fundamental0:08:28reality of some... In fact, I think pain is THE fundamental reality. I think it's the only thing that people will never deny. But...0:08:37So, there's these aspects of your existence that are subjective, like your experience of colour and your experience of beauty and just your experience of things or, maybe, just your experience.0:08:47Your eperience plays an indeterminate role in the structure of being itself. 'Cause you might ask, well, what would there be if there was nothing conscious?0:08:58and you could say, well... what would there be if there was nothing conscious of being? Well, it's a tricky question, because it depends on your a priori0:09:08axioms but...it's not obvious what there would be in the absence of a conscious oberver. There wouldn't obviously be any duration between things. It would be very difficult to0:09:19specify things in terms of size. There wouldn't be any of the qualities that we experience... ...that we experience our being is having 'cause0:09:28colour doesn't seem to be an intrinsic part of the world, smell doesn't seem to be an intrinsic part of the world. It's very difficult. The more you think about it, you'd find0:09:37the more difficut it is to determine exactly what there would be if there was no one to observe it. And...that's not the tree-in-the-forest idea, precisely It's not so much if a tree falls in the forest0:09:49and there's no one to hear it, it doesn't make a sound 'cause that's more a matter of the definition of sound than anything else. This is more, like, if there's a tree in the forest and there isn't anyone, is there a tree ? And that's a0:10:00whole different question. Anyways, so, what Heidegger did, partly because he was not pleased, I suppose, with the metaphysical0:10:10consequences of the scientific worldview, and also, perhaps, because he wasn't very happy about our ability to account for consciousness,0:10:19he decided to see what would happen if he played a different kind of game. And you can do that in an intellectual discussion, you know, you can say, well,0:10:28here's a set of axioms out of which a system will emerge, like, here's a set of rules out of which a game would emerge. Same idea. What if we start with a different set of rules? Let's see0:10:39what we can do if we do that. You kind of do that when you play one video game rather than another. You know, there're little worlds that pop out. There's a different underlining structure.0:10:48And then, you can go inside that world and experiment with it and see what comes out of it. So Heidegger decided to say "OK, what we're gonna do instead0:10:57is we're going to assume that everything we experience is real. We're going to make our field of experience itself reality".0:11:06And...So that would mean, from Heidegger's point of view, that everything about the being that manifests itself to you is to be regarded as0:11:17equallly real. So, then, you think, well, that makes pain a fundamental reality. That makes anxiety a fundamental reality. It makes beauty and colour fundamental0:11:26realities. They're not self-evidently reducible to anything else, which they would be... ...which they are in a scientific...from a scientific0:11:36perspective because you have to think about them as manifestations of some more fundamental underlying material reality. And I guess that's another problem with the subject/object model and the material0:11:47model. When you aggregate atoms, when you arrange them in certain forms. When they manifest themselves as certain molecules and then0:11:58in more complex structures, they seem to take on all sorts of qualities that you couldn't predict if you just knew about the subatomic particles and the atoms themselves and so, of course, the...0:12:10those are called emerging properties and you say, well, you can observe hydrogen and you can observe oxygen but that doesn't make it self-evident0:12:20for you to be able to predict the properties of water. And, of course, that's a more simpler problem, all things considered, than the problem of figuring YOU out. You're this0:12:29crazily complex aggregate of these hypothetical... hypothetically simple entities but it isn't obvious how their elemental properties can combine0:12:40to produce YOU. It's not obvious at all. It's certainly not obious how a material that's supposed to be dead matter, so to speak, can0:12:49manifest consciousness, no matter how complexly it's arranged. So...0:12:58The phenomenologists, Heidegger leading them, were... attempted to produce a philosophical model of0:13:07being. And...We'll talk more specifically about the phenomenologists after we're done with Rogers, but he is... he fits in that0:13:17philosophical framework. And...0:13:35One of the things that I've thought... -- This is a bit of a tangent but I'll move back to the model afterwards. --0:13:44See, I really like the psychoanalysts. And I like the idea that you have a psyche that's inside of you and that is structured, in part consciously and in part uncounsciously.0:13:53There's something about that that's really cool and I've learned a lot from the psychoanalysts. But, you know, there is a funny conesquence of thinking the way they think -- and you do0:14:04think the way they think, even if you don't know it -- like we tend to think that a lot of us is inside our head, you know. That's the psyche model basically.0:14:13But, the more I've practised as a clinical psychologist the less I've actually been convinced that that's true So, I could say, well...Let's say I want to know about your personality. We think, well, I wanna now0:14:24you. I wanna know about your subjectivity and I want to know what's inside of you. But that is not exactly what you do want to know if you're doing clinical work, say, with someone. You wanna know0:14:35do they have any friends? That's really important. Because, if you're miserable and anxious and badly placed in life and misbehaving,0:14:45one of the reasons that all of that can occur is 'cause you don't have any friends, you don't know anyone. And that's not something that's inside you. It's you, localized0:14:55in a broader sphere. And then, you might say, well, do you have a job? And...Well, let's talk about the job. Do you actually make enough money with your job? Is it satisfying for0:15:04you in any way? Are you bullied all the time when you're at work? Does it provoke anxiety? Is it a carrier that allows you to go somewhere? Are you overworked?0:15:13Or...But let's start with just the first question. Do you have a job? Well, if the answer to that is "no", you have a serious problem and that would enough0:15:22might be to depress you and make you anxious and hopeless and nihilistic and all of those things. And, you could say, well, you're not reacting very well to not having a job but0:15:31that's kind of a foolish objection, even though some of it might be true. One problem is that you're not reacting very well to not having a job but another problem is that you don't have a0:15:40job and that, actually, constitutes the problem, right? You don't get to eat, you don't have a place to live. Those aren't psychological problems precisely, even0:15:49though a psychological probem could make it worse. Well, are you as educated as you should be? That's another question. How do you handle drugs and alcohol? Are they taking you down a bad pathway? Know?0:16:00Uhmm... What about intimate relationships ? Do you have one? Do you have a plan for one? Or is that a never ending series of catastrophes or something that you avoid completely?0:16:11That's a big problem! And, maybe, people don't... aren't attracted to you for one reason or another and.... You can think about that as a psychological problem but...it's an interpersonal problem.0:16:20And the degree to which that's a psychological problem is... is certainly unspecified when you first begin to talk to somebody. What about your family? Do you have a family?0:16:30'Cause' it's hard to be in the world all by yourself. That's for sure! It makes things a lot more stressful...even though having a family can also be extraordinarily stressful...you know..0:16:40Do you have plans to have children? How are you doing with your parents? Do you get along with your siblings? You know, all of that, all of that, to me, is more fundamental and it's outside of you. Those are elements of your experience.0:16:52More broadly...conceptualized... more than they are objects of your psychology or of your internal experience. You know, it's sort of like0:17:04Well, a person is a creature that exists at multiple levels of analysis. Right? Something might go wrong with you at a cellular level. So, maybe, you're born with a genetic abnormality.0:17:16So, something's wrong with you molecularly. Or you have something wrong with a major organ. Or, maybe, there's something wrong with you psycologically. Or, maybe, you're in a pathological family. Or, maybe, you're stuck0:17:26in a pathological social system. And... figuring out why you're suffering means going up and down those different levels trying0:17:35to specify the appropriate level for analysis and also the appropriate level for intervention. And, for me, as I said, even though I'm a great admirer of the psychoanalysts and I do0:17:45things like dream analysis which I really find incredibly useful and enlightning, the first, the fundamental level of analysis is, well, what's your experience structured like...0:17:55exactly? And that isn't localized in you. Now, the behaviourists do that to, because... -- which is one of the things I really like about the behaviourial approach of psychotherapy. It's very very concrete and practical. It's like,0:18:06they'll say, well, there're certain things that you need to have in order to live properly and, maybe, you don't have the skills or the wherewithwall... wherewithal to accumulate them and we'll break them down0:18:15into tiny little pieces and you'll practice. So, for example, someone who doesn't have any friends and you do a micro-analysis of their...social skills, say,0:18:24and maybe an analysis of the kind of anxiety that are stopping them from going out and meeting people and then you address those things practically one by one. You try to get the person have some friends. You try to figure out how they can0:18:36establish an intimate relationship. You see if you could help them sort out their family. You do what you can about their employment and...A lot of that's only tangentially related to -- really, in some sense -- to the structure of their psyche.0:18:47But, one of the things you'll see, if you work as a clinician, or as a counsellor, is that, most of the time, people come and see you because they have problems, not because they have psychological0:18:56problems. And those things are not that easy to distinguish. You know, it's sort of the psychoanalytic idea, sort of like, well, if you juste got your act together, everything would work out for you. It's like,0:19:07yeaaaah... There's some truth in that. But...0:19:17But, you know if you're 55 years old and you've just been laid off work, and, maybe, through no fault of your own, it isn't obvious how much getting your act together0:19:28is gonna help you find another job...because... the actual problem that you're facing may have relatively little to do with you. And that would especially be the case0:19:37if you're, maybe, on the bottom half of the itelligence distribution, for example, and so...it isn't as easy for you just to go out and pick up new0:19:46skills at the drop of a hat...you know...and that gets harder as you get older because your IQ actually declines quite substantially as you get older, the working or the....0:19:55the fluid intelligence part, anyways -- exercise can keep that at bay, by the way, it's the best way to keep that at bay. So, anyways...you can think,0:20:05from the phenomenological viewpoint, of your experience as a whole, instead of you being a subject in an objective world. And so...here's another way of...here's something that's quite useful.0:20:16Jung talked about this 'cause he was moving towards a phenomenological perspective later in his life. The last book he wrote was called Mysterium Coniunctionis. He talked about three conjunctions0:20:26that needed to take place in order for someone to be well constituted psychologically. And, you know how Piaget talked about learning that you could,0:20:36not only follow rules, but that you could make rules for new games as sort of a highest level of moral development. I would say Jung extended the Piagetian0:20:45moral continuum up past what Piaget had envisioned. Now, he didn't... he didn't do that 'cause he wasn't trying to extend Piaget's model. But...0:20:54But you can think about it the same way. And it's not easy to come up with a moral mode of being, say, that transcends the ability to make rules for new games. That's damn smart, man, that's...0:21:06That's a major home run by Piaget, as far as I am concerned. But Jung said something like this. He said, look, when you're going through the process of psychological integration...0:21:16Here's a way of conceptualizing it. He thought about this as... symbolically, as male-female pairings, because... as I've tried to point out, the most... one of the most fundamental0:21:28categories that our mythological imagination uses to structure the world is the category of masculine and feminine. And it moves that around, you know, it's a fundamental metaphor so you can move that around anywhere.0:21:39And so Jung thought well, one of the things that you're trying to do is to get your thoughts and your emotions integrated. And so, you know, the classic Enlightenment viewpoint,0:21:50roughly speaking, is something like, passion is the enemy of reason. Right? And so, to the degree that you're rational, it's sort of a Freudian viewpoint 'cause you've got your emotions under control.0:22:01And...there's some truth in that but...not enough truth. I like the Piagetian idea better, which is that, no, no, that isn't what happens. What happens is if...0:22:10if you're playing the proper game is that, you integrate your emotions underneath your thinkings, something like that. So, they're all working in the same direction, you know. So,0:22:19for example, you can make your anxiety work against you or for you. And, one of the ways... I made a program, called the Future Authoring Program0:22:28that I think helps people do that. 'Cause, one of the things you see when you're talking to people and they're trying to solve problems is that they're afraid to face the problem.0:22:37And so, then, their anxiety is working against them and you can think about it as a... as antagonistic to rationality. But then, I could say, well, what if you think for a while about0:22:46what your life would be like if you didn't face this problem? Because, if you think that through, if you have a problem and you really think through what the consequences are0:22:56gonna be in two to three years of not facing it, then you're gonna get more afraid of not facing it than facing it. And that's great because then, your anxiety, instead of0:23:05standing in front of you...instead of... you having a dragon that's guarding the path in front of you, you have one chasing you down the path from behind. That's a lot more useful.0:23:15And so... you know, that's just a... a minimal example of the utility of getting your emotions and your... and your thoughts aligned the same way. The same0:23:24thing happens with the aggression. You know...One of the most common reasons that people come and seek psychotherapy, really, is because they're too agreeable.0:23:33But...what that means is they're not assertive enough. They haven't integrated their capacity for aggression. And so, other people can push them around. And...and they're very conflict avoidant.0:23:43And...and so, the consequences of that across time is that you don't stand up for yourself well enough and you get taken advantage of and that spirals0:23:52badly downwards. And so, partly what you do when you're doing assertiveness training with people is you find out what they're angry about...and...0:24:02They're usuallly angry, if they're not assertive enough, because other people are taking advantage of them or, you could say, because they're not putting their own... necessities forward with enough force. It's hard to distinguish between those two things.0:24:14But, anyways, you... get them to talk about what they're angry about, that often makes them cry, often many times, and then, you get them to kind of envision what they would want0:24:24to have instead, which they're often afraid to do because people are afraid to think about what they want because that makes it more clear when they're not getting it0:24:33and that's painful, right? Or, maybe, they're afraid of hoping so they won't specify a clear aim. But, anyways, you get them to think about what they might want instead. You get them0:24:42to think about the cost of not pursuing that and then, you help them develop strategies for integrating their aggression and... with their thinking,0:24:52so they can come up with a plan to approach the world in a more confident way. So, for example, someone might come to me and say "I'm being bullied badly at work".0:25:01And so, then, I'll say "well, what are your options? You have to put up with it? Well, we'll figure that out cause maybe you do, maybe you don't have options. But here's how to find out. Get your damn CV together,0:25:12so it's pristine, right? It's ready to go. Get over your fear of a new interview, because people are generally afraid of that. Get over your fear of applying0:25:22for a new job. Start thinking about what it would mean to have a different job. Start thinking about what it would mean to have a better job, even. Cause, maybe, your fear0:25:31is just making you stuck here but I can tell you one thing : if someone's picking on you at work and you don't have options, you lose." So you get the person to start building a strategy. It's like, "OK,0:25:41if you're gonna tell this person to stop, you have to know how to make them stop and the one thing you need for sure is an option, and, if you can't...if you don't have an option0:25:52then, maybe, we start thinking about the fact that you need some more training or something like that. Because you cannot negotiate if you don't have any power. So...because while....especially if you're dealing with someone0:26:02who's really out to get you or really disagreeable, If you don't have a leg to stand on, they'll just push you over and, maybe, they'll jump on you too because that's what they're like and enjoy anyways, so...0:26:12It's no joke. So... You put your options behind you and then you start to think about strategy." So I tell people "Look, if you're being harassed at work, you document it every time0:26:23it happens. You write it down. So you've got like twenty stories about it and it's fully documented. And then, you go confront the person at some point with, at least, 3 pieces of evidence. And you have some0:26:33sense about what you tell them about what will happen if they don't stop. So you have to figure out : well, they don't stop? What are you gonna do about it? Leave? Not if you0:26:43can't leave. So, you have to be able to -- what is it? -- wield a big stick and speak softly. But, you see, that way...that's how you take your0:26:52aggression, which is an absolute necessary part of your psyche and manifest it up into a sophisticated means of dealing with the world.0:27:01You don't just suppress it and say "well, I should be able to put up with it" or "I wish I wasn't so angry" or some...it's like...forget that! That's... All that'll happen is your blood pressure will stay high and you'll die of a heart0:27:12attack. Because anger, for example, is a very toxic emotion. And it does cause heart damage over time. It's the only emotion that we really know that's been linked to things like0:27:21cardiovascular risk. And anger is toxic because it's like, you're driving a car, you're stepping on the gas and pushing on the brake at the same time. Because anger tells you to run away and to attack0:27:33...at the same time, cause you don't know what's gonna happen. And so, it really amps up the physiological demand on your body. And so, if you...0:27:42-- including your heart and your musculature -- so, if you stay like that for like 10 years, you know...you're gonna age 20 years. And that's a bad plan.0:27:51So... So, you know, you take your underground emotions and you integrate them into a sophisticated reality.0:28:01Now... Jung said, so "FIrst of all you unite your mind, your thinking, let's say, with your emotions. So that makes one0:28:11thing, instead of two fighting things." OK. That's a good one. And then, the next conjunction he talked about was "It isn'tenough to unite your mind0:28:21and your emotions". And he tought about that as male/female pairing, symbolically. That's how it would manifest itself sometimes in dreams. So you take the masculine element and the feminine element,0:28:32the thinking and the emotion, unite those and that makes you more like one thing. OK and now, all of a sudden, that's represented as symbolicaly male, that one thing.0:28:41And it unites with something else that's now represented symbolically femin...female. That's the body. So you take the mind/emotion integration and integrate that in your body. So what'd that be?0:28:52You act it out! Instead of just thinking. So, there's this philosophical idea called a... -- now I'm gonna forget what it's called -- It's a0:29:03contradiction in action! There's actually a technical term for it. But that's when you think and believe something but you don't act it out. And so, that means there's a dissociation in you somehow0:29:12between your abstract representations and what you manifest in action. Wel that's another form of discontinuity that isn't doing you any good.0:29:22You know, the driver is going one way and the car is going the other. And you won't even be able to understand yourself, if you do that. But, even more, you're not putting your principles into practice.0:29:31So, you're dissociated. Your being is dissociated. So... Once you get your mind and your emotions working together, then the next thing to do is to act that out consistenly.0:29:40That was the second conjunction, as far as Jung was concerned, and then the third one was -- this is the tough one, and this is the one that's related to phenomenology --0:29:50you erase the distinction between yourself and the world. OK. That's a tough one. So, imagine you're dealing with someone who's hoarding.0:29:59Now, people who are hoarding are often older or neurologically damaged or they have obsessive compulsive disorder. But then, you walk into their house and there's like ten0:30:08thousands things in their house. There's...there's...there's There's, maybe, a hundred boxes. And you open up a box and, in the box, there's some pens and some old passports and some0:30:18checks and... there's collections of silver dollars and some hypodermic needles and some dust and... you know, a dead mouse and...and... there's boxes and boxes and boxes. It's like0:30:29that in the house. It's absolute chaos in there. Absolute chaos. Not order...chaos. And then, you think, is that their house or is that their being? Is that their mind? And the answer is :0:30:40there's no difference. There's no difference. So, you know, I could say, well, if you want to organize your psyche, you could start by organizing your room...if that0:30:49would be easier, cause, maybe, you're a more concrete person and you need something concrete to do. So...you go clean up under your bed and you make your bed and you organize the papers on your desk and you think, well...0:30:59Just exactly what are you organizing? Are you organizing the objective world or are you objecting your field... are you organizing your field of being, like your field of total experience?0:31:10And Jung believed that...and I think there's a Buddhist doctrine that's sort of nested in there, that, at the highest level of psychological integrration, there's no difference between you and what your experience.0:31:20Now, you think, well, I can't control everything I experience. But that's no objection because you can't control yourself anyway, so the mere fact0:31:29that you can't extend control over everything you experience is no argument against the idea that you should still treat that as an extension of yourself.0:31:38Well, let's say that you have a longstanding feud with your brother. Well... Is that a psychological problem? Is that him? Is it a0:31:47problem in the objective world or is it a problem in your field of being? And it's very useful to think that way because you might ask what could you do to improve yourself? Well, let's step0:31:58one step backwards. The first question might be why should you even bother improving yourself? And I think the answer to that is something like : so you don't suffer any more stupidly than you have to.0:32:09And, maybe, so others don't have to either. It's something like that. You know, like, there's a real injunction at the bottom of it. It's not some casual self-help doctrine, it's that if you don't0:32:19organize yourself properly, you'll pay for it. And in a big way. And so will the people around you. Now... And, you could say, well, I don't care about that but that's actually not0:32:28true. You actually do care about that. Because, if you're in pain, you will care about it. And so, you do care about it. Even if it's just that negative way, you know.0:32:37It's very rare that you can find someone who's in excruciating pain who would ever say well, it would be no better if I was out of this.0:32:46This sort of pain is one of those things that brings the idea that it would be better if it didn't exist along with it. It's incontrovertible.0:32:55So...You get your act together so that there isn't any more stupid pain around you than necessary. So then, the question might be: well, how would you go about getting your act together? And the answer to that0:33:05-- and this is a phenomenological idea too -- it's something like: look around for something that bothers you and see if you can fix it. So...Now, you think, well0:33:16let's say you go into a -- you can do this in a room. It's quite fun to do it just when you're sitting in a room, like, a room...maybe, your bedroom, you can sit there0:33:25and then just sort of meditate on it, think, OK, if I wanted to spend 10 minutes making this room better, what would I have to do? And you have to ask yourself that,0:33:34right? It's not a command, it's like a genuine question. And things will pop out in the room that, you know, you...like...there's a stack of papers over there that's kind of bugging you and you know that, maybe,0:33:43a little order there would be a good thing and, you know you haven't... There's some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven't attended to for, like, six months and...the room would be slightly better0:33:53if it was a little less dusty and the cables weren't all tangled up the same way and... like, if you...if you allow yourself just to consider the0:34:02expanse in which you exist at that moment, there'll be all sorts of things that will pop out in it, that you could just fix. And, you know, I might say, well, if you're coming to see me for0:34:13psychotherapy, the easiest thing for us to do first would just be to get you to organize your room. You think, well, is that psychotherapy? And the answer is, well, it depends on how you conceive the limits of your0:34:25being And, I would say, start where you can start. You know, if something announces itself to you, which is a strange way of thinking about it,0:34:35as in need of repair, that you could repair, then, hey! fix it! You fix a hundred things like that, your life will be a lot different.0:34:46You know, I often tell people too, "fix the things you repeat every day. Cause people tend to think of those as trivial. Right? You get up, you brush your teeth,0:34:55you have your breakfast, you know, you have your routines that you go through everyday. Well, those...those probably constitute 50% of your life. And people think "well, they're mundane, I don't need to pay attention to them", it's like0:35:06no, no, that's exactly wrong. The things you do every day, those are the most important things you do. Hands down. All you have to do is do the arithmetic.0:35:15You figure it out right away. So... A hundred adjustments to your...broader domain of being and there's a lot less rubbish and..0:35:25there's a lot less rubbish around and a lot fewer traps for you to step into. And so... That's in keeping with Jung's idea about0:35:34erasing the diss...once you've got your mind and your emotions together and once you're acting that out, then you can extend what you're willing to consider yourself and start fixing up the things0:35:46that are part of your broader extent. Now, sometimes, you don't know how to do that. So, you might say, imagine you're walking down Bloor Street and there's this guy who's, like, alcoholic0:35:55and schizophrenic and he's been on the street for ten years. He sort of stumbles towards you and, you know, incoherently mutters something. That's a problem! And...it would be good if you could fix it but0:36:06you haven't got a clue about how to fix THAT. You just walk around that and go find something that you could fix because, if you muck about in that,0:36:15not only is it unlikely that' you'll help that person, it's very likely that you'll get hurt yourself. So... you know, just because, while your experiencing things announce themselves as in need of repair0:36:26doesn't mean that it's you, right then and there, that should repair them. You have to have some humility, you know. You don't walk up to a helicopter that isn't working and just start0:36:35tinkering away with it. You have to stay within your domain of competence. But, most of the time, when people look at their lives, you know.... -- It's a very interesting thing to do. I like...I like0:36:46the idea of the room because you can do that at the drop of a hat. You know, go back to where you live and sit down and think "OK, I'm gonna make this place better for half an hour. What should I0:36:56do?" You have to ask. And...things will just pop up like mad. And it's partly because your mind is a very strange thing. As soon as you give it an aim,0:37:05a genuine aim, it'll reconfigure the world in keeping with that aim. That's, that's actually how you see, to begin with. And so, if you0:37:14set it a task, espec... -- you have to be genuine about it, which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together and then, you have to get them in your body, so you're acting consistently. You have to0:37:24be genuine about the aim - But once you aim, the world will reconfigure itself around that aim, which is very strange. And...and... it's...0:37:33it's..it's technically true. You know, the best example of that -- you've all seen this video where you...watch the0:37:42basket ball being tossed back and forth between members of the white team versus the black team and, while you're doing that, a gorilla walks up into the middle of the video and you don't see it. It's like...0:37:52-- you know, if you thought about that experiment for about five years, that would be about the right amount of time to spend thinking about it. Because, what it shows yo isthat you see what you aim at.0:38:02And that, man, if you can get one thing through your head as a consequence of even being in University, that would be a good one: you see what you aim at. And so, because...one...0:38:13inference you might draw from that is... be careful what you aimt at! Right? What you aim at determines the way the world manifests itself to you. And so, if the world is0:38:24manifesting itself in a... very negative way, one thing to ask is: are you aiming at the right thing? Now... you know, I'm not trying to reduce everybody's problems to0:38:35an improper aim. People get cut off at the knees for all sorts of reasons, you know. They get sick, they have accidents, There's a random element to being, that's for sure. But0:38:44-- and so, you don't want to take anything, even that particular phrase too far. You want to bind it with the fact that random things do happen to people. But it's still a great thing to0:38:53ask.-- OK, so, Rogers was a phenomenologist. He was interested in...he didn't start his philosophy from the perspective of0:39:02subject versus object or from the idea of psyche, like, sort of inside you, your mind with it's layers. That's not how it looked at it. And so,0:39:12let's go through... (now...) I'll introduce you to Rogers. I think that... then we'll talk more about him next time. I'm gonna start though,0:39:21with something that I learned from him that I think was of crucial importance. And so, we'll set the stage for the further discussion with this. And I'm gonna read it to you.0:39:31ROGERS : "Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact and to receive communications, we may say that the greater the communicated congruence0:39:40of experience, awareness and behaviour on the part of one individual, the more the ensuing relationship will involve a tendency towards reciprocal communication with the same0:39:50qualities. Mutually accurate understanding of the communications, improved psychological adjustments and functioning in both parties, and mutual satisfaction in the relationship."0:40:00It's quite a mouthful. What does it mean? "Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact and to receive communications." Okay, we are having a conversation.0:40:10I'm deciding I'm going to listen to you. Right, That's different than how people generally communicate, because usually when they communicate,0:40:20they're doing something like: Okay We're going to have a conversation, and I'm going to tell you why I'm right, and I'll win if you agree or maybe you're having a conversation where0:40:30i don't know what your trying to do, maybe your trying to impress the person you're talking to, so you're not listening to them at all, you're just thinking about what you're going to say next. Okay, so that's Not This.0:40:39This Is: You might have something to tell me. And So, I'm going to Listen On the off chance that you'll tell me something that would really be useful for me to know.0:40:49and so, you can think about it as an extension of the Piagetian... you know Piaget talked about the fundamental0:40:58The fundamentally important element of knowledge being to describe how knowledge is sought. The process by which knowledge is generated. Well, if you agree with me and I find that out,0:41:08I know nothing more than I knew before. I just know what I knew before. And, maybe, I'm happy about that because, you know, it didn't get challenged. But I'm no smarter than I was before.0:41:17But, maybe, you're different than me and so, while I'm listening to you, you'll tell me something I would... I don't like. Maybe, it's something I find contemptible... or difficult, whatever. Maybe you'll find...you'll tell me something0:41:28I don't know. And then, I won't be quite as stupid. And then, maybe, I won't run painfully into quite as many things. And that's a really useful thing to know, especially if you live0:41:37with someone and you're trying to make long-term peace with them and they're not the same as you. And their way they look at the world and the facts that they pull out of the world0:41:46aren't the same as your facts. And... even though you're going to be overwhelmed with the procilvity to demonstrate that you're right, it is the case that two brains are better than one.0:41:57And so, maybe, nine of the ten things they tell you are dispensable, or, maybe, even 49 out of 50. But one thing...all you need to get out of the damn conversations is0:42:08one thing you don't know. And one of the things that's very cool about a good psychotherapeutic session is that the whole conversation is like that.0:42:17All you're doing is trying to... express the truth of the situation as clearly as possible. That's it!0:42:27And so... Now, Rodgers' proposition -- and I'll tell you why he derived it -- was that, if you have a conversation like that with someone,0:42:38it will make both of you better. It will make both of you psychologically healthier. So, there's an implicit presupposition that the exchange of truth is curative. Well, that's0:42:49a very cool idea. I mean, it's a very deep idea. I think it's the most profound idea... It's the idea upon western civil...0:42:58upon which western civilization -- although not only western civilization -- is actually predicated. The idea that truth produces health. But for0:43:07Rogers, that was the entire purpose of the psychotherapeutic alliance. You come to see me because you want to be better. You don't even know what that means, necessarily. Neither do I.0:43:17We're gonna figure that out together. But you come and you say "Look, things are not acceptable to me and maybe, there's something I could do about that". So that's the minimal precondition to engage in therapy.0:43:28Something's wrong. You're willing to talk about it truthfuly and you want it to be better. WIthout that, the therapeutic relationship does not get off the ground.0:43:37And so, then, you might ask: well what relationships are therapeutic? And the answer to that will be: if you have a real relationship, it's therapeutic. If it isn't, what you have is not a relationship. God only0:43:48knows what you have. You're a slave, they're a tyrant. You know, you're both butting heads with one another. It's a primate dominance hierarchy dispute or,0:43:57I don't know, you're like two cats in a barrel or two people with their hands around each other's throats. But what you have is not a relationship. So... All right. ROGERS "We may say that the greater the0:44:08communicated congruence of experience, awareness and behaviour on the part of one individual"...PETERSON That's a reference to the same idea that I was describing, with regards to Jung. so...0:44:17Let's say, you come and talk to me and you want things do go well. Well, I'm gonna have to more or less be one thing. Because, if I'm all over the place,0:44:26you can't trust any continuity in what I say. There's no....and...you There's no reason for you to believe that I'm capable of actually telling you...0:44:35...I'm capable of expressing anything that's true. So, the truth is something that emerges as a consequence of getting yourself lined up...and beating all the...0:44:45-- what would you call? -- ...all the impurities out of your...out of your... out of your.... soul, for lack of a better word.0:44:55You have to be integrated for that to happen. And you do that, at least in part, by wanting to tell the truth. ROGERS "...the more the ensuing relationship wil involve a tendency towards0:45:04reciprocal communication with the same qualities...." PETERSON : So, one of the things -- 'cause I've been quite influenced by Rogers -- One of the things I try to do in my therapeutic sessions is, first of all,0:45:13to listen, to really listen. And then, while I listen, I watch. And while I'm listening, things will happen in my head.0:45:22You know, maybe, I'll get a litte image of something or I'll get a thought or a question will emerge and I'll just tell the person what that is. But it's sort of directionless, you know. It's not like I have a goal0:45:32-- except that we're trying to make things better -- I'm on the side of the person...I'm on the side of the part of the person that wants things to be better, not worse.0:45:41And so, then, those parts of us have a dialogue and the consequence of that dialogue is that certain things take place. And then, I'll just tell the person what happened. And it isn't that0:45:50I'm right. That's not the point The point of this is that, they get to have an hour with someone who actually tells them what they think. Here's the impact you're having on me.0:46:00You know...This is making me angry. This is making me happy. This is really interesting. This reminds me of something that you said an hour ago that I don't quite understand.0:46:09And the whole... the whole point is not, for either person to make the propositon or convince the other that their position is correct, but merely to0:46:19have an exchange of experience about how things are set up. And it's extraordinarily useful for people because it's often difficult for anyone to find anyone to talk to that will actually listen.0:46:31And so...another thing that's really strange about this listening is that, if you really listen to people, they will tell you the weirdest bloody things so fast you just cannot believe it. So,0:46:40if you're having a conversation with someone and it's dull, it's because you're stupid. That's why. You're not listening to them properly. Because they're weird. They're like0:46:50wombats or albatrosses or rhinoceroses or something, like, they're strange creatures. And so if you were actually communicating with them and they were telling you how weird they really are,0:46:59it would be...it would be anything but boring. So.... And you can ask questions, that's a really good way of listening. But, you know... one of0:47:09Rogers' point is that, well, you have to orientate properly in order to listen. And the orientation has to be: look, what I want out of this conversation is that the place we both end up is better than the place we left.0:47:19That's it! That's what I'm after. And, if you're not after that, you gotta think: why the hell wouldn't you be after that? What could you possibly be after that would be better than that?0:47:29You walk away smarter and more well equipped for the world than you were before you had the conversation. And so does the other person. Well, maybe, if you're0:47:38bitter and resentful and angry and anxious and, you know, generally annoyed at the world, then, that isn't what you want. You want the other person to walk away0:47:47worse, and you too, cause you're full of revenge. But...you know... You'll get what you want, if you do that. So... ROGERS "We know from our research that such empathic0:47:57understanding..." PETERSON: It's already defined, that. I want to hear you, I want to hear what you have to say, so we can clarify it and move forward. I want to have your best interest in mind...And mine as well...but...0:48:07you know...both at the same time. Your family's too, if we can manage that. We're after making things better. ROGERS: "We know from our reserach that such emphatic understanding0:48:17-- understanding with a person, not about them -- is such an effective approach that it can bring about major changes in personality. Some of you may be feeling that you listen well0:48:26to people and that you have never seen such results. The chances are very great that you have not been listening in the manner that I have described. Fortunately, I can suggest a little experiment that you can do to test the quality of our understanding.0:48:37the quality of our understanding. The next time you get into an argument with your wife, or your friend, or a small group of friends, stop the discussion for a moment and, for an experiment, institute0:48:46this rule. Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately."0:48:56PETERSON: What "accurately" means is they have to agree with your restatement. Now, that's an annoying thing to do! Because, if someone is talking to you and you disagree with them, the first thing you wanna do is take their argument and make it0:49:07the stupidest possible thing out of it that you can -- that's the straw man -- and then, demolish it. It's like...so then, you can walk away feeling good about it0:49:16and, you know, you primate domins... dominated them really nicely. So... But that is not what you do. You say, OK, well, I'm gonna take what you told me, and, maybe, I'm even gonna make your argument stronger than the one you made.0:49:27That's useful if you're dealing with someone that you have to live with. Because, maybe, they can't bloody well express themselves very well but they have something to say. So you...make0:49:36their argument strong. All right...then... ROGERS: "You see what this would mean. It would mean that before presenting your own point of view, it'd be necessary for you to really achieve the other speaker's frame of reference0:49:47-- to understand his thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for him. Sound simple doesn't it? But if you try it, you'll find that it's the most0:49:57difficult thing that you've ever done." PETERSON: OK, good, we'll leave it at that and then, we'll see you on Tuesday.0:00:002017 Personality 11: Existentialism: Nietzsche Dostoevsky & Kierkegaard
0:00:000:00:13so we started to talk a little bit about phenomenology last time and about carl rogers and, uh, I mentioned that the phenomenologists0:00:23were interested in experiences in some sense as the ultimate as the ultimate reality, and that's a very complicated concept to grasp0:00:35the existentialists also adopted that viewpoint. they were concerned with the the quality of subjective experience,0:00:44not that they were ignoring the reality of the objective experience but they were concerned with the reality of subjective experience and they were also more focused action than on0:00:54on statement or belief. because here's something to think aboot you can think about this for a very long time if you're trying to understand what someone believes0:01:05even if you're trying to analyze their representations of the world if you should pay attention to how they act or what they say0:01:14and that's a profound question, even from a from a neurological posi- perspective or a neuropsychological perspective, because0:01:23the memory system, that you use to represent what you say, that you believe, is not the same memory system that you use to embody0:01:32your knowledge about action so, it's akin to the distinction between telling someone how to ride a bike and knowing how to ride a bike0:01:43those are not the same things the descriptions don't even lay very well on top of one another because you don't actually know how you ride a bike you just know how to do it. it's built into your physiology, right0:01:54it's a skill, and that's called procedural memory, and procedural memories are the same kind of memories that that basically structures your perceptions0:02:05it's not that you can't orient orient your perceptions consciously, you can but once you've oriented them consciously let's say, some goal, it's automatic procedures0:02:16that take over because you really don't know how that you organize your senses so that you pay attention you just know how to do it now the existentialists believed that0:02:28actions spoke louder than words and that if you were interested in belief and even if you were interested in analyzing belief that it was better for you to look at how someone acted0:02:39than what they said. Now one of the things you might think with regards to rogers0:02:48is that his psychotherapeutic practice would be predicated on the idea that that you should bring how you act into alignment with0:02:57what you say you believe so that there is no discontinuity between your body, that's one way of thinking about it, and your mind0:03:07and so that there are fewer paradoxes in your in the way that you manifest yourself in the world0:03:16so the concentration on action is one of the fundamental characteristics of existentialism another one is0:03:30the insistence upon trouble and suffering as an intrinsic element of human experience So, you could say that we concentrate0:03:42Well we could say: "Ok, well built into that is Trouble, built into that is Chaos, built into that is Anxiety and Pain; and Disease.0:03:53You can fall prey into those things Without there being something wrong with you. Now, if you pin down a psychoanalyst like Jung or Freud0:04:02They would of course admit that human misery is endemic to human experience, but Freud in particular tended to look for0:04:11adult psychopathology in childhood misadventure in pathological childhood experience0:04:20he at least implicitly claimed that If you hadn't experience childhood trauma and you had developed properly what would0:04:29is that you would end up healthy, roughly speaking certainly, mentally sound but the existentialists don't really buy that belief in the beginning0:04:40they basically make a different claim which is that Life is so full of intrinsic misery, let's say but suffering is a better way of thinking about it suffering that0:04:50manifests itself as a consequence of your intrinsic vulnerability, that psychopathology is built into the human experience0:04:59There's no real way of avoiding it or at least... There's no real reason to look for extra causes that might be a better way of thinking about it0:05:09and you'd be surprised how often that observation is useful for clinical clients for example because one of the things that is quite characteristic0:05:19about people, especially if they are introverted and don't have many friends; they don't have people to talk to if they are suffering, maybe they are depressed or anxious or they have some sets of strange symptoms like agoraphobia0:05:30or obsessive compulsive disorder one of the things that they always presume is that the fact that they are suffering in that manner0:05:39means that there is not only something wrong with them but something uniquely wrong with them so that it is their fault and no one else is like them0:05:48and one of the things that you do as a diagnostician; you know, you'll hear a lot of rattling about how labelling is bad for people and0:05:58certainly myth labelling is bad for people and eve an accurate label can be a box you can get out of, but it is very frequently the case that you diagnose someone, it is a relief to them that you can't believe0:06:09because they come into you knowing there is something isn't going properly but they think well, they are the only person facing it0:06:18that it means that they are idiosyncratically strange in some incomprehensible way that no one else can possibly understand and there's no way that they can ever get better0:06:28the things you do is that you point out to them depression and anxiety doesn't really require any explanation right, there is plenty of reason; I don't remember who said it0:06:38"everyone has sufficient justification for suicide". I think that was the claim, well the point is that Is that you look through the experiences of the typical person0:06:47Unless they are very very fortunate and they wont be that way forever that certainly is the case that they can point to traumatic experiences throughout their lives death and loss and illnesses0:06:58and humiliation and all those sorts of things is sufficient to account for existence in the state of quasi-pemanent negative emotion now often0:07:08if you see people who are depressed and anxious by nature they assume that everyone else is the smiling face of that you see on facebook0:07:17and so that alienates themselves from people and from themselves even more than certainly far more than necessary part of the psycho-education that is going on in therapy0:07:27is merely educated people to understand that a fair bit of misery is the norm and that there is plenty of genuine reason for it0:07:39and so the existentialists basically start from that stance It's like a 'Fall of Man' stance you know, because (it) is deeply rooted in0:07:51the Western tradition roughly speaking is the idea that people are divorced from some early paradisal fate and that is the emergence of something like self-consciousness0:08:01that produced that demolition of humanity and left us in a damaged state and people think they don't believe that but they believe it all the time0:08:14and it's frequently how people experience themselves as if there is something wrong that needs to be rectified and it seems unique in some sense to human beings0:08:24it doesn't seem all that obvious that animals think that way but people definitely think that way and so all the existentialists0:08:33basically take that as a given. and then, they offer another question well, given that is your lot0:08:43and then, there is ample reason for misery How is that you should conduct yourself? Because merely say giving into that misery or multiplying it,0:08:53doesn't seem to be it doesn't seem to be doing anything other than multiply it0:09:04it doesn't seem to be doing anything than increase it "It is bad to begin with it", you might say well increasing it is something you have to regard as worse so how do you conduct yourself in the face of misery?0:09:15Ok, how do they present that to begin with? Ok so, this is from Pascal, and this is an existential statement0:09:24that describes the position of the individual in the universe you might say, or you could say it explains a deep characteristic of individual experience,0:09:36or existence. Hence, existentialism.1:14:17All he does is he spends his hole trying to make0:00:002017 Personality 12: Phenomenology: Heidegger, Binswanger, Boss
0:00:000:00:12I don't know if any other personality course in North America talks about Binswanger and Boss anymore maybe not But I think their ideas are extremely interesting0:00:22And so I'm going to talk about them They were influenced very much by Martin Heidegger Who was one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers0:00:33I would say probably - This school of This part of the phenomenological school was more influenced directly by a philosopher than any other school.0:00:43And just to reiterate because you might keep wondering why I discuss so many philosophers in this course It's because0:00:54Clinical Psychology in particular is not strictly a scientific enterprise It's because it's oriented towards values as far as I can tell0:01:05And I don't see that there is any way of getting around that and that because what you are trying to do as a clinical psychologist and perhaps what you're trying to do with your own life is to figure out how to live properly0:01:15Now you can construe that as the absence of illness Which is - That's about as close as you get to a scientific model of living well0:01:24So you don't have any illnesses But even the idea of illness is an idea that's not precisely scientific It's an amalgam of scientific concepts and ethical concepts0:01:35so There is no escaping it and if you're in the domain of ethics or values Then you're in what is more or less a philosophical domain But also if you're a scientist - if you're a scientist who is interested in personality0:01:49It's also something you have to grapple with conceptually Because people live within an ethic and the ethic structures their perceptions And so even to study human beings as objects0:01:58You still have to take into account they ensconce themselves within a value system and you have to understand what that means So for me it's easier and more straightforward just to get right to the root of matter to begin with0:02:10and these people also had insanely interesting ideas They're really useful to know And so this, I would say maybe these The philosophy that underpins this might be the most complex of all the philosophies0:02:21That we're going to discuss And that's really saying something because there is no shortage of complexities say in Jung And it's very difficult to portray what these people were up to0:02:34I started by telling you, when we discussed Rogers a little bit That the phenomenologists were interested in the fact that people live within a self-defined perceptual world0:02:47That might be one way of thinking about it Part of the way to start to conceptualize what that means is to consider for a moment0:02:58just consider for a moment how many things there are in this room that you might look at and the answer to that is there's an infinite number of them Depending on how you're going to scale your perceptions0:03:08You could spend, if you were a painter, you could spend a month painting that tile Painting a representation of that tile because it's infinitely complex0:03:17To get the colors right, to get the patterns right, there's no end to it really Because to make a representation that was accurate It would have to be as detailed as the thing itself and it's crazily detailed0:03:29But you don't concentrate on that sort of thing So you think, you're surrounded by an infinite number of potential things to apprehend But that isn't the world you live in The world you live in is a very very constrained subset of those things0:03:42And part of the question is then: what's the nature of that constrained subset That's what you inhabit that's what makes up your experience And also how is it related to the infinitely complex objects that are around you0:03:55And that's really what these people were trying to figure out. So you're in this perceptual frame, that's one way of thinking about it. That's the Dasein, by the way0:04:04That's the existential frame or the phenomenological frame Because you can't think about it merely as perception Because it contains also, all of the things you experience subjectively0:04:14The emotions and the Qualia that You know Qualia is an element of being that say philosophers or scientists of consciouness have a particularly difficult time with.0:04:26And it's like - it's the quality of pain which doesn't seem reducible to a set of objective facts Or the quality of color, or the quality of beauty, or the quality of love, or the quality of sorrow0:04:36Those things seem irreducible to some degree in and of themselves Like what is pain made of? It doesn't even seem like a reasonable question. I mean you can say, how do you decompose the neurological circuits that are involved in the experience of pain? Fine.0:04:51But to ask what pain consists of or is composed of or what beauty is composed of, or love. Seems to be - There is something wrong with the formulation of that question0:05:01Because those things sort of manifest them self as raw facts of existence And so they're constituent elements of this - of your field of experience0:05:10Your phenomenological frame or this Dasein Which is the way that Heidegger conceptualized it. That's being there with you at the center of your what? Your realm of experience0:05:28Now here's some characteristics of the Dasein The thing that makes up you The past and the present are implicit in it0:05:37What does that mean? Well, say you have a particular emotional response to something, maybe it's a negative emotional response.0:05:46And you see this very frequently with arguments with people You're having an argument with someone you love. Like a family member, that's a good example So lets say it's the same damn fight you've had with your mother 50 times0:05:57Okay that's interesting because what it means is that All of those 50 times you've fought with your mother are implicit in this fight So althought it's taking place right here and now, the past has shaped it0:06:10And if you wanted to investigate the fight completely You'd have to get to the bottom of that entire train of interactions you've had with your mother So it's implicit in your current experience that's one way of thinking about it0:06:24But the future is implicit in it too because What you're doing right now, it's as if the future is folded up in what you're experiencing right now and it unfolds as you interact with it0:06:34And so the reason it's conditional to some degree on you and your past is because it's your past and you that are determining the actions that you undertake right now that determine how the future is going to unfold around you0:06:47Now not completely obviously because you don't have complete control over how things unfold But you seem to have some ability to determine how things unfold0:06:59So one of the ways I've sort of conceptualized the phenomenological viewpoint This is one way of thinking about it I believe is that Instead of thinking - It does mean you have to reconceptualize your idea of objects0:07:12Like an object seems like a unidimensional thing in some sense. It's an object. But most of the things people interact with aren't like that at all So like here's an example0:07:22Let's say you have Let's say you get You're writing the MCAT, you want to go to medical school You've written the MCAT, you get the envelope in the mail, it tells you what your score is0:07:32You hold the envelope, what are you holding? Well if you think about it from an objective perspective, it's an envelope Who cares? It's just a little piece of paper right?0:07:41It's a rectangle of paper But that isn't what you're holding at all That's not what that thing is, that's how you see it. But it's not what it is at all and you know that. Your body knows that0:07:53Because you're shaking. Well, what are you scared of? The envelope? Well the fact that you see it as an envelope is only an indication of just how narrow your perceptions actually are.0:08:05Because it's a portal. Right? it's a portal through which you are going to walk into one of two worlds One in which you're in medical school and the other in which you're not0:08:15And it also actually contains the past Which is really strange because you think, well you already know what the past is. No you don't. Whatever that score is in there determines what your past was and you know that too.0:08:28You go watch a movie and a bunch of things happen in the movie and then something twisted happens at the end and all the sudden (trilling) Everything that you thought about the movie was wrong and a whole new past for the movie pops into being0:08:39Well, are you a pre-med student? A valid pre-med student? Well the score will determine whether or not you were. Very strange, very strange0:08:49Because you think of the past as fixed You know? And you think of the things you're interacting with as the things that you see and they're not And you're body is smarter than that, way smarter than that. Because it responds to, you could say0:09:02And this is sort of a Rogerian perspective, your body is more likely to respond to what the thing actually is, than how it is that you see it. Okay so, the past is implicit in the current being0:09:13and the future is implicit in the current being And so the past and the future sort of folded up inside it And you can unfold them and take a look at them0:09:29Now, here's the next thing So, from a classic scientific perspective, There's the world of independently existing objects and there's the world of subjects0:09:39And the subject is really in a secondary relationship to the object Because the objective world is what's real But one of the things that the phenomenologists were concerned about that0:09:51Is that, well you run into this problem again of exactly how it is that you define the object Because, just as the envelope with the scores in it can't be reduced to the paper,0:10:06So the object that you're interacting with only reveals what it is as a consequence of the way that you interact with it So for example if you take a complex object like another person0:10:18It's like well, what is it that you are. Well a huge part of that is going to depend on exactly how I interact with you Because you could be a raging beast if I interacted with you one way0:10:28and you could be a perfectly, you know, cooperative entity that was very pleasant if I interacted with you another way And so partly what's happening - you can think of what you're interacting with as something that's really multi-faceted. Truly multi-faceted0:10:43And you say, well you're trying to determine what it is. But the problem is that what it is manifests itself only in accordance with how you behave towards it0:10:52And it's actually the case with even objects that you reduce right down to their constituent elements So you might say like lets talk about subatomic particles. Hypothetically, the most objective thing there is0:11:04Well it turns out that whether they're a wave or a particle depends on the way you set up the experiment Now I don't want to make quantum analogies but what I'm saying is that the object is a very very complicated thing0:11:16And so even defining what it is means you have to adopt a frame of reference with regards to it And you undertake only some procedures and not others0:11:25So, when you're defining an object even scientifically you actually don't define the object. What you say is here is a multi-dimensional entity if you approach it in this manner, that's the procedure, right? The methods.0:11:37If you approach it in that manner, it will manifest that set of traits But the problem is, is that there's all sorts of other traits that it could manifest just as well If you treated it a different way0:11:47And so the object itself is not something that - it's not something easily reducible to a single set of properties I was talking to one of my students yesterday, he had a pretty smart thing to say about images.0:12:00We were talking about deep images you know the sorts that you might see in a really high quality museum So maybe they're I don't know 15th century or 16th century renaissance masterpieces0:12:12They're inexhaustible to some degree Which is why they're in museums and people go look at them you know decade after decade And it's partly because0:12:22Every time you look at them you're different You go in one week, you look at it, you see something. You go in the next week, you look at it and you see something else. Well it's partly because0:12:31You're bringing something entirely different to the situation and the image is complicated enough to allow it to reflect something new to you depening on the stance you take in relationship to it0:12:43And lots of things are like that lots of things are like that A book you read when you were sixteen is going to be an entirely different book when you read it when you're 35 Say well the book's the same. It's like, it depends on how you define the book0:12:55Because it isn't even obvious where the book is exactly Well it's on my shelf in the library It's like no, that's a chunk of paper that's on your shelf in the library0:13:05Where exactly the book is, that's a much more difficult question to consider So it depends on how you define the book So without a subject, nothing at all would exist to confront objects and to imagine them as such0:13:19True this implies that every object Everything objective in being merely objectified by the subject is the most subjective thing possible0:13:28Well you also know this again when you're in an argument with someone "it's you" "no, it's you" "no it's you" It's like, you don't know Are you being biased? Are you looking at the situation incorrectly?0:13:39The person you're arguing with trying to convince you that it's your problem You think "no you made me angry" It's like hmm an interesting statement you know? as if you could do that0:13:51But it does seem that way, you were being provocative "Well you're just too sensitive" "hmm how are we going to settle that?" Well it's a continual argument and that again has to do with the crazy entangled dynamic between subjective perception and objective perception0:14:13I've showed you this before and I actually think this is a pretty good Schematic representation of what's meant by Dasein And this is a complicated little diagram0:14:22Although the diagram itself is quite simple It's predicated on the following assumptions You need to narrow down your world0:14:32and what you're doing is narrowing it down from lets say an infinite set of possibilities To a finite set of manageable possibilities and you do that a bunch of ways0:14:41Partly - merely - you can't your senses aren't acute enough to detect everything. So pure stupidity in some sense stops you from being absolutely overwhelmed0:14:52You don't have eyes in the back of your head for example so you don't have to worry about all those things you're not looking at behind you But then it's far more than that You just can't handle that full complexity so there's a continual narrowing process0:15:04And then you exist inside that narrowed reality Like if I look at you like that There's not a hell of a lot of difference between that looking at you like that0:15:13Like I can't really see these people. I can tell they're people, that's all I can see your face I've got just about all of it right there0:15:22That's a very narrow and you know you're moving your eyes around and inhabiting this constant narrow space Well what's that space - what does that space you inhabit consist of0:15:33Well that's Dasein that space that you inhabit and so we can say It's something like this You have implicit in that perception a sense of where you are and what you are doing right now0:15:43it's in the perception and then in the perception as well is what you're aiming at Because you're not just sitting here passively or you'd be asleep or you'd be unconscious0:15:52You're sitting here doing nothing You know, physically But you have an aim in mind and the aim is what you're pointing your eyes at The aim is what's structuring your perceptions0:16:02The aim is what's revealing that part of the world that is being revealed to you, to you That's the revelation of the world0:16:12It also structures your emotions. It also primes your behaviors So it's not a drive, it's not a goal it's not a motivation, it's more than that. It's all of that at once.0:16:23That's sort of what your personality is You see the phenomenologists don't really think about personality They think about the manifestation of your reality0:16:32It's not exactly your personality It's that you're the center of a reality and you constitute that reality But all of your elements of experience constitute that reality and so it's simplest element is something like0:16:44Where you are and where you're going and the embodied actions you undertake to relate those two things Which would include your eye movements because of course perception is an active phenomena0:16:57You are shaking your eyes back and forth unbelievable rapidly Otherwise, if you can make your eyes stand still, which you can do with great concentration Everything will black out0:17:07Because you have to move your eyes back and forth so the light hits different cells cause the cells get exhausted And then they stop reporting. So you're just whipping your eyes back and forth in a micro-way constantly0:17:21And as well as moving them around voluntarily and involuntarily So even perception is a lot more like feeling things out with your fingers Even when you're using your ears or your eyes0:17:31It's very active, there's no passive perception it's a motor act to perceive and so your motor act is determined by your hierarchy of values that's one way of looking at it0:17:40So another way of thinking about it is that's how the past and future are implicit in it Your very active perception is determined by your entire value structure0:17:50So It's implicit inside of it, it's folded up inside of it You can tell that too because if something violates it Again, maybe an argument with someone0:17:59It's good to think about people as the thing you interact with the most as the canonical object Cause they're so damn complicated and they get in the way all the time and when someone gets in the way of what you're doing0:18:10You know, it isn't obvious what they're interfering with It might be the little micro-routine that you're undertaking right now You know, maybe you go home and you make a nice dinner and the person you're making it for is all rude about it0:18:22Okay so what exactly are they getting in the way of? Well They're certainly getting in the way of your expectations of having a nice emotional time for the next hour0:18:35But you have no idea how indicative that is of some serious flaw In you, or them, or the relationship, or the situation, or the way you've conducted your whole life Or the way they've conducted their whole life0:18:46and all of that's packed in there It's sort of like the unconscious of the psychoanalysts but it's more - it's not the same conceptualization. It's another way of looking at the same phenomena0:18:57So Alright so the two people we're going to talk about most are Medard Boss And he was influenced by Martin Heidegger, who was a great philosopher0:19:07Taken to task often because he turned out to be tangled up with the Nazis more than he should've been And Husserl, that's Edmund Husserl, who was actually if I remember correctly was Martin Heidegger's teacher0:19:19That's Ludwig Binswanger - and they were Both of these two people were influenced both by Freud and Jung Okay so here is one of Binswanger's claims0:19:29I love this claim it's such a cool idea And I think there is neurological support for it. Neuropsychological support What we perceive are "first and foremost" not impressions of taste, tone, smell or touch0:19:41Not even in things or objects, but meanings Well that's an interesting idea Because You know it's been said that every person in an unconscious exponent of some great philosopher's presuppositions0:19:54Well, mostly the way you think about the way you perceive is that there are objects in the world You see the objects You think about the objects, you evaluate the objects0:20:03You decide how to act on the objects, and then you act Right? it's from Object, sense, perception, emotion, cognition, action0:20:12That's wrong. That isn't how it works It's partly not the way it works because You're actually - the way that you interact with the world exists at multiple levels0:20:22So for example You have reflexes so if I If I poke you hard, you'll react like that. You'll jerk back0:20:32And that, you do that without thinking That's part of a neurological circuit that's very deeply embedded and that's virtually automatic It's reflexive. It doesn't require conscious perception at all0:20:43It's too slow for starters And so you have - there's multiple levels of you interacting with the world. And at one level, you're seeing objects, you're thinking about them, you're planning what to do0:20:54But you're doing all sorts of other things that are way faster than that and other things that are way slower at the same time. Now what Binswanger claims0:21:03Is that what you see in the world are meanings So it's the meaning detection first and the object recognition second0:21:12Now that's a hell of a claim, that is But there's definitely levels of your nervous system That operate in that manner So for example Here's a good example, people have blind sight0:21:22There visual cortex is damaged they can't see objects So they think they're blind But if you show them an angry face, they'll manifest a change in the skin conductants, They'll orient0:21:34And it means that the eyes are still mapping the face onto the amygdala And the amygdala is mapping the pattern onto the body, no object perception0:21:43Pattern Pattern Pattern No object perception And so the meaning is what's being perceived first and foremost0:21:53And you have to perceive meanings first because you actually want to stay alive That's the trick So the world is full of these things that have meanings to you that are relevant to your survival0:22:04And what you're perceiving first is the relevance of the pattern to your survival And the idea that you can conceptualize that as a set of objects Well first of all, that's a pretty new idea0:22:15Technically speaking, right? Because Technically speaking we didn't really start to conceive the world as subject in an objective world until we really formalized science0:22:25Now science was implicit long before it became explicit But it didn't become explicit until about 500 years ago So you react to meanings0:22:34So here's an example Babies if you If you have two surfaces and you put a piece of glass between them You know, they're elevated0:22:43And you put an 8 month year old baby on the one surface so they can crawl It won't crawl across the space And you might say it sees a hole and won't crawl across it0:22:56But that isn't what it sees. It sees a place to fall off Direct, that's direct perception So when I see this for example My eyes see that as a pattern0:23:07That pattern's on my retina it's propagated through my optic nerve It's propagated into my brain, it's propagated onto my motor cortex And the propagation is0:23:17This That Right? So I can pick it up And as soon as - when I look at that this is implicit0:23:26That's implicit in the perception You think well why do you see that at the size and resolution you see it at? That's why So the fact that you see it that way has this implicit in it0:23:36It isn't that you see the object and match your hand to it It's that matching your hand to it is part of the perception of the object It's what gives the object meaning0:23:45And so you see actually you perceive the meaning of the object It's part of the perception And you can't not see the meaning of the object Well if you're a scientist you can sort of separate out the object from its meaning0:23:58That's actually what science does It tears the object away from its meaning And then of course there is nothing meaningful left So science ends up value free. But that's because the meaning has been torn out of it0:24:10Now there's technical reasons for doing that But Binswanger's point is don't kid yourself you see the meaning first. Here's an example You watch the trade towers fall0:24:19What did you see? Well you could say you saw the towers fall It's like why are you in shock for two days afterwards then? Well because what are the towers exactly?0:24:31As long as they're standing and operating, they're towers. As soon as they fall, God only knows what they are Maybe they're the beginning of the next war0:24:40You know? Who knows what they are? And so everyone was in shock for three days Because what they saw was the indeterminate meaning of that event0:24:50And it opened all sorts of gateways It's like well, the towers fell, there's gateways open everywhere. We don't know what's going on. We don't know what's going to happen next. We don't know where we are0:25:00And that's direct perception mapped onto your body. Bang, you're in shock You see the meaning first And well you constrain it down to well why are you so upset?0:25:09Well the towers fell It's like that's the best you can do for a verbal utterance It's what your perceptual systems reported to you But God only knows what happened0:25:18We still don't really know what it meant that they fell Now most things have put themselves back together but0:25:28And then you think well what does it mean? What does it mean that what you see first is the meaning? and that's a really tricky question because you might say well That's when you get back to the problem of what constitutes real0:25:40So I could say well you've evolved to see the meaning Well then we might ask Well if you've evoled to see the meaning and that's kept you alive0:25:49Is there anything more real than the meaning? Because somebody who is a materialist would say "well no, the object is more real" It's like no, it depends on how you define real0:25:58It might be that the most real thing about the visual cliff is that that's a falling off place And that its secondary description as a you know an object A hole or something like that0:26:08That's something you paint over the top of the primary reality And so, Well here's a practical application of it or at least one of the things I think is practical0:26:20You know, you can have experiences that differ in their, lets call it, high quality meaning You know so you get engaged and engrossed in something and you're happy about that0:26:29It's not that you're happy It's that you're engaged and engrossed in it, you would do it again Even though it might take effort You can tell that where you are is meaningful0:26:38Well I think what happens in that situation is that You're in a Piagetian place Where many of the games that you're playing are stacked sort of isomorphically on top of one another0:26:49And the experience of meaning is the fact that you're playing a small game properly Nested inside a larger game, you're playing it properly Nested inside a larger game, you're playing it properly too, etc all the way out0:27:01Past is balanced, future is balanced everything is stacked up And there's a report coming from your being telling you that, that's why you're engaged0:27:11You might say well maybe that's real. Maybe it's more real than anything else That's a strange thing because if you think that meaning is separate and secondary from the real objective world0:27:21Then the reality is the object But it isn't obvious that the reality is the object It's certainly not how we act0:27:30It's not how we perceive And so Did we evolve to perceive reality? It depends on what you mean by perceive0:27:39Perceive might mean did we evolve mechanisms that allowed us to survive in the face of that reality. Yes. Is that whats real? What enables you to survive in the face of reality?0:27:51It's a definition It's a perfectly reasonable definition unless you can come up with a better one Meanings are primary0:28:00Now that brings up a strange issue So what determines the meaning of what it is you're perceiving Well this is where Binswanger and Boss disagree0:28:11Binswanger says It's the a-priori ontological structure. The world design, or matrix of meaning Okay so what does that mean?0:28:20Well, you have a particular history. Biological and cultural and individual And you're viewing the world through the lense of that set of particularities0:28:31So it's almost if you are behind a curtain and the curtain has certain hoels in it And you can see through the wholes in the curtain but the curtain is your construction so the curtain with the holes determines what you see0:28:45Well, Boss would say no it's the opposite in a very strange thing The meaning of the world manifests itself to you more or less of its own accord0:28:55And It's a tougher one to explain Disclosure of meaning: Boss the revelation of the object0:29:04The emergence of the phenomena: the numinous The very word phenomena is derived from phainesthai To shine forth, to appear, to unveil itself, to come out of concealment or darkness0:29:15Okay here's an example you see someone beautiful Is it your perception is it your perception or does the beauty exist?0:29:25That's the difference between Binswanger and Boss Cause Binswanger would say well the reason that thing appears to you as beautiful is because of the way you're filtering it0:29:34And Boss would say no The beauty inheres in the object itself and manifests itself. It shines forth And so I really like this concept this concept of phenomena0:29:46That's why they're phenomenologists phainesthai means to shine forth From the phenomenological perspective you pursue those things that shine forth0:29:55Now you remember this is kind of a parallel idea I suppose it's a parallel of Jungian ideas You remember in Harry Potter that when they're playing Quidditch he's always chasing the snitch?0:30:07And you remember how, if I've got this correctly, Quidditch is basically two games at the same time right? There's the standard game and there's the game that the seekers play0:30:16Yes? I've got that right? What happens if the seeker gets the snitch? Games over right? They win Very interesting. She has a brilliant imagination that woman, Rowling0:30:28So the idea is that in every game there's two games going on at the same time. There's the ordinary game And there's the game that the seekers play and the seekers chase the thing that shines at them0:30:37And that's what that little thing is the snitch. It's a round circle with wings. It's a very very old old old symbol It's a symbol of what0:30:46It's a symbol of reality before it's fractionated into its parts I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that It's a symbol of It's a symbol of0:30:55Imagine that there are things that move forward to make you curious And you were trying to figure out what was common among all the things that made you curious0:31:04That thing that Harry Potter's chasing, that's a symbol of that It's golden like the sun, it flits around and attracts your attention and it's always moving And if you're seeking, you chase it.0:31:15So that's the phenomenological idea, that's the disclosure of meaning You say well when you're curious about something, why are you curious about that? Is it calling to you? Or is it something that you're interpreting?0:31:28Well I would say it's both I think that's the way to resolve this puzzle It's that There isn't a perceiving entity without a structure0:31:37And your structure has been evolving itself for three and a half billion years There's no perceiving entity without a structure But by the same token the thing that's being perceived0:31:47Also shines forth with its own potential manifestation And you need to think of it both ways at the same time But the curiosity issue is a really fascinating one0:31:57Because curiosity pulls you forward It's not random That's the thing that's so cool You can't really control it, but it's not random0:32:07If your curiosity is random, you're schizophrenic And I mean that technically Because one of the things that happens to schziphrenics is that the mechanisms that establish relevance become pathologized0:32:18And they see meaning everywhere, randomly And that's partly why they generate delusions Because the incoherent manifestation of meaning calls out for a representation0:32:28They develop a paranoid delusion if they're intelligent enough to put everything together So you're curious and something pulls you forward Well you can interact with the curiosity and you can follow it but you can't really direct it0:32:40The question is where is it taking you? So that little ball, that was a manifestation Of what the Greeks referred to - Greeks? Is that right? - Mercurius0:32:51It's a Roman and Greek God Mercurius The spirit Mercurius is the messenger of the Gods. The winged messenger of the Gods It flits around You say well the curiosity pulls you forward0:33:02To where? Well to wherever it wants to take you Well that's a Jungian idea as well Is that your curiosity is like the manifestation of your self to the ego0:33:13Right? It's the thing that you could be in the future calling you forward Something like that Very strange idea0:33:22Very interesting. See when you start to understand That you're not in control of what makes you interested in things The whole world shifts around on you0:33:31Because the question is if you're not in control of that, what the hell is directing it? What's going on? It's not you It's not under your control0:33:41It's not random. It's alive. It's dynamic It has an orientation towards something That's the Jungian self. Or that's the manifestation of meaning0:33:50Yes very strange I told you this already See there's an old representation, a very old represenation of the snitch right there0:33:59Now this is an old symbol, eh? You've got this dragon of chaos here It's kind of like an octopus as well That twist in its tail refers to infinity. Dragons almost always have an infinite tail like that0:34:11And it's got the claws of a bird, maybe a bird of prey The body of an animal and the head of a snake And then down here You see its got the sun up there so it's sort of aiming upwards towards the sun this thing0:34:23And then down here is this thing called the round chaos. It's an old alchemical system And if you look the dragon is fertilizing this And that has potential in it like an egg0:34:34It's full of potential And so it's matter and spirit at the same time It's sort of like it's a representation of that which you're exploring0:34:45Because you could say well the thing that you're exploring It's sort of a constructivist idea You explore something new What do you generate from the exploration? You. Because as you explore it you learn things. That changes you.0:34:57So you generate psyche out of the exploration. That's spirit. And you also generate the world out of it But the thing to begin with is psyche and world at the same time0:35:06And that's what this thing represents And that's what Harry Potter is chasing That's what makes him a seeker Very strange ideas Now I'm going to tell you a dream0:35:16There was a dream I had while working on these ideas And I'm going to tell you the dream for two reasons One is because it bears directly on these ideas Two because well we just covered psychoanalytic thought and I want to show you how a dream can work0:35:29Cause it's not easy to find a dream that you can interpret in a way that's public that makes sense Cause they're usually so tightly defined contextually You can define them in the therapeutic context because you know so much about the person0:35:41It's very hard to pull that out and make it meaningful outside of that context But this dream works. Ok so, I was dreaming I was dreaming that there was a small object. It was a circle, a sphere about this big.0:35:53And it was floating on top of the Atlantic Ocean And I had kind of a birds eye view of it and I was following it along Like maybe you know like a drone would follow behind an object0:36:03And it was floating And it was really zipping along man, it was really really fast And then the scene shifted To a bunch of scientists they were sitting inside a room full of television monitors0:36:15And they were watching this thing move across the Ocean And so it was here and it had four hurricanes beside it one here, one here, one here, and one here0:36:24So it was in the center of four hurricanes So whatever it was was like some bloody potent thing zipping across the ocean0:36:33Then the scientists got a hold of it I guess and the scene shifted And I was in a museum like an old Victorian museum And this thing, this ball was now inside a0:36:43Imagine a wood stand With a glass case on top of it It was inside the glass case and it was floating and it was sort of pulsing a little bit0:36:52And so inside the room there was Stephen Hawking And the American President I don't remember who it was he was sort of faceless0:37:02But Stephen I thought, Stephen Hawking? What the hell Disembodied intellect That's Stephen Hawking so that's what that meant And the President well he's just the symbol of order0:37:13And so this thing whatever it was that was surrounded by these winds Had been placed into a category system right? It was in a museum, it was boxed in. It had been conceptualized and categorized0:37:24Partly by disembodied intellect, that was Stephen Hawking, and partly by social order And so there's a Binswanger Boss thing going on there The thing pulses and is alive so its got its own power0:37:36But it's also encapsulated in a category system So I'm a third person observer in there I'm not in the room I'm just seeing this So that was fine So the next thing that happened0:37:45Oh yes, one of them described the features of the room Its walls were seven feet thick They didn't want this thing going anywhere And it was made out of titanium dioxide0:37:55I thought, what the hell is that? Well it's a paint It's a paint substance but it's also what the hull of the Starship Enterprise is made out of So my dream was saying well what's the hardest substance there is? Well it's titanium dioxide0:38:07It's not getting out of that box The walls were designed to permanently constrain the object Okay now the next thing that happened was this object was You could tell it was kind of alive0:38:17And it kept shifting around and at one point it turned into a chrysalis you know a cocoon And I thought what the hell does that mean? And then, so it turned into a cocoon0:38:27And I don't know if you've seen a chrysalis when it's just about to hatch But it twitches around eh? It's alive that thing So they're very strange things0:38:36And then at the end it turned itself into a pipe Like a Meerschaum pipe And I thought Then it reformed itself into a sphere And just shot right out of the room0:38:45Like the walls weren't even there It decided it was gone bang! It was gone And I woke up and I thought what the hell What the hell does that mean?0:38:54It took me forever to figure this out So then about two years after experiencing this dream, I was reading Dante's Inferno In the ninth Canto, a messenger from God appears0:39:05So Dante goes down into hell right? It was Dante's attempt to describe It's brilliant So imagine that you go to a bad place psychologically right?0:39:15So your life has collapsed that's terrible But then you're trying to figure out what you did wrong and how you're to blame for it And so what you do is a descent0:39:24A descent into your own foolishness and stupidity Level, by level, by level And that's what Dante was trying to explain That's what that hell was0:39:33Levels of catastrophe and there's something right at the bottom And he found that it was betrayal that was at the bottom So in any case I was reading that0:39:43And there's a line in there that made me remember this dream Cause I tried to figure out this dream for years eh0:40:27So that was like a herald of the arrival of this messenger It's a very powerful scene And I thought about this dream with this thing with the four storms So0:40:36The pipe thing that really, that really took me forever to figure out And I finally remembered this painting by Magritte This is not a pipe0:40:45Right so what does that mean? Well what it means is the representation is not the thing0:40:55It's a very famous painting right? The representation is not the thing Well even the perception is not the thing And that's what the dream was trying to get at0:41:04It's like this thing This thing that was so powerful and so capable of transforming Could be encapsulated temporarily within a conceptual system0:41:13But whenever it decided to leave it was just going to leave And so What is was referring to was the potential that there is inside objects So for example0:41:22And it's such a complicated thing to explain Nobody knew what cell phones were going to do You make the cell phone You think you know what it is0:41:31You don't know what it is No one knew what the birth control pill was going to do You make it, you think you know what it is, you have no idea what it is And it's going to do some of the things you think it will do0:41:41And it's going to do a bunch of things you have no idea about And that's because Things are more complex than they look They're multi-dimensional and they have0:41:50I wouldn't say a life exactly but they have an intrinsic complexity That tends to unfold across time And it's only somewhat predictable And so you have things under your control and in your grasp to some limited degree0:42:03But at any point it's like the switch in the yin yang symbol At any time chaos can collapse into order Or order can collapse into chaos And that's what that dream meant0:42:14Another painting by Magritte trying to express the same thing right? All men in suits, all uniform, all thinking the same way Same haircuts, completely socialized0:42:24Blinded by their own perceptions That's us Cause you think well your perceptions illuminate and bring you information It's yes and no0:42:34They also constrain to equal degree I dreamed much later about a year later This was a very cool image too You know that image I think is it Da Vinci or Michelangelo0:42:46Of the man inscribed in the square inside the circle It's a very famous image Well it was like that except It was a cube and not a square And so there was kind of a faceless person, almost like a mannequin inside this cube0:42:59And he was suspended about two feet off the ground And on the front wall It was like wall paper designs, there were these little squares about this big0:43:08And they mandalas square with circles inside them And then inside the circle there was a little snake tail that was out And the whole wall was covered with these snake tails0:43:18And the person When the person walked forward the wall would move forward And when he walked backwards the wall would move backwards So it was always this far away0:43:27And he could reach out and pull any of those snakes into being And so that was another dream of the same sort of idea What do you have in front of you? A world of objects0:43:36No You have a world of potential in front of you And you can interact with any aspect of that potential And while you're doing so, you realize it0:43:46You pull something into being that wouldn't have been there before And what you see in front of you is a wall of potential The potential is not infinite because you're constrained0:43:56But, it's still For all intents and purposes it will do you just fine it's more potential than you could ever need And so the dream See dreams0:44:07Dreams are at the forefront of thinking They get there before you The creative imagination is at the forefront of thinking0:44:16If you think that you're moving out into the unknown To gather new information What gets there first is the imagination Obviously that's what Piaget says about children as well0:44:26You imagine it first Then maybe you can represent it in speech And a dream is part of that imaginative process That's what artists are doing0:44:35They're going out into the unknown And representing it imaginatively So what does that painting mean? Well if the artist knew that he'd just write it down0:44:44Right? The art is beyond what's articulable otherwise it's not art it's just propaganda So the artist and the dream their out on the frontier right? That's the open imagination0:44:56And so when you're conceptualizing new things The dream and the imagination can bring you places that you don't even know that you can go And it's a mystery too It's like I don't know how I figured this out0:45:06It was as if the figuring out manifested itself inside me Cause that's the experience in a dream right? You don't feel "I dreamed this up" You feel "I had a dream." Where did that come from?0:45:19It springs out of the unknown and offers something to you0:45:31Here's pathology as conceptualized by the phenomenologists It's a very interesting way of thinking about it Existential guilt and fear as debt to possibility0:45:41Well so there's this idea It's like an exisitential idea that you have some problems That you have some problems in your life Well part of the Dasein is the sense of responsibility that you have to address those problems0:45:54It's part and parcel of the way that human beings manifest themselves in the world So part of your pathology would be failure to bear the responsibility for your being0:46:03And a sense that you have a debt to your existence And according to the phenomenologists that's built right into the sense of your being0:46:14It's a remarkable conceptualization Right well that's a good place to stop0:46:24Okay good we'll see you in a week and a half0:00:002017 Personality 13: Existentialism via Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag
0:00:000:00:12So, I want to tell you about a book today. The book is called "The Gulag Archipelago." (to the camera crew) You ready?0:00:21(to the students) The book is called "The Gulag Archipelago," and it's by a a Russian author... a Soviet author named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,0:00:30who was in the Gulag Archipelago concentration camp system for a very long time. He had a very hard life.0:00:40He was on the Russian front when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in the early stages of World War II. Now,0:00:52Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact0:01:01and Hitler invaded the Soviet Union anyway. And from what I've been able to understand, the Soviets had prepared an invasion force for Europe at that point but were0:01:12not concerned with having to defend their territory, and so they were caught completely unawares by Hitler's move. And the conditions on the Russian front were absolutely dreadful,0:01:21and Solzhenitsyn was soldier on Russian front.0:01:30He wrote some letters to one of his friends, which were intercepted, complaining about the lack of preparation, and using bitter dark humor to describe0:01:43the situation, and the consequences of that was that he was thrown into work camp. The Soviet system relied on work camps,0:01:54and so those were large labor camps of people who were essentially enslaved, many of whom were worked to death — often froze to death — working in conditions that were so dreadful, that they're virtually unimaginable.0:02:07Solzhenitsyn spent a very large number of years in these camps, sometimes in a more privileged camp, because he was an educated man,0:02:16and sometimes in worse camps. He also developed cancer0:02:25later, and wrote a book about that called "Cancer Ward," which is a brilliant book. So, he had a very hard life. There's just no way around that.0:02:35To be on the front, and then to be in a concentration camp, and then to have cancer, That's... that's pretty rough. Now, he wrote "The Gulag Archipelago."0:02:45He wrote a book called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" first, that was published in the early 1960s, when there was a brief thaw. Stalin was pretty much out of the picture by the end of the 1950s.0:02:57There’s some indication that he was murdered, by Khrushchev, and Khrushchev became a premier of the Soviet Union after Stalin.0:03:08And there’s some indication, perhaps, that Stalin was either murdered by Khrushchev and a set of his cronies, or, when he was very ill, just before he died, was not helped, at least by…0:03:21wasn’t provided with any medical attention because of the intervention of Khrushchev and his cronies. Now, there's some indication as well, at that point, that Stalin, who was an absolute— absolutely barbaric in every possible way you could imagine,0:03:34was planning to start a third World War. And he was certainly capable of doing such things, because he had already0:03:43imprisoned or killed tens of millions of people. Now... just after Stalin died, there was a bit of a thaw in the Soviet Union with regards to internal repression.0:03:54In the early 1960s, Solzhenitsyn published a book called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which was a story about one day in the life — his life, really — inside one of these so-called "gulag archipelago" camps.0:04:07Now, he called it the "gulag archipelago" because an "archipelago" is a chain of islands, and so Solzhenitsyn likened the work-camp system in the Soviet Union, which is made of isolated camps distributed across the entire state...0:04:20He likened that to a series of islands, and hence the metaphor. And "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was one of the first publications released in the Soviet Union that dared make public0:04:34what had happened inside these camps, at least initially. Now, that thought didn't last very long, but that book had a tremendous effect. It's a short book; it's worth reading.0:04:45After that, he spent— he wrote a number of other books which were also— He's a great literary figure; in the same category, I would say, as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which is,0:04:54like, really saying something, you know. Those two are perhaps the greatest literary figures who ever lived, with the possible exception of Shakespeare. He wrote this book called "The Gulag Archipelago," which is published in three volumes, each of which is about 700 pages long.0:05:09The first one details the origin of the oppressive Soviet system, at least in part under Lenin, and then its full-fledged implementation0:05:20under Stalin and the deaths of... Well, Solzhenitsyn estimated the deaths in internal repression in the Soviet Union at something approximating sixty million, between 1919 and 1959.0:05:31Now, that doesn't count the death toll in the second World War, by the way. Now, people have disputed those figures, but they're certainly in the tens of millions, and the low-end bounds are probably0:05:41twenty million, and the high-end bounds are near what Solzhenitsyn estimated... He also estimated that the same kind of internal repression in Maoist China0:05:50cost a hundred million lives, and so you can imagine that the genuine historical figures, again, are subject to dispute, but somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people. And one of the things that's really surprising to me0:06:03and that I think is absolutely reprehensible — absolutely reprehensible — is the fact that this is not widespread knowledge among students in the West.any of these0:06:12it's because your education - your historical education0:15:17Establishing the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labor.0:15:26One of the things that's quite interesting about the gulag camps, and this is something that's very relevant to understanding modern Russia is that so, ordinary criminals were put into the camps, and so were political prisoners.0:15:39but the ordinary criminals, and so those would be rapists and murderers, let's say, as well as thieves who were engaged in theft as an occupation. Those were regarded by the Soviets as "socially friendly" elements. And the reason for that was that they assumed that the reason that these people had turned to crime was because of the oppressive nature0:15:53of the previous Czarist/Capitalist system. And that the only reason that these criminals existed was because they had been oppressed -- they were oppressed victims of that system0:16:04and so one of the convenient consequences of that absolutely insane doctrine was that the Soviets put the ordinary criminals in charge of the camps.0:16:14And these were very, very seriously bad people, and so, you can imagine the way that they treated the political prisoners who were regarded as socially hostile elements,0:16:23sometimes because of their own hypothetically traitorous acts, but more often merely as a consequence of their racial or ethnic identity, or the fact that they were related by birth to, say, people who had been succcessful0:16:35under the previous systems, so who had any any association with nobility or any association with were known as the Kulaks, who were the only successful class of former peasants in the Soviet Union.0:16:48Because they were regarded as "privileged." You may have heard that word more recently. They were regarded as "privileged" and therefore as enemies of the state. And it didn't matter if it was your father, or your grandfather, or your great-grandfather0:16:59who happened to be "privileged," but the mere fact that you were a member of that group was sufficient reason to put you into a camp.0:00:002017 Personality 14: Introduction to Traits/Psychometrics/The Big 5
0:00:000:00:12so I want to tell you I want to make a little announcement first. I'm going to do a series of lectures, I think, starting in May. Maybe at the Isabel Bader Theatre?0:00:23We're trying to look into booking that. On a, I'm going to do a psychological interpretation of the bible from beginning to end. That's the plan anyway. So I'm going to do that once a week.0:00:32So if you are interested in that, I would recommend that you... (and maybe your not an that's fine obviously) but, if you go onto my Twitter account you can just, there's a place you can sign up0:00:43It doesn't mean that you'll attend. I'm just trying to see if there are people who are interested. I've been interested in doing that for a long time and so I think I'm going to try it and so. Anyways!0:00:52That's the announcement. Then, is that about it? I guess so. OK! So look we are going to switch gears today. Um. The first half of this course, as you've0:01:01no doubt already err gathered, is... because it's grounded essentially in clinical theories of personality it tends more towards the philosophical. And I told you that the reason for that was that0:01:12I regard clinical psychology as a branch of engineering rather than a branch of science. It's Human Engineering obviously; and because of that0:01:21it's an applied science and so that means it straddles the ground between a science and a practice and and it, because it's, it involves human beings,0:01:31it necessarily involves value because we live inside value structures; and so the logical consequence of that is that investigation into the philosophy of value0:01:42is necessary in order to understand clinical Psychological theories. Because really what you are trying to do as a clinician, you could say that you are trying to do two things; one is to help people0:01:52have less terrible lives. But you are also trying to help them have better lives. and there is obviously a value structure that is inherent in that attempt because you are moving from something of less value to something of more value0:02:03and so.. and it's best to just to face that and all the complexities that come along with that, head on. Now!0:02:12I think that what you do as a clinician, to overcome what ever tendency you might have to impose your value structure on someone is you do an awful lot of listening And so my basic practise with people0:02:22is to say to them. "Well; obviously you are here because you would like things to be better. But that's OK. We can use your definition of what constitutes better.0:02:31We can use your definition of what constitutes worse. Or we can establish that through dialogue, and negotiation. What are you aiming at? How would you like things to be better0:02:40a year from now say? If you could have what you wanted, if your life was put together what would that look like? And you can have a very straight forward0:02:49discussion with people about that if you are not cram the way that they are orienting the world into your particular perspective. Now. That's one of the dangers of being the adherent of0:02:58a given psychological school. Now having said that. It's also... There was research done many years ago, showing that if you were an eclectic psychotherapist0:03:09which means that you sort of pick and chose from different therapeutic schools. You tended to not be as effective as you were if you were the dedicated adherent of a given school0:03:18and I think that the reason for that is that there are so many schools of psychological thought that if you say that you pick an choose from all of them, what that0:03:27really means is that you don't know anything about any of them. And then there's also the additional factor (maybe, you might call it) that if someone comes to you and they're very chaotic and confused.0:03:39Helping them impose ANY STRUCTURE onto their life is likely to be an improvement over no structure at all. And you can think about that in a Piagetian sense, is that you know you’re going to be happier playing a game, rather than no game.0:03:50And there's many games that you can play that are better than no game. And so if you go to a therapist that has a particular view point0:03:59and they help you structure your understanding of the world within the confines of a given clinical model; and you came in there very chaotic and uncertain, then maybe that's going to be a lot better for you than just floundering.0:04:10And I think that there's some real truth in that. And I think that that's part and parcel of the same, er; of another, what, you might call it "reasonable observation about maturation" is that0:04:21it's very necessary for people at some point in there life to dedicate themselves to a single game, of some sort. Which is kind of what you are doing at University. You Know, you have to become 'one thing' at some point in your life;0:04:32and the sacrifice of course is that you give up all the other things that you could become. But you don't really have a choice because if you don't decide voluntarily to become one thing. You know0:04:42to become a disciplined adherent of some specific er practise or profession or view point0:04:51then you risk just ageing Chaotically And you don't get away with not ageing. So you might as well age into something that's actually something0:05:01rather than just becoming an old child Which is really... Which is not a good thing. It's not a good thing to see. Especialy when people hit about 40. It's not, it's not pretty,0:05:11For them or anyone else. And even at 30, it's getting pretty old at that point. 40; it's like almost irreparable at 40. And the reason for that is, you start running out of opportunities0:05:22when you're young and stupid people don't care because they think, you know, whatever. You've got decades of of possibilities still ready to unfold in you,0:05:33but if you are in the same unspecified position at 40 people are much less forgiving especially if they are going to hire someone who doesn't know0:05:43what's going on. Or employ them or sorry engage them is some sort of productive activity. They might as well take a chance on someone young and full of potential rather than someone0:05:52who has really lived more than half of their life already because of course you have, by the time you are 40. OK. So, anyway, so that is with regards to putting the first0:06:01half of the course to bed so to speak. The second half is more scientific. and there is a bit of a gap and it's a bit of a gap I am trying to resolve conceptually0:06:12because now we move into more biological models and into models that are psychometric and Psychometrics is the psychological study of the study0:06:21of psychological measurement. And now if you are a scientist there's a couple of things that you are obliged to do if you are a scientist one is to utilise the scientific method that's usually the0:06:32experimental method where you take 2 groups randomly selected, apply a manipulation to one of them and not0:06:41equivalent manipulation of a different sort to another; hypothesize about what the outcome is likely to be and then test it ah, that's the technical experimental model anyways0:06:50you're also obliged as a scientist to come up with a measurement of your, of your0:06:59to come up with a measurement, let's just put it that way that's reliable and valid. Okay, and what a reliable measure is one that measures the same way0:07:08across multiple measurements. So, for example, you wouldn't want to take a ruler that's made out of flexible rubber to measure things with because it0:07:17wouldn't give you the same measurement if you put it in different situations That's reliability, and it's a term you need to know. It means that the measurement tool produces stable results across0:07:26different instances of the measurement. Without that, you don't have a measurement. And the other critical0:07:35factor with regards to a measurement is that it has to be valid, which means that it actually has to measure what it preports to measure and it actually has to be usable for an array of0:07:46different purposes as a consequence, so, you might think well the purpose of scientific endeavor is to predict and to control, you could say understand, predict, and control but0:07:56understanding, prediction, and control are all manifestations of the same underlying throughly designed comprehension. Now,0:08:07here's what's happened with the measurement of personality It's a funny story in some sense, a peculiar story, because0:08:17in many ways, what we've come to understand about personality from a scientific perspective, developed in a very atheoretical manner. It's not very common0:08:26in scientific endeavor that that occurs, is that what we know about personality emerged from, I would say, statistically rigorous observation,0:08:36without it being the consequence of any real model. So, often, what happens, in scientific endeavor is that someone generates a model first, a theoretical understanding,0:08:47and then they generate measurement tools based on that theoretical understanding and then they test the measurement tools to see if well if the measurement tools perform properly, and if they0:08:56fail at least to invalidate the underlying theory That isn't what happened with psychometrics. Except in a loose way, so here's the loose0:09:05theory, and you've got to get this exactly right to understand this properly. You've got to get it exactly right, and it's really important, because, insofar as you guys are interested in psychology, especially in the0:09:15experimental end of psychology, measurement is everything and so much of what psychologists publish and write about is incorrect, and the reason it's incorrect0:09:24is cause they do not have their measurements properly instantiated. It's a massive problem especially in social psychology. In fact it's probably a fatal problem, in that most of the things that0:09:34social psychologists measure don't exist. And social psychology has been rife with scandals for the last 4 or 5 years, and there's good reason for it0:09:43but a big part of the problem is is that, the measurement that people are not stringent and careful enough about their measurements so we're going to walk through this very very carefully, so I'm going to0:09:52set forward a set of propositions and you have to think about it, cause each of them are...they're axiomatic, so you sort of have to accept them before you go on to the next step.0:10:01And there's certainly room to question them. But here's the bare bones of the psychometric model of personality so we'll call it roughly the big 5 model0:10:10and the reason it's called the big 5 model is because the psychometric investigations have indicated that you can specify human personality along 5 basic dimensions. You might ask well what0:10:21exactly is personality, and well that's partly what we have been trying to wrestle with in the entire course so far and I would say umm what exactly is a trait. Think of an trait as an element of0:10:32personality; and I think the best way to think about a trait is as a sub-personality. So you are made up of sub-personalities that are integrated into something0:10:43vaguely resembling a unity. But the unity is diverse. There are describable stable elements that characterize you.0:10:52That are elements of your being. So for example, here are some common ones. I would say, are you so sure ,or would you rather be alone? So here is a good question for you to define0:11:03decide whether you are an extrovert or an introvert. It's pretty straightforward. It is the first major dimension. Basically if you take any set of questions, about, any set of questions that0:11:14could be applied descriptively to a human being, and you subject them to a statistical process called factor analysis. You can determine how they group together. So, what I would be interested in,0:11:25Let's say I ask you a hundred questions.0:00:002017 Personality 15: Biology/Traits: The Limbic System
0:00:002017 Personality 16: Biology/Traits: Incentive Reward/Neuroticism
0:00:002017 Personality 17: Biology and Traits: Agreeableness
0:00:00 [CLASSICAL MUSIC]0:00:12We've discussed the big five traits: extroversion, that's sensitivity to positive emotion. Neuroticism: it's sensitivity to negative emotion.0:00:21Not all negative emotions. Mostly fear, anxiety, and emotional pain seem to load on neuroticism. Disgust, which is another negative emotion.0:00:31It seems to be more associated [COUGHS] with conscientiousness, particularly its orderliness aspect.0:00:40Agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. We're going to talk about agreeableness today. Agreeableness is a very difficult personality dimension to understand, I think.0:00:50Partly because it's difficult to dissociate from neuroticism, and as well from extroversion. Because agreeable people like you, and so that kind of sounds like extroversion.0:01:01And disagreeable people sound like they're hard to get along with. And they sort of are. But people who are high in neuroticism are hard to get along with too. And they tend to be volatile and irritable.0:01:12And so most of the time, if you're engaged in a contentious issue with someone, and emotions flare, it usually has more to do with trait neuroticism than with disagreeableness per se.0:01:23So what I'm going to do is try to describe to you what the agreeable trait is, on both of its dimensions. And also to lay out the pros and cons of existence on that normal distribution trait at more or less every point.0:01:39Because I think, the way I look at it anyways, is, of all the traits, agreeableness is the one that seems to come with the most marked positive and negative aspects.0:01:50Features, let's say, so we don't confuse it with aspects. The most positive and negative features at each point on the distribution. It seems to be a very, very complex dimension.0:01:59So, I'll read you some of the questions from the Big Five Aspects Scale and that will give you an initial rule-of-thumb estimate about whether or not you're agreeable or disagreeable.0:02:09And so here are some of the questions. Imagine that you're answering these for yourself on a scale from one to five, strongly disagree to strongly agree.0:02:19So the first question is: I'm not interested in other people's problems. So, if you are interested in other people's problems, that tilts you towards agreeableness.0:02:31Agreeableness is divided into compassion and politeness. Which also sound like very positive things, right? Because everyone wants to be compassionate, and everyone wants to be polite. And so you might say, "Well, is that a virtue? Are those virtues, with the other end being actually negative, to be not compassionate, not polite."0:02:49It's certainly worded that way. And that's actually a mistake, because we know that these traits are normally distributed, roughly speaking, right? And that that means that there has to be positive and negative features at every single position on the distribution.0:03:04And so to make the pre-supposition, for example, that being extroverted is better than being introverted, or that being emotionally stable is necessarily better than being neurotic, is to make a kind of confusion of moral obligation with trait position.0:03:24You have to assume that there's advantages and disadvantages all the way along, or the distribution wouldn't have set itself up that way. Especially because these things seem to be biologically instantiated traits.0:03:35So Anyways If you're interested in other people's problems, they like to unburden themselves to you, you care about them: that's a mark of compassion.0:03:44If you're more or less indifferent to other people's stupid problems and you wish they'd just get on with it, then you're less compassionate. You're harsher and more, well, at the extreme, more callous.0:03:58Ah, let's see. Respect authority. That's politeness. That's part of agreeableness.0:04:16Feel others' emotions. Compassion. Inquire about others' wellbeing. Compassion.0:04:29Can't be bothered with others' needs. Take advantage of others. That's disagreeable, obviously. Sympathize with others' feelings.'0:04:39Avoid imposing my will on others. Wait for others to lead the way. Okay, I think all of those are associated with the trait agreeableness or disagreeableness.0:04:50So let's think about this for a minute. So I'm going to tell you how I conceptualize agreeableness. The first thing you want to know is that women are more agreeable than men. About half a standard deviation.0:05:01And that's approximately enough so that if you took a random male and a random female out of the population, and you tried to guess who was more agreeable, and you guessed the female, you'd be right about 60% of the time.0:05:12But what's interesting about that, and this is something also to keep in mind, about normal distributions, you know. Imagine you have normal distribution, so that most people are in the middle.0:05:22And then you have another normal distribution, male and female, and mostly they overlap. But, you see, out here, and out here, they don't overlap at all.0:05:32And so, even though on average, men and women aren't that much different in terms of their levels of agreeableness by the group, if you go out and you look at the extremes, they're very different.0:05:43So all of the most agreeable people are women, and all of the most disagreeable people are men. And the thing is, the extremes are often what matter, rather than what's in the middle.0:05:52And so one of the ways that's reflected in society, by the way, is there's way more men in prison. And the best personality predictor of being in prison is to be low in agreeableness.0:06:02It makes you callous. Now, you might think, "What's the opposite of compassion and politeness?" And the answer to that is, I think it's best conceptualized as a trading game.0:06:14So let's say that we're going to play repeated trading games. And if you're very agreeable, then you're going to bargain harder on my behalf than you're going to bargain on your own behalf.0:06:25Whereas if you're very disagreeable, you're going to do the reverse. You're going to think, "I'm in this trading game for me, and you're going to take care of your own interests." Where an agreeable person is going to say, "No, no, at worst this has to be 50-50, but I'd like to help you every way I can."0:06:41Okay, so you kind of understand that. Now the advantage to being agreeable, then, is that you're good in teams and you're very much likely to give other people credit. The down side of being agreeable is that you're not good at putting forward your own interests.0:06:54And so one of the things that predicts salary across time, for example, is agreeableness, and it predicts it negatively. And so it's part of the reason why women get paid less than men, and this is something for the women in the class to really listen to.0:07:07Because how you get paid across time depends on a very large number of things, right? It depends on your skills and your abilities and your position and your social network and all of that.0:07:17But the other thing it depends on is whether or not you actually go ask for money. Or maybe that you don't even ask. Because actually, you don't ask for money. You tell people that you need to be paid more or something they don't like will happen.0:07:28And I don't mean as a threat. I mean that you have to be willing, when you're negotiating, to have an alternative. You go talk to your boss, who isn't going to give you money, because everyone wants money, right?0:07:38It's a competitive game. You're going to have to go there and say, "Look, here's what I do. Here's why it's useful. Here's why you have to give me more money. And this is my opportunities if you don't."0:07:50And then, you're not taking your boss's money anyway, because it's very frequently the case that he's working for a whopping big company. But he needs an excuse to give you money because everyone's asking for money all the time.0:08:03And so you have to put your case forward powerfully and disagreeably. Now, you don't want to do it too disagreeably because then he's gonna think that you're a son of a bitch and maybe he's not gonna give you anything and maybe you'll get fired for being mouthy, and all of that.0:08:16And that certainly happens to people who are too disagreeable. You gotta get the balance right. But it's definitely the case. And the other thing that happens to women that's also worth noting, and this is probably because they're higher in negative emotion, is they tend to underestimate their own utility in business settings.0:08:31Right, because if you're trying to evaluate what you're like, and you're more tilted toward negative emotion, then the things that you do that are wrong are gonna stand out more on the foreground than the things that you do that are right.0:08:43So if you go into a negotiation, and you're uncertain already, because you have self doubts, and then you're agreeable in the negotiation, what's going to happen is that you're not going to win as often.0:08:55And winning, in a business setting, or in a career development setting, means more opportunity for promotion and more revenue generated. Now, the downside of that, of course, is as you climb the business hierarchy, you also have to take on more responsibility, and that responsibility is sometimes unpleasant as well, especially to people who are agreeable.0:09:13Because you're not necessarily liked if you're in a position of authority. And agreeable people really like to be liked. It's their primary motivator because they're concerned about the maintenance of intimate, positive relationships.0:09:27That also makes them conflict avoidant. Okay so now, you guys can think about this, but I'll tell you why I think the personality differences between men and women exist.0:09:39Now, these are speculative hypotheses, but they're reasonably well documented by the relevant literature. So let's think about it. The first thing we might think about is: what's the difference between men and women?0:09:51How do they differ? Well the first thing we might observe is that if you look at personality differences between pre-pubescent boys and girls, they're not very large.0:10:01Boys and girls don't differ in terms of their trait neuroticism, for example. What happens is that, when puberty kicks in, women's trait neuroticism rises and it stays higher than men for the rest of their life.0:10:13And this is why you see this reflected in the different kinds of psychopathology that beset the two sexes. So men are over-represented in alcoholism, drug abuse, anti-social personality, and a host of learning disorders as well as attention deficit disorder.0:10:27And women are over-represented in depression and anxiety, primarily. That seems to be tightly associated with higher levels of trait neuroticism. Because if you're at the 95th percentile or higher, let's say, in trait neuroticism,0:10:40there isn't much difference between that and being somewhat prone to depression and anxiety. And because the curves overlap, the curves aren't identical,0:10:51the normal distributions aren't identical for men and women, you tilt the women's curve to the right towards higher levels of neuroticism. You go out and you look for the person in twenty who has the highest levels of negative emotion.0:11:04It's much more likely to be female than male. Okay, so let's see if we can figure out why. So, we're gonna tell you some basic differences between men and women and you can tell me what you think about it, if you agree or disagree.0:11:15Okay, first. Size differential emerges between men and women at puberty, right? Because boys and girls are roughly the same size and roughly the same strength.0:11:24But men get bigger at puberty, when testosterone kicks in. And more importantly, not only do they get taller and heavier, but their upper body strength is much higher.0:11:33And that's a real issue for combat, because human beings punch, and there's other animals that do that. Kangaroos do that too, so we're not the only people that punch.0:11:43But we have clubs on the ends of our arms, and so that's how we defend ourselves. And so if you have a lot of upper body strength, especially across the shoulders, and you're heavier, then you can step into the punch and it's a lot more devastating.0:11:55Now it is the case that, if you look at the statistics for physical altercations in marriage, women attack their husbands more often than husbands attack their wives.0:12:04Well, you think, "Why is that?" Well, let's assume that there isn't any reason, other than both people in a relationship can get upset, and the women know that if they hit their husbands, nothing's really going to happen.0:12:16Right, because if you're a woman about that high, and your husband is, say, my height, unless you hit me with an object or something that's sharp, the probability that you're going to do me any serious damage is pretty low.0:12:28You might hurt me. But if I do the reverse, and hit you, and I really hit you then I might kill you. And so, at least one of the reasons why women can be more physically aggressive in minor ways in a relationship0:12:40is because everyone knows, the wife and the husband equally, that the consequence of the physical aggression is much more limited. So, men do more serious damage to women.0:12:50But women are more aggressive in relationships. So that's interesting. So ok, so there's a body size difference that's important, a strength differential that's important.0:12:59Next thing, I think... So let's assume that the reason that women are higher in sensitivity to negative emotion is because the world is actually more dangerous to women, right?0:13:09Because that would be the most logical reason why there would be a sex difference in something like fear sensitivity and punishment. Well first there's the danger of physical altercation.0:13:20Second, there's the sexual danger. So women become sexually vulnerable at puberty. And why do I say vulnerable? Well it's straightforward.0:13:29It's because the cost of sex for women is way higher than it is for men. Or it certainly has been throughout our evolutionary history. Because if a man has an unwanted sexual encounter,0:13:39well then he walks away and maybe he is persecuted by the the state or prosecuted by the state for it. But if a woman has an unwanted, unwarranted, or incautious sexual encounter,0:13:48and she ends up pregnant, then, well, in traditional societies, you're just done. And even in modern societies that are rich like ours, you're... it's a... I don't have to go into that.0:14:01It's big trouble. No matter what you do about it, it's big trouble. So being more nervous about that makes perfect sense. But then, here's the last thing.0:14:11I think that women's nervous systems are not adapted to women. I think women's nervous systems are adapted to the mother-infant dyad.0:14:21Because you are not the same creature when you have an infant. Not at all. You're way more vulnerable. And it's partly because you have to express the vulnerability of the infant.0:14:30And you also have to care for it. Right, so, you think about an infant, especially under nine months. So let's say, how are you going to be wired up if you're going to optimally care for an infant under nine months?0:14:41And I'm saying under nine months because women generally do the bulk of child care for infants who are under nine months old. And part of the reason for that, there's a whole host of reasons, but part of the reasons for that, obviously,0:14:51is that they breast-feed. But imagine what you need to be wired up biologically in order to care for an infant. First of all, they're very demanding.0:15:00Right? Because they're completely helpless. And they're demanding twenty-four hours a day. And it's quite an emotional load.0:15:10And an infant under nine months is never wrong. Right? What you do to an infant under nine months, is, when they're in distress, you always respond. You never tell the infant, "Get your act together and stop whining."0:15:22Right? Which you can do to a child that's eighteen months old. You can start having that sort of conversation. But under nine months, it's like, nothing is the infant's fault,0:15:33it's surrounded in an extraordinarily threatening world, and you have to be responsive to what it needs, regardless of what you want. And you have to be very sensitive to the threats that emerge in the environment.0:15:43And so I think the price that women pay for that ability to have an intimate relationship with infants in the very earliest stages of development is that their nervous systems are actually wired so that they can perform that role optimally.0:15:56And the disadvantage to that is that having a temperament like that doesn't work that well when you're dealing with adult men. Especially when you're dealing with them in a business environment.0:16:06Because it's not the same thing. Not at all. It's a competitive environment. So agreeable people are compassionate and polite. What are disagreeable people like?0:16:15They're tough-minded, they're blunt, they're competitive, and they won't do a damn thing they don't want to do. So it isn't exactly that they're aggressive, although they will push you the hell out of their way if you're in the way.0:16:26They're not volatile like you are if you're high in neuroticism. It isn't defensive aggression, it's more like predatory aggression.0:16:35It's dominance behavior. And so for someone who's highly disagreeable, they look at the world as a place in which they can compete and win.0:16:45And I'll tell you a story. I have a friend. I gave him my personality test, the Big Five Aspect Scale that Colin DeYoung developed, in my lab.0:16:56I knew he was a disagreeable guy. By interacting with him. I mean, he's even rude to people sort of spontaneously on the street. I actually like him quite a bit. He's very, very funny.0:17:05He's also very conscientious, so you can trust him. But he's disagreeable as hell. So I gave him this test because I thought it would be funny, and he came out as the most disagreeable person in ten thousand.0:17:17[STUDENTS LAUGH] Reasonable in compassion, about thirtieth percentile, but point zero-zero-one in politeness. So he's extraordinarily blunt.0:17:26He'll just say absolutely anything, no matter how horrible it is. And he was often brought into corporations to sort of clean them up. So if a corporation was tilting and not doing well, they'd bring him in to find out who the useless people were and fire them.0:17:40And I talked to him about that, because I had the mis-opportunity to have to not have graduate students in my lab, for example, that weren't performing well. And I find it very, very difficult, to, you know, to dress someone down, and certainly difficult to fire them.0:17:52I just hate it because I'm actually quite an agreeable person, much to my chagrin. And I asked him about that. And I said, "Well, what do you do? You have to fire people all the time. How do you handle that?"0:18:01He says, "Handle it? I enjoy it!" [STUDENTS LAUGH] And I thought, "Wow, that's so interesting, that someone would have that response." So I said, "Well, what do you mean you enjoy it?" He said, "Look, I go into these companies, and I analyze the performance of groups of people.0:18:13Right, and in those groups there are people who are really striving, really trying hard and working, themselves, really hard, and being productive. And then there's these people that are just doing nothing.0:18:23They're completely in the way. They don't carry their weight at all. They take advantage every chance they get. And they're always whining about why they can't work. It's like, I find out who they are, I call them into my office, and I tell them exactly what they've been doing.0:18:34It's like, hit the road, buddy. You've had your run of it." And I thought, "Oh yeah, okay, fair enough." Well, I can tell you, you know, I've had situations in my lab where I had under-performing graduate students.0:18:47And one of the things that was really awful about that was that it was really hard on the high-performing graduate students. You know, because they felt that even being in the same category as the people who weren't working hard and pulling their weight devalued what they were doing.0:19:01You know? And that's exactly right. And so this is also why there's a conscientiousness trait and an agreeableness trait. Because conscientious people judge you on your accomplishments, right?0:19:12They don't give a damn about your feelings. Not a bit. It's like, "Are you doing the work, or not?" Whereas agreeable people think, "Well, you know, your mother's sick, and you've got a bunch of family problems, and we all have to take care of each other."0:19:25"And it's no wonder that you're having a rough time." You can't say that one of those attitudes is correct and the other isn't correct. You can't say that! There wouldn't be those two dimensions if there wasn't something correct about both of them.0:19:37But you can certainly point out that often they conflict. You know, and so the demand for inclusiveness and unity and care, and the demand for high level performance in a hierarchical structure- they're very different orientations in the world.0:19:53It's complicated for people who are agreeable AND conscientious. And actually, I think often, that large corporations, large institutions of any sort, run on the un-heralded labor of people who are high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness.0:20:09And they're disproportionately women. My experience in large institutions has been that if you want to hire someone to exploit appropriately,0:20:18No, not appropriately.. If you want to hire someone to exploit productively, you hire middle-aged women who are hyper-conscientious and who are agreeable. Because they'll do everything.0:20:27They won't take credit for it, and they won't complain. And that's nasty. And I think that happens all the time. And so one of the things you have to be careful of, if you're agreeable, is not to be exploited.0:20:38Because you'll line up to be exploited. And I think the reason for that is because you're wired to be exploited by infants. And so, that just doesn't work so well in the actual world.0:20:49One of the things that happens very often in psychotherapy, you know, people come to psychotherapy for multiple reasons. But one of them is they often come because they're too agreeable.0:20:58And so what they get is so-called "assertiveness training." Although it's not exactly assertiveness that's being trained. What it is the ability to learn how to negotiate on your own behalf.0:21:07And one of the things I tell agreeable people, especially if they're conscientious, is Say what you think. Tell the truth about what you think. There's gonna be things you think that you think are nasty and harsh.0:21:18And they probably are nasty and harsh. But they're also probably true. And you need to bring those up to the forefront and deliver the message. And it's not straightforward at all because agreeable people do not like conflict.0:21:31Not at all. They smooth the water. And you can see why that is, in accordance with the hypothesis that I've been putting forward. You don't want conflict around infants.0:21:41It's too damn dangerous. You don't want fights to break out. You don't want anything to disturb the relative peace. If you're also more prone to being hurt, physically, and perhaps emotionally, you're also maybe loathe to engage in the kind of high intensity conflict that will solve problems in the short term.0:21:58Because it takes a lot of conflict to solve problems in the short term. And if that can spiral up to where it's dangerous, which it can, it gets uncontrolled,0:22:08it might be safer in the short term to keep the waters smooth, and to not delve into those situations where conflict emerges. The problem with that is it's not a very good medium to long-term strategy.0:22:19Right, because lots of times there's things you have to talk about. Because they're not going to go away. And so partly what you do with agreeable people is, you get them to figure out- and they have a hard time with this too.0:22:31If you ask a disagreeable person what he wants, say, or she wants, they'll tell you right away. They go, "This is what I want, and this is how I'm going to get it." Agreeable people, especially if they're really agreeable, are so agreeable, that they often don't even know what they want.0:22:44Because they're so accustomed to living for other people, and to finding out what other people want, and to trying to make them comfortable, and so forth, that it's harder for them to find a sense of their own desires as they move through life.0:22:56And that's not... look, there's situations where that's advantageous, but it's certainly not advantageous if you're going to try to forge yourself a career.0:23:06That just doesn't work at all. So... All right. What else do I want to tell you about agreeableness?0:23:16Well, I can tell you a little bit about the regulation of aggression. One of the things I studied, especially when I was in Montreal, was the development of antisocial behavior in children and in adolescents.0:23:30Antisocial children, so they tend to be aggressive, antisocial children tend to turn into antisocial... It's conduct disorder, technically speaking. Conduct disordered children tend to turn into conduct disordered adolescents.0:23:41And then they tend to turn into antisocial and criminal adults. And so I can tell you little bit about how that progresses, I think, because it's quite interesting. And it isn't what people generally think.0:23:51So, the first thing is, if you want to be criminal, the best way to do it is to be really low in agreeableness and really low in conscientiousness. Because low in agreeableness means, "Things are for me and not for you.0:24:02And you're not going to get me to do a damn that I don't want to do, and I'll stand my ground." And low in conscientiousness means you can do all the work and I'll sit back and take the benefits.0:24:11And so if you have someone who's really disagreeable, and really unconscientious, you have someone who's starting to border on psychopath. And if you add high intelligence and high emotional stability to that, then you have someone who won't work but will reap the benefits, who doesn't give a damn about you, who is assertive as hell and who's smart.0:24:29And a person like that's also going to be charismatic because extroverted disagreeable people are kind of narcissistic. But they're... they'll put themselves forward strongly.0:24:39And if they don't show any signs of fear, that also indicates that they're confident. And it's easy for people to confuse that with competence. And that's how psychopaths get away with what they're doing.0:24:48Although they have to move from person to person because their reputation will track them. So anyways, back to the development of aggression in children, the development of criminality in adults.0:24:59Here's how it seem to work, at least in part. It's more complicated than this, but I'll put in some of the sociological elements as well. So If you take0:25:08children and you group them together in groups defined by age, So let's say you have 30 two year olds, 30 three year olds, 30 four year olds, all the way up to eighteen.0:25:22And then you watch them interact, and you code their behavior for kicking, biting, fighting, and property theft,0:25:32then what you'll find is that the two year olds are by far the most aggressive of the lot. So that's pretty interesting, you know, because you think, "Well, children are naturally peaceful, and if they're aggressive it's because they learn it."0:25:42It's like, no, that's true for a small minority of children. But there's a substantial number of children who are aggressive at two, by nature.0:25:53Most of them are male. Now that doesn't mean most children are like that, because they're not, even if you look at two year olds, who are the most aggressive human beings. Most two year olds aren't aggressive.0:26:03But some of them are. And most of those are male. Okay, so then let's say you identify this cohort of aggressive two year olds. And you track them across time.0:26:12Track them for the next 2-4 years. Track them until they're four years old. What you find is the vast majority of the hyper-aggressive male two year olds get socialized perfectly well.0:26:25So by the time they're four, they're temperamentally probably still more aggressive, but they become civilized little monsters. So other people can tolerate them. And that means that they've had parents, or peers, or educational experiences, that enabled them to learn how to interact productively with other kids.0:26:41And to bring their aggressive nature under control. Some of that seems to be mediated by the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play. And that's one of the things that we know that that helps socialize rats, for example.0:26:52It's vital to them, but it also seems to really be good for socializing young kids. And rough-and-tumble play, which is something that adult males particularly like to do with young kids, by the way,0:27:03not before nine months, because they're just too little, but once they become ambulatory, and kind of puppy-like so that they're a little bit more robust, then you can play a lot with them.0:27:13And you can play with them right at the edge of danger, too, which kids, they absolutely go nuts for that. They love that. When I had little kids, I made this kind of wrestling ring out of these two couches that we had that would hook together.0:27:25And I'd bring them on there and, you know, toss them up in the air and catch them, you know. Eight, ten feet- no, no. [STUDENT LAUGHTER] A foot in the air and catch them, and they'd go like this, and then, you know, I'd catch them, and they'd laugh,0:27:38and I'd throw them up and they're all freaked out and then they'd laugh. So they're learning trust with that in the bodied way, and they're also learning, and this is from stretching them out, and wrestling them, and twisting them around, and letting them pull on your hair and hit you, and all of those things,0:27:51they learn deep in their bones exactly what can hurt them and what doesn't. And you want to kind of push them to the edge, you know, so that they can tell the difference between what hurts and what's still within the realm of the game.0:28:03And you do the same thing when they're wrestling with you. So they learn not to, you know, awkwardly stick their thumb in your eye. Or do things that are actually painful like grab your lip and pull it.0:28:13It's like, no, no, you let go of my lip, you know? And so, that seems to help regulate the aggressive impulses. And help the child find a more appropriate embodiment.0:28:25You can think that what you're doing, in some sense, when you're rough-and-tumble playing with kids is teaching them how to dance. Because that is what you're doing. You know? You're making them comfortable in their bodies in all of its extension.0:28:36And building in that kind of body fluency that you see in people who are well-situated inside themselves. And so that's something to really think about, you know? And it's appalling.0:28:45We know that the ability to engage in rough-and-tumble play among rats inhibits aggression, impulsive aggression, among rats. We also know that if you deprive rats of the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play, they show pre-frontal cortical developmental deficits.0:29:00And manifest behaviors that are akin to attention deficit disorder, which you can then treat with Ritalin. And so one of the things that's happening with boys, because they're way more dosed with attention deficit disorder medication than girls is that their natural proclivity to engage in robust and troublesome active play isn't appropriate for a school environment0:29:20where you're supposed to sit down and shut up. And so the kids get hyperactive. And instead of letting them out to run around until they fall over half exhausted, which is exactly what you should do,0:29:30you know, and you medicate them, so that their exploratory systems, the activity of which is facilitated by the dopaminergic agonist,0:29:40that's the ADHD medication, suppresses the play function. It's absolutely appalling. There's no excuse for it. You know, but it's a good indictment of the education system, because why in the world would you take six year old kids0:29:54and get them to sit without moving for five hours, unless you want them to grow up fat and stupid? Why in the world would you train them to do that? Well it's easier. That's one thing.0:30:04And when they're sitting there, there's nothing disruptive about the rough-and-tumble play, and that can be quite disruptive. So anyways, most of these kids0:30:13are reasonably well socialized by the time they're the age of four, using one mechanism or another. They learn how to regulate their aggression and they learn how to engage in fictional play structures with other kids.0:30:24They learn how to cooperate and compete. And the advantage to having a well-socialized disagreeable person is that they really don't let much get in their way. So if you can get a kid who's disagreeable socialized, that person can be quite the creature, you know?0:30:38Because they're very forward-moving in their nature and very difficult to stop. But if you don't get them successfully "domesticated," tamed, roughly speaking, by the time they're four,0:30:51their peers reject them. And that's a big problem because your job as a parent is to make your child socially desirable by the age of four.0:31:00You want to burn that into your brain. Because people don't know that. That's your job. And here's why, it's easy if you think about it carefully.0:31:10So you imagine, you've got a three year old child, so halfway through that initial period of socialization, and you take that child out in public.0:31:19Okay, what do you want for the child? Who care about you? What do you want for the child? You want the child to be able to interact with other children and adults,0:31:29so that the children are welcoming and smile and want to play with him or her, and the adults are happy to see the child and treat him or her properly. And if your child's a horrible little monster because you're afraid of disciplining or you don't know how to do that properly,0:31:43then what they're going to do is, they're going to experience nothing but rejection from other children, and false smiles from other parents and adults. So then you're throwing the child out there into a world where every single face that they see is either hostile or lying.0:31:59And that's not something that's going to be particularly conducive to the mental health or the wellbeing of your child. If your child can learn a couple simple rules of behavior, like don't interrupt adults when they're talking too much,0:32:10and pay attention, and try not to hit the other kids over the head with the truck any more than is absolutely necessary, and share and play properly, then when they meet other kids, the kids are going to try out a few little play routines on them,0:32:22and that's going to go well, and then they're going to go off, and socialize each other for the rest of their lives. Because that's what happens, is that from four years old onwards, the primary socialization with children takes place among other children.0:32:35And so if the kids don't get in on that early, they don't move into that developmental spiral upwards and they're left behind. And you can imagine how terrible that is, because a four year old will not play with another four year old who's two.0:32:49But a five year old certainly will not play with a five year old who's two. Right, because the gap is just starting to become unbelievably large. And so the kids start out behind, and then the peers leave them behind,0:33:00and then those kids are alienated and outside the peer group for the rest of their life. Those are the ones that grow up to be long-term anti-social.0:33:09They're already aggressive. It doesn't dip down. Now what happens to normal boys, roughly speaking, imagine the aggressive two year old types,0:33:18they get socialized, so their level of aggression goes down, and then they hit puberty, and testosterone kicks in, and bang! Levels of aggression go back up. And so that's why males are criminals between the ages roughly of sixteen and about twenty-five.0:33:31And it matches the creativity curve, by the way. It's so cool. If you look at the spike of creativity among men, sixteen to twenty-five, it starts to go down,0:33:40criminality matches that absolutely perfectly. So that's quite cool. So the testosterone levels raise the average level of aggression among men,0:33:50more dominance than aggression, actually, and testosterone is by no means all bad, and then it starts to decrease around age twenty-five or twenty-six, which is usually, with men,0:33:59stop staying up late at night, stop drinking as much, develop a full time career, and take on the burdens and responsibilities and opportunities that are associated with a long-term partner and family.0:34:13So that's the development of what I would call predatory aggression, because I also think that the agreeableness distribution is probably something like predatory aggression,0:34:26versus maternal sympathy. It's something like that. So if you look at other mammals that are predators, because we're predators as well as prey animals,0:34:35if you look at other animals like bears, the male bear has absolutely nothing to do with the raising of the infants. In fact, the female bears will keep the male the hell away because he's likely to kill the infants,0:34:45and maybe even to eat them. So there's no maternality at all in solitary, male, mammalian predators.0:34:54Now it depends on how social they are, but roughly speaking, that's the situation. Whereas with human beings, males are quite maternal. So, but anyways, I think the extreme of agreeableness,0:35:07on the low end, so disagreeableness, is predation. And the extreme on the upper end is maternal caring. And those two things compete, right?0:35:16Obviously, it's very difficult to be both of those at the same time. And so men, of course, in the wild, so to speak, are... Very, very few women hunt0:35:27in modern societies or in archaic societies. And you can also understand why that it because hunting actually requires hurting something, killing it. And it's usually something that's not very impressed about being hurt or killed, and it will emit a lot of distress while it's happening.0:35:41And so for anybody who's compassionate, who's got compassion as one of the fundamental elements of their temperament, that's something they're just not going to be able to tolerate at all.0:35:51In the evolutionary landscape, because that's really what we're talking about, there's tension behind the development of different modes of being in the world.0:36:00And if you're good at one thing, that sometimes means that you can't be good at the other thing at the same time. So... I was going to have a guest speaker for you last week, but the person I had invited in had some familial trouble,0:36:13so that didn't work out. She's a graduate student of mine and one of the things that we'd be working on in my lab, generally speaking, is the delineation of the relationship between personality traits and political belief.0:36:26And so I told you a little bit about the things that distinguish liberals from conservatives, right? The conservatives are high in conscientiousness, especially orderliness, and low in trait openness.0:36:37And so that means a conservative is someone who puts someone in boxes, puts the boxes in order, and doesn't like them to be messed up. So they like the borders between things to remain determinate and what would you say,0:36:53inviolable. And I think that's true at every level from the conceptual all the way up to the political. I think that the fundamental political question0:37:02and I think this is why the temperaments align across these political dimensions, is whether the borders between things should be open or closed. We see this reflected worldwide right now in then arguments about immigration, right?0:37:14Because the liberal types are saying, "Open the gates." And the conservatives are saying, "Wait, you don't know what you're inviting in." And you might say, "Well, who's right?" And the answer is you don't know.0:37:25That's the thing. Because sometimes the right answer is, "Open the gates, these are interesting people, we could trade with them, we could learn from each other." And sometimes the answer is, "Don't bother. What's going to come in is going to wipe you out and kill you, and really do it."0:37:38I mean, so, here's an example. This is why I think orderliness is associated with disgust sensitivity. And it's one of the determining factors of conservative political belief.0:37:49What happened when the Europeans came to North America? What happened when the Spaniards came to North America? 95% of the Native Americans died.0:37:58Why? Because the Spaniards brought illness. Smallpox, measles, chicken pox, all these things that the Native Americans had absolutely no resistance to.0:38:08There were hardly any diseases at all in North and South America. The Spaniards showed up, within 15-20 years, 19 out of 20 of the Native Americans were dead.0:38:18You never know what people are bringing with them. And so what that means is that how should you respond to people who are outside of your circle of familiarity?0:38:28Well the answer is One, they might kill you, in all sorts of ways . Two, they might bring with them things to trade that are of inestimable value.0:38:38So you're stuck. It's like, how the hell are you going to reconcile that problem? And the answer is, well we reconcile it temperamentally, roughly speaking. So half the people are temperamentally wired up to say, "No, no, no! Let's keep the damn boxes closed. Took a long time to pack everything in there and to get it into order."0:38:56And the liberals say, "Well wait a minute. You don't know if you've got things in the right boxes to begin with. The things that you're keeping in there were getting stale and old. And maybe we need some new ideas and new people to rejuvenate the situation."0:39:09That's political discussion. And the political discussion has to proceed because there's no way of solving that problem except by discussing it.0:39:18Well, how does that relate to agreeableness? We also looked at political correctness. And so here's an interesting thing. Purely from a scientific perspective.0:39:27You might ask yourself, If you talk about political correctness, one of the things that the people who tend to be labeled as politically correct say is0:39:36there's no such thing as political correctness. It's just a pejorative label that people who are opposed to those views impose on a set of beliefs to demonize it.0:39:46Perfectly reasonable objection, and you never know, it might be true. But the thing is, psychometrically, you can solve that problem, and you solve it the same way that you solve the problem of what constitutes human personality.0:39:57So this is the way we tried to solve it. You can think about it methodologically, because that's how you should think about it. The first thing we did was collect a very large number of statements from press accounts that seemed to indicate what people generally referred to as political correctnes.0:40:11So we had a small team of people combing media reports to come out with opinions or attitudes that looked like they were characteristic of the differentiation between politically correct people and people who aren't politically correct.0:40:24So we got about four hundred statements like that. And what you want to do is, you imagine that there's a core set of beliefs and statements that people are defining in a particular way.0:40:35And you're trying to get a handle on what that is, and even if it exists. What you do is over-sample it. If you can find questions that might even tangentially be related to the phenomena in question,0:40:48you include those. Because the statistics will take care of the excess. Okay, so then what you do is you take your four hundred items, roughly speaking, and you get people to register the degree to which they agree or disagree with them, get a thousand people to do that.0:41:03And then you subject that to a factor analysis. And what the factor analysis does is tell how those questions clump. Now, they might not clump.0:41:12So for example, you could do a factor analysis of a set of questions, and you could find that there are two hundred factors, let's say you have four hundred items. There's two hundred factors.0:41:21And none of them... there's no big set of questions that are clumping together. And you say, "Well, there's no evidence here that there is a single, underlying phenomena that unifies those questions that you can reasonably characterize with a name."0:41:35Well that isn't what we found. We found that there were two dimensions of political correctness. One of them looked like liberalism, except that the people who were politically correct, in addition to being liberal, were very high in trait agreeableness.0:41:51And agreeableness has almost nothing to do with the classic liberal-conservative divide. It's weakly related in that conservatives are more compassionate than liberals, Sorry, liberals are more compassionate than conservatives, the difference isn't huge,0:42:03and conservatives are more polite than liberals, and the difference isn't huge. So those are the two aspects of agreeableness. If you put them together, they cancel each other out.0:42:12And so on average, conservatives and liberals don't differ in agreeableness. But political correctness did clump together into two categories,0:42:22PC liberalism, we call it PC authoritarianism. The PC liberals were high in openness, high in verbal intelligence, and high in agreeableness.0:42:32And the second group was PC authoritarians. And they were also high in agreeableness, but they were high in orderliness, and the correlation with that was negative in relationship to verbal intelligence.0:42:41So we found that there were two categories of political correctness, that it does in fact exist, but that it's a very unstable construct because0:42:50factor one, which was PC liberalism, and factor two, which was PC authoritarianism, were only correlated at 0.1. And so what it indicates, and this is our prediction, roughly speaking, from the lab, is to the degree that there's unity, so to speak, on the politically correct left,0:43:05it'll fragment into two groups. One will be the PC liberals, and the other will be the PC authoritarians, because although they're united by their tendency to agreeableness, they're not united by other temperamental traits, nor in their core beliefs.0:43:18So the PC authoritarian types, for example, are very obsessed with language control. And it's funny that it's agreeableness. I've really been thinking about that.0:43:27You know, again, this is a hypothesis in development, but I think what's happening is that you know, your temperamental proclivity allows you to lay out a kind of radical simplification on the world.0:43:40That's part of the advantage of having a temperament. So if you're a conscientious person, the world is a place to go out there and work. If you're an open person, the world is a place to go out there to discover new ideas and do artistic things.0:43:50If you're an agreeable person, the world's a place to go out there and establish intimate relationships. So they're simplifying0:43:59perspectives, and simplifying personalities. They're the manner in which you're adapted to a particular niche.0:44:09I think what you see in agreeableness in relationship to political belief is a proclivity for people to divide the world into defenseless infants and predatory oppressors.0:44:21And that that's blasted forward onto the political landscape, and things are conceptualized along that temperamental variable. Anyways, that's where we're at with regards to the analysis of political belief.0:44:35Well, we've got three minutes left, and I'm wondering if anyone has a particularly intelligent question or failing that, any question at all? Because I told you a lot of things that are, I would say contentious.0:44:46But I also think they're very much worth knowing. So I, yes? Did you say that high in agreeableness is the simplified perspective of the mother-infant dynamic?0:44:58Yeah, that's what it looks like to me, yeah. Projected onto the world, period. Yeah. So what would you say is the best way to go about, knowing that we have these simplified ways of looking at the world, what then?0:45:13It's really useful to investigate the viewpoints of people who have opposing views to yours. Because they'll tell you things, not only will they tell you things you don't know,0:45:24they'll also tell you how to see the world in ways that you don't see it. And they'll also have skills that you don't have, that you could develop. So for example, if you're an introverted person, it's very useful to watch an extroverted person, because the extroverted person has ways of being in the social world that aren't natural to you,0:45:40that you can use to improve your toolkit. And if you're disagreeable, one of the best things to do with disagreeable people, especially if that's alienating them from other people, for example, because it can,0:45:51you know, people treat you like you're a selfish, arrogant son-of-a-bitch, and maybe that's because you are. It's like, okay, so what do you do about that? One of the most promising "treatments," let's say,0:46:03is get the person to do something for someone else once a day. Just as a practice, and learn how to do it. Maybe you can wake the circuit up, you know, if you think that it's lying dormant in you, which is probably right.0:46:14You know, I think we have a very wide range of propensities within us. Some are switched on. Genetic propensity. Some are switched on. But I think that if you put yourself in the right situation or walk yourself through the right exercises, you can switch some of these other things on as well.0:46:28But it takes work and dedication and discipline to do it. So actively confront the things which are not a part of our personality? Yes. Well, I would say, generally speaking, if you want to adapt yourself properly to life, you should find a niche in the environment that corresponds with your temperament.0:46:43Right? You shouldn't work at cross-purposes to your temperament, because it's just too damn difficult. But having done that, then you should work on developing the skills and viewpoints that exist in the space opposite to your personality.0:46:58Because that's where you're fundamentally underdeveloped. That way you can extend out your temperamental capability across a wider range, and to me that's roughly equivalent as bringing a richer toolkit to each situation.0:47:11You know, so if you're hyper-extroverted, you should probably learn to shut up at parties now and then. And listen just to see what's going on, to see if you can manage it. And if you're introverted, well then you should learn how to speak in public, and to learn how to go to parties without hiding in the corner and saying nothing to anyone.0:47:27And if you're agreeable, then you need to learn how to be disagreeable, so people can't push you around. And if you're disagreeable, you need to learn how to be agreeable so that you're not an evil son-of-a-bitch, you know?0:47:36And the same thing applies even in the conscientious domain. If you're too conscientious, you need to learn to relax and let go a little bit.0:47:46And if you're unconscientious, it's time, like, get out and Google "calendar," man, and start scheduling your day, right, and beat yourself on the back of the head with a stick until you're disciplined enough so that you can actually stick to something for some length of time.0:47:59And not living in absolute squalor, which is something that would characterize someone who is very disorderly, for example. Because they just don't notice. It doesn't bother them, disorder.0:48:10It's like, maybe they can see it, but it doesn't have any emotional valence and so it doesn't have any motivational significance. The other thing you might want to think about, too, if you're choosing a partner, is try not to choose someone who's too distant from you on the temperamental variables.0:48:26Because you're going to have a hard time bridging the gap. You know, it's hard for an introverted person and an extroverted person to co-exist. And it's really hard for an orderly person and a disorderly person to co-exist because they will drive each other nuts.0:48:39Why don't you pick up? Why are you so obsessed by it? That's the basic argument. So it's useful to know about your temperament so that you can negotiate the space with your partner as well, and I don't think you should try to find someone who's exactly the same as you,0:48:54because then you don't have the benefits of the alternative viewpoint. But you've gotta watch it because you may hit irreconcilable differences of various sorts. And I've seen that most particularly among couples who are high and low in openness, that's a rough one.0:49:09And also high and low in conscientiousness, that's another rough one, because they just cannot see how the other person sees the world at all.0:49:18Okay, I'll see you on Tuesday.0:00:002017 Personality 18: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity I
0:00:002017 Personality 19: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity II
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:11today we're going to talk a little bit more about the fractionation of openness to experience and we've done a fair0:00:22number of studies with the Big Five aspect scale which we talked about a lot which enables the Big Five model to be differentiated down into two aspects per trait and those aspects have been useful0:00:35for a variety of reasons for example when we're looking at political behavior we've been able to determine that conservatives who are generally regarded0:00:44as higher in conscientiousness are actually more specifically higher in orderliness it's not a lot of difference between liberals and conservatives with0:00:53regards to industriousness and we've also been able to determine at least to some degree that orderliness seems to be associated with disgust sensitivity and0:01:02disgust sensitivity as part of the behavioural immune system and so part of the reasons that conservatives are more inclined to want things like close borders is because they're more0:01:11concerned about maintaining the boundaries between things and the reason for that seems to be fundamentally associated with disgust and I'll talk to0:01:20you a lot about that next week because once we've sorted that out it really really illuminated my way of thinking about things that had happened for0:01:29example in Nazi Germany because people tend to people tend to think about like when people have been studying conservatism from the scientific0:01:39perspective they've tended to assume that it's associated with fear of the out-group say and the Conservatives are more fearful the Liberals but that actually doesn't seem to be conservatives are not hiring trait0:01:49neuroticism and that's a really tough one because if you are going to make a case that a group one group is more anxious let's say or threat sensitive than another and you don't get0:01:58differences in treatment autism then you've really got a problem well yeah0:02:10but the theories the theories seem to be more trade like rather than situation yeah so so but what we have found is that that you know for a long time0:02:19people thought that all of the negative emotions loaded on neuroticism and it was like the global the global trade for negative emotion but disgust seems to be its own peculiar0:02:29thing and but I will talk to you more about that next week and but that's just an example of why differentiation at the0:02:38aspect level seems useful you also pick up differences between men and women at the aspect level that aren't obvious at the trade level as well so you can think0:02:47about the model says you know you have a model that operates at different levels of resolution and low resolution representations are good for one set of operations and higher resolution0:02:57representations are good for other purposes and the purpose of course is to predict at least that's one of the primary scientific purposes and so you pick the level of analysis that gives0:03:07you the most prediction and perhaps also the most utility in terms of formulating scientific theories so and so we'll concentrate a little bit more today on0:03:16openness per se so openness to experience fragments into intellect and openness proper and I think the right way to think about intellect is that0:03:25it's the personality instantiation of IQ roughly speaking and the reason I think that is because well first of all working memory predicts intellect quite0:03:34nicely and working memory tests are very very highly correlated with G and specifically G being the first factor that you pull out of any set of IQ tests0:03:43right that that's the technical definition of G you set up sets of questions do a factor analysis and extract out the first factor which is0:03:52roughly equivalent by the way to the total or to that to the mean of the items if it's if there's a one factor solution it's not much different than the average so the average is actually a0:04:02factor that's that that where the hypothesis is that every single item loads equally on that factor because0:04:11you're adding them all up and then dividing them by the number so it's no different than a factor analysis sometimes you'll hear people like Steve and Jay Google did this when he was complaining about IQ back in the 90s he0:04:20said a factor and a factor analysis like a factor is just a mathematical abstraction it's like well yeah so is the average you think it's the average of a set of numbers real and answer that0:04:31question is depends on how you define real you can use it for certain functions which is a pretty good definition of real as far as I'm concerned but when you ask0:04:40questions like that you have to define both your terms and you do that somewhat arbitrarily anyways people with high IQs tend to think that they're smart which0:04:49is and that's right and so then they can to describe themselves as smart if you give them the opportunity to do that and then that shows up when you ask them questions about their problem-solving0:04:58ability and that loads mostly on intellect and so it isn't even obvious that there's any real utility in assessing intellect from the self-report0:05:07perspective when you could replace that with an IQ test because the IQ test is way more accurate so but that gives you some sense you think about the whole0:05:16five factor model you know where intelligence slots it slots in underneath opens now the openness proper part of openness to experience which which I tend to think about as0:05:26creativity you can use that at least as a shorthand to sort of aid your understanding of what it is creativity seems related to IQ in that more people0:05:36with higher IQs are likely to be creative or if you take people who are noted for their creativity there's a high probability that they'll have a higher IQ but there's more to it than IQ0:05:46and and what what creativity seems to be associated with then again depends on whether or not on how you define creativity because you could define it0:05:56as the sum total of creative achievements that you've made in your life which would be the actual production of say artifacts of one form or another performances or inventions or0:06:06artworks or or what-have-you we'll go over the dimensions in the middle in a minute or you could also define it as the proclivity to engage in creative0:06:15thought and I think we'll start with that first so what does it mean to think creatively it's it's sort of like it's something like this you imagine that I0:06:25toss you out an idea and there's some probability that when I toss you that idea that that will trigger off other ideas in your imagination so you can0:06:34think about it as a threshold issue if you're not very creative I'll throw you an idea and hardly any other ideas will be triggered and the ones that will be triggered are going to be very closely associated with that initial idea so0:06:45let's say I toss each of you an idea and I asked you to think tell me the first thing that comes to mind okay so what we would see first is that the first thing0:06:54that comes to mind for you the first thing that comes to mind in like in all likelihood we'd be shared by many of you okay so then you can think about that as a common response right and so that's a0:07:04less creative response and then there'll be some things that come to mind for you that are that they're so idiosyncratic that you're the only person that thinks that and no one can understand it well0:07:14that's also not exactly creative because the thing that you for something to be creative it has to be novel and useful at the same time that's sort of rough definition creative something creative0:07:25is novel and useful and obviously you know there's a there's a certain amount of judgment that goes along with that clearly but if it's too novel then no0:07:34one else can understand it and it's unlikely to be useful so there's there's a there's a range of convenience so anyways if you want to decide if something's creative like what we would0:07:44do for I could say to you okay in the next three minutes I want you to write down all the uses you can think of for a brick so okay so someone tell me your0:07:53use for a brick breaking windows yes okay what else can use a brick for build0:08:05a wall it's very small wall haha a wall for ant and what else paperweight okay okay well so you get0:08:16the idea you're not feeling very multi today obviously but so so you see that so if we gathered your responses say I said you have to think of 20 items that0:08:2620 things that that you could do with a brick then a bunch of the things that you thought would be the same and some people would come up with something different like yours was reasonably0:08:35different than one about using it as a publish stone for your feet but someone else might come up with that but it's it's a good creative response because it's unexpected and it you could0:08:44actually do it you know so anyway so you'll get a graph of probability of response right and the more probable the less creative roughly speaking it's not0:08:55the only criteria though because you also have to look at utility so if I said okay you've got three minutes to write down as many uses as you can think of for a brick I would score that in a variety of ways0:09:04the first thing I would do is just figure out how many uses you generated that's called fluency and we could also do that I could just say write down as many words as you can begin with the letter s in three minutes0:09:13or that begin with the letter C or four-letter words that begin with the letter D no I can I can constrain it and if I counted how many words you generated if I had an IQ measure and I0:09:24had a measure of how many words you generated IQ plus the number of words that you generated would be a better predictor of your creativity than just IQ so there's this fluency element0:09:35that's and so that's something like the rate at which you can produce say verbal ideas and one of the things we do know about about the creativity dimension of0:09:44openness is that it is associated with fluency and it's also associated with originality and originality would be how improbable your use was compared to the0:09:55uses generated by other people so so anyway so you can think of you get thrown an idea and there's some probability that that will Co activate0:10:04other ideas and if it Co activates many other ideas that's like fluency and if it co activates ideas that are quite distant from the original idea something like that and you could you could track0:10:14distance by comparing it to to probability that other people have generated it then that's also another indication of creativity so they have to be unlikely many unlikely responses that0:10:25are useful that's what creativity is roughly speaking and then you can tracks innate it in two different dimensions so that's creative thinking but then creative achievement would be0:10:34the ability to take those original ideas and then actually to implement them in the world and that's obviously much more different than merely being creative and so and then what creativity is depends0:10:46on which of those measurement routes that you take now I developed a questionnaire it's one of my students Shelley Carson about Jesus just about 30 years ago now 20 years ago I guess0:10:56called the creative achievement questionnaire and I'll show you that here and I'll show you some of the things that are interesting about it you0:11:05know you hear very frequently people say things like everyone's creative it's like that's wrong okay it's wrong it's just as wrong as saying that everyone's extroverted first of all you have to be0:11:14pretty damn smart to be creative because otherwise you're just going to get to where other people have already got and that's not creative by definition so so being fast and being0:11:24out there at the front of things really makes a difference and then you also have to have these divergent thinking capabilities and that's part of your trait structure and creative people are really different than non creative0:11:34people you know partly because for example they're highly motivated to do creative things and to experience novelty in two and two and to chase down0:11:43aesthetic experiences in to attend movies and to read fiction and to go to museums and to enjoy poetry and and and to enjoy music that's not conventional music for example0:11:53these aren't trivial differences and so and so it's a real it's a real myth statement to make the proposition that everyone's creative it's just simply not0:12:02the case it's a matter of wishful thinking it's like saying that everyone is intelligent it's like well if everyone is intelligent and then the term loses all of its meaning because0:12:11any term that you can apply to every member of a category has absolutely no meaning now that doesn't and you know the other thing you want to be thinking about here is that don't be thinking0:12:20that creativity is such a good thing it's a high-risk high-return strategy so if you're creative you just try this there's creative people in this room man you guys are going to have a hell of a0:12:29time monetizing your creativity it's virtually impossible it's really really difficult because first of all let's say you make an original product you think the world will beat a pathway to your0:12:39door if you build a better mousetrap it's like that's complete rubbish it isn't it isn't true in the least if you make a good creative product you've probably solved about 5% of your problem0:12:50because then you have marketing which is insanely difficult and then you have sales and then you have customer support and then you have to build an organization and you have to if it's0:12:59really novel you have to tell people what the hell the thing is you know we built this future authoring program right and so it's available for people online how do you market that no one0:13:09knows what that is and that's a real problem if you wrote a book well then you have the problem that another million people have also written a book but if you produce something that's completely new and doesn't have a0:13:18category people can't search for it online how are they going to find it so you just have and then you have pricing problems and it's really unbelievably0:13:27difficult to produce something creative and then monetize it and even worse if you're the creative let's say you have a spectacular invention you've got no money right0:13:36you've got no customers those are big problems and so maybe you go and you find a venture capitalist we start with family and friends because that's how it works you raise money for your product you raise money from your0:13:46family and friends that's assuming you have family and friends that have some money and that they're going to give it to you and most people aren't in that situation so it's a terrible barrier0:13:55right off the bat and then of course you're putting your family and friends it's substantial financial risk because the probability that your stupid idea is going to make money is virtually zero even if it's a really brilliant idea and0:14:05so then let's say well you get past family and friends and you get venture capitalist capitalists involved because that's often the next step or an angel investor that's there's their steps in0:14:15building a business family and friends angel investor that's some rich guy that you happen to meet some manner in some way who's who's into this sort of thing0:14:24and is willing to provide you with some money to get your product off the ground well how much of your product is that person going to take well most of it0:14:33most of it and then if you get a venture and no wonder because you know you don't have any money how are you going to bargain for control over your product he'll just say well do you want the0:14:43money or not and if your answer is no then he'll go and do something else with his money it's not like there's no shortage of things that you can do with your money0:14:52because there's a million things you can do with it so you're not in a great bargaining position and then if you get venture capitalists involved they'll take another big chunk and maybe if they're not very straight with you0:15:01they'll just throw you out because maybe by that point in the company's development you're nothing but a pain in the neck because what do you know about marketing and sales and customer service0:15:10and building an organization and running a business like you don't have a clue so why do they need you so even if you're successful at generating a new idea and0:15:19you put it into a business the probability that you as the originator of the of the idea are going to make some money from it is very very low so0:15:28don't be thinking that creativity is such a is such a something you would want to curse yourself with now you know it's not all bad because it opens up0:15:37avenues of experience for creative people that aren't available to people who aren't creative but it definitely is a high-risk high-return strategy you know so the overwhelming0:15:46probability is that you will fail but a small proportion of creative people succeed spectacularly and so it's like a0:15:55lottery in some sense you're probably going to lose but if you don't lose you could win big and that keeps a lot of creative people going but also they don't really have much choice in it because if you're a creative person0:16:05you're like a fruit tree that's that's bearing fruit so you don't really have you can suppress it but it's very bad for you you know the creative people I've worked with is if they're not0:16:15creative they're miserable so they have to do it but and and you know there's real joy and pleasure in it and and the end and and and psychological utility0:16:25but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's an intelligent it's certainly not a conservative strategy for moving forward through life so and you know whenever I0:16:34talk to people who are creative and you guys should listen to this because I know what I'm talking about if you happen to be creative if you're a songwriter or another kind of musician or an artist or or any of the other0:16:45number of things that you might be find a way to make money and then practice your craft on the side because you will starve to death otherwise now some for0:16:55some of you that won't be true but it's a tiny minority your best bet is to find a job that will keep body and soul together and parse off some time that you can pursue your creative things0:17:05because then well as a long-term strategy you medium to long term strategy it's a better one but it's got incredibly difficult for people musicians for example it's incredibly0:17:14difficult for new musicians to monetize their their craft even if they're really really good at it so it's it's well so anyway so don't be so I say well everyone's not everyone's0:17:25not creative and everybody goes oh that's terrible it's like it's not so terrible it's not something it's not self-evident that you would curse someone with high levels of creativity so alright so here's how our creative0:17:36achievement questionnaire works what we did essentially was we thought up how many domains there are in which you might be creative and this is remember0:17:45when you're designing a questionnaire you want to be over-inclusive because the statistics will take care of it right so you can you can take a big area of potential you can take a large area0:17:55and aim your questionnaire at it and you can do statistics post talk to see you're covering the area if if the things that you're measuring are nicely correlated they're this you know there's0:18:05something about them that's similar if they're not correlated then maybe you're measuring two different things and you can get rid of one of them that's fine so we did start with a pretty wide range we thought okay well what domains can0:18:15you be creative in visual arts painting and sculpture then we had experts sort of rank order levels of achievement within those domains and so if you are a0:18:24painter you can 0 gives you I have no training or recognised talent in this area okay so you really want to keep an eye on the zeros alright so then I have0:18:34taken lessons people have commented on my talents I have won a prize my work is being critiqued in national publications all right so you get you get you get0:18:43zero to seven points but you can indicate more than no maybe that's happened to you more than once so and what happens this is interesting is that0:18:52higher you are up in this hierarchy the more likely it is that those things have happened to you more than once and that's that's another example of this weird thing called the Pareto principle0:19:02or Prices law which is that it's sort of good things happen to you the probability that more good things will happen increases right so because once0:19:11you're famous people give you all sorts of opportunities to do other things right so your your your success doesn't go like this goes like this zero zero zero skyrocket that's how it works but0:19:22getting from zero getting from zero to one if you're starting a business the hardest customer you'll ever get is your first one and then the second hardest one will be your second one it's0:19:31virtually impossible to get a first customer because they're going to say to you first of all you're going to be selling to people who are basically conservative and there aren't going to be evaluate they're not going to be0:19:41willing or able to evaluate whether your damn product is good for anything and so they'll say well who are your other customers and if your answer to that is well we don't have any it's like well0:19:50then what they're going to be the first one no because people don't stick their necks out at all not a bit ever and so unless you're well established in the market especially if0:20:00you're dealing with a big company you can just bloody well forget it it's like a three year sales cycle anyways it's RIT because big corporations move very very slowly and you might be able to0:20:09find a small company that doesn't have much money who would be willing to use your stoop product for nothing if you're really nice to them and you get one customer that way it's very very difficult and so0:20:20you'll you'll end up you know and what do you think the royalty just out of curiosity so I've written a book it's going to be published by penguin Random House and in January what do you think0:20:29the royalty is for an author on a book so you make something creative you get a percentage of the sale what do you think the percentage is just out of curiosity0:20:38guess yeah it's like 5% so think about that so that means that you make your thing and 95% of it belongs to someone0:20:47else and that's that things are going quite well for you and it doesn't really matter what you manufacture or produce that's about what you can expect sales marketing distribution it eats it all up0:20:57so us all well anyways you need to know these things because they're not self-evident okay so seems to be working all by itself0:21:07all right so let's take a look well how else can you have creative achievement well you can be a musician I have no training or recognize Talent recordings of my composition have been sold0:21:16publicly that's the top end my composition has been copyrighted recorded critiqued in local population publication I have composed an original piece of music well let's try this how0:21:26many of you have composed an original piece of music wow there's lots of creative people in here that's very impressive so there must be 10 or 11 people in here oh that's cool so how0:21:37about your coffees composition has been copyrighted how about it's been the recordings have been sold publicly and0:21:46actually sold how many people - two okay well so what you can see is there's a rapid drop-off in the number of people who say yes how many of you fit into0:21:56category zero I have no training a recognised talent in this area yeah okay okay zero is the median score on all of0:22:05these median is the score that's the most likely for people to have or it's different than the mean median score is zero so what's the median score and the entire creative achievement0:22:14questionnaire zero you you add up all over all thirteen domains the most difficult score is zero so that's how0:22:23creative people are there's zero creative at all yes everybody has a certain degree not really creative well the0:22:37thing is you could say that people have people all people are creative and that all people can generate ideas but the issue isn't whether or not you can generate ideas it's whether or not you0:22:46can generate ideas that are different from the ideas that other people generate that's the critical issue because it mean it depends on how you define it you could you well the novelty0:22:55is a huge part of it but that's that's sort of built into the definition of creative it has to be novel and useful and if your idea that you generate is the same as the idea that a bunch of0:23:04other people have it's not it's an idea fair enough and if you define creativity that way then everyone's creative but it's a foolish way of defining creativity because everyone does it and0:23:14and we know that there has to be something novel about creativity useful idea today the Integra's all seem to be0:23:25artistic and well as requiring specific non-creative skills for example music and require yeah are there ways to be0:23:38creative outside there well let's go through the rest of the domains because we did include domains that aren't that aren't artistic and yes there are engineering is a good example of that or0:23:48writing nonfiction that those things tend to tilt more in the intellect direction but I'm concentrating most particularly here on sort of creativity0:23:57that would be associated with openness so yeah okay so dance well it's roughly the same as music so we won't we won't move forward into that architectural0:24:07design my architectural design my architectural design has been recognized in the national publication Creative Writing my work has been reviewed in national publications million books sold0:24:18last year 250 of them sold more than 100,000 copies right so that's another that's another example of high risk high returns so probably you won't write a0:24:28book if you write a book probably no one will publish it if you publish it almost certainly no one will buy it so you see you see what I mean there's0:24:37exclusion the exclusion criteria there are so there's so thoroughly they're so difficult because it's very difficult to write a book even a bad one you have to work a long time0:24:47to write a bad book and then your book has to be pretty damn good before you're going to get it published and and you also have to know about know how to go about getting it published that's also0:24:56you don't send a book to a publisher by the way they don't want your stupid book they want a summary of the book they want an outline of the book they want0:25:05three chapters of the book they want to know who the hell you are and why anyone should listen to you they want to know what other books your book is like and most importantly perhaps they want to0:25:15know where it would sit in a bookshelf in a bookstore and the reason for that is that and I have trouble this is trouble with the books that I write is no one was where to put them that's a0:25:25big problem because then the marketing people don't know how to market them and maybe that's because they're more creative than usual it doesn't matter if there isn't a place that you can put the book where people can find it then0:25:34you're not going to publish it and even if you do you can't sell it because no one can find it so you just think about the difficulties and being a successful author you're not going to write a book it's too hard there's no damn way you're0:25:45going to get it published and if you do it probably won't be a very good publisher then they have to do a really good job of selling it and marketing it then you have to enter the market at the right time right and then you have to be0:25:56reviewed by the right people and then it has to be put in the right places it's like most what happens is your book will go out for a week no one will buy it and it'll disappear and that's if you've0:26:05done 99.99% of things right so okay creative writing our humor my humor has0:26:14been recognized in a national publication that's at the top and I've written a joke or cartoon that has been published I've written jokes for other people I've worked as a professional comedian inventions I regularly find0:26:24novel uses for household objects I've built a prototype of one of my designed inventions I've sold one of my inventions to people I know has anyone in here built a prototype of a designed0:26:33invention no one okay has anyone in here created original software for a computer0:26:44one to three people yes three people how about I've sketched out an invention and worked on design flaws how many people0:26:54so maybe two or three yeah I mean if this was an engineering class and all likelihood there would be more people in not telling but that this is more in the0:27:03domain it's not the exactly the artsy end of the creativity distribution it's more on the ideas and and mechanical end of it and and and that's a reasonable way of thinking about it I would say so0:27:13um scientific discovery I do not have training or recognizability in this field I received a scholarship based on my work in science or medicine how many0:27:23people have received a scholarship based in their work on science and medicine okay nobody so we don't have anybody that goes up that high I've won a prize at a science fair or other local0:27:33competition anybody there yes there's maybe two or three four people there so that means we've got four people in the class of about 150 who hit the third the0:27:45second level of scientific discovery anybody received a grant to pursue their work in science and medicine its highly unlikely you guys are mostly too young to have had that happen to you okay0:27:54so theater and film anybody who's at how many people have performed in theater or film oh yeah your Narsee bunchy so my0:28:04acting abilities have been recognized in local publication how many people for that one that's it anybody higher than that I have directed or produced a theater or0:28:13film production one two I've been paid there's a good one I have been paid to pit one two two0:28:23okay my theatrical work has been paid to direct the theater film production ha got you there so you've done that Hey0:28:33congratulations you're way the hell up on the list right right right right hard to monetize how many films did you make0:28:42you made poor did you make any money oh you did well congratulations yeah yeah0:28:51yeah well that's about yeah0:29:01yeah calab recruiter and then also piracy got really bad right yeah well that's one of the big problems with anything that can be distributed digitally it's like yeah yeah yeah I rat0:29:13right timing is everything and that's it's actually well that's that's another one of the terrible cut offs is that not only do you have to be right and have0:29:23yourself together and produce the proper thing but the market has to open it's exactly that moment so that you can walk through there has to be a demand so people won't buy anything that they don't have a crying need for because0:29:33they have priority say it's imagine everybody has ten priorities and ten number ten is important but no one ever does it and number eight is important that no one ever does it and so you have0:29:42to go talk to someone to buy what you have and that has to be priority one or two for them because they'll say oh that's good we really need it but it's priority eight it's like forget it they'll never buy your thing because0:29:51they never get to priority eight on their list of ten priorities they only get down to like priority four so and then the other thing that will happen too is if you go up try to sell your product you won't know who to talk to0:30:01and you'll end up spending ninety five percent of your time this is especially true in companies with the people who will talk to you right obviously but those aren't the people who ever make0:30:10any decisions so they'll tell you all sorts of good things about your product and how interested they are but they'll never buy it because they can't make make decisions and you won't be able to0:30:19get to the people who make decisions because other people who know how to do that have already got there and that's not you so that's very difficult as well culinary arts my recipes have been0:30:29published nationally anyone how about I often experiment with rest misses purposeful experimentation right not accidental experimentation yes sorry0:30:39alright my recipes would be published in the local cookbook anyone know okay okay well you get the you get the point right you see you see how this works it's just0:30:49well here are ways you can be creative and here are strata of accomplishment within those ways and so then the question is what does it look like yes0:30:59yes yes yes fair enough and and this probably needs to be updated to reflect that so so there's there's the0:31:08distribution of scores now that's dismal that's a dismal thing to look at you have to understand that why look at this zero right the median person has not0:31:19done anything creative ever in their life with anything on any dimension right it's really important to know that and then you have these horrible people out here right they do everything they0:31:31do everything price is law here's prices law this is something to hammer into your heart the square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work0:31:40okay so let's go through that you have ten employees three of them do half the work makes sense that's reasonable you have a hundred employees ten of them do0:31:49half the work that's problem so the other 90% are doing the other half who cares about them you have 10,000 employees 100 of them do have to work0:31:59right so here's that here's a nasty little law as your company grows incompetence grows in it exponentially and confidence grows linearly got it0:32:10right because it with ten it's three who are doing half the work but at 10,000 it's 100 that are doing half the work so nine thousand nine hundred of your employees are doing as much as the best0:32:20100 you might not even know who the best 100 are but probably they know and maybe their peers know too and so one of the things that's really interesting when big companies start to shake which means0:32:30maybe they've had a bad quarter too bad quarters and the stock price starts to tip down and the people the hot people who have options are not very happy about that and maybe they start to0:32:39announce layoffs all the hundred people who have opportunities leave and they're the ones who were doing half the work so boy that puts your company in a pretty rough situation because now you've got0:32:48the ninety nine hundred people left over who we're only doing half the work and the next time you announced layoffs the next most productive hundred leave and so then you're left with nobody who's0:32:58productive at a massive overhead payroll prices law you can look that up to Sol a price to Sol a price is a guy who is looking at scientific productivity and0:33:08one of the things he found was when he was looking at PhD students is that the median number of publications for a PhD graduate when he did his work which was0:33:17in the early 60s was one okay half as many had - half as many as that had three half as many as that had four - real stepped out and one of the0:33:27corollaries of that is that there's a number of people who are hyper productive and that's these people out here and if you were graphing the distribution let's say you graphed how0:33:37many people in that population of 300 had $10,000 in a savings account it would look very much like this some of them would have are some of some of them0:33:46would most people would have like no savings whatsoever the median person would have no savings whatsoever and then you go up here where the 1% is they have all the money but the thing you0:33:55want to understand about that 1% issue that you always hear about is that it applies in every single realm where there's difference in creative production every realm doesn't matter0:34:06number of Records produce number of records sold number of compositions written so here's here's an example 5 composers produce the music that0:34:15occupies 50% of the classical repertoire by Bach Beethoven Brahms Tchaikovsky who's Mozart that's right0:34:24those 5 ok so here's something cool so you take all the music those people wrote 5 percent of the music all those people wrote occupies 50 percent of the0:34:33music that of their writing that's played so not only do almost all the composers never get a listen but even among the composers and you get a list0:34:42and almost none of their music ever gets played so so then that's that's another example of this price is law of scaling so and it applies to all sorts of things0:34:51like number of hockey goals scored is also distributed this way number of basketball basketball basketball successfully put through the hoop0:35:00follows the same distribution size of cities follows the same distribution it's a weird it's a weird law and you you can think about it in part why does0:35:11this happen law imagine what happens when you play Monopoly what happens everybody has the same amount of money to begin with right so then you start playing it's basically0:35:21a random game well some people start to win a bit some people start to lose a bit and then if you win the probability that you'll keep winning starts to increase and if you lose your0:35:30vulnerability increases as you lose and then maybe you've got to say six people play Monopoly soon one person has zero what happens when they have zero they're0:35:40out of the game so zero is a weird number because when you hit zero you're out of the game so so then if you keep playing people start to stack up at zero right what happens at the end of the game one0:35:51person has all the property and all the money and everyone else has none right that's what happens if you play an iterated trading game to its final0:36:00conclusion and that's part of the the law in a sense that's underlying this kind of distribution so it's it's really it's it's it's not a consequence necessarily of structural inequality0:36:10it's built into the system at a deeper level than that so you know people talk about all the time about how unfair it is that 1% of the population has the vast amount of the money and 1% of the0:36:211% has most of that money and 1% of the 1% of the 1% has most of that money but it is a it's a it's an inevitable conclusion of iterated trading games and0:36:31we don't know how to fight it we don't know how to take from the people who have and move it to the bottom without instantly moving back up to the top different people maybe but still back up0:36:42to the top because even the 1% turns a lot like I think you have a 10% chance if I remember correctly you have a 10% chance of being in the top 1% for at0:36:52least one year of your life and a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year in your life that's in Canada in the u.s. it's less so in0:37:01Europe so there's a fair bit of churning at the top end it's not the same people all the time you have the money but it is a tiny fraction of the people all the time who have all the money yeah people0:37:20inside redistribute to recreate no not usually I mean they do but it's attenuated because the people mean if you reach up0:37:32the entire company and put everywhere somewhere else there's some probability that some of those people would rise to the top that weren't at the top before but in that company that that isn't0:37:41generally what happens people get stuck in their niche and they don't move so yeah this is you kill you wonder sometimes well how can companies die so0:37:50quickly well they go they go into a death spiral it's almost impossible for them to get out of so and it happened happen extraordinarily quickly this is why you know the typical fortune 5000:37:59company only last 30 years that's it it's not that easy for these Bale moths to continue existance across time so and it's because it's really easy for0:38:08something to die it's very unlikely that it will be built it's very unlikely that it will be successful and once successful it's very unlikely that it will continue to duplicate its success0:38:17because the underlying landscape shifts on it and it doesn't know where to go and that's also partly because it's not that easy to integrate creative people0:38:26into your company right you certainly don't want them at the bottom because they're supposed to be people who are doing what they're told to do so you filter out a lot of them at the bottom and then you need them at the top but0:38:36they've already been filtered out and also creative people are troublesome to work with because they're always how do you evaluate a creative person you all you almost can't by definition because0:38:47they keep coming up with new things and you don't have a good evaluative strategy for a new thing it wouldn't be new if you had a good evaluative strategy for it right it would have to be the member of a class that you've0:38:57already encountered substantially so anyway so the take-home lesson from this is zero right right and then that's like0:39:07that's like a graph of money monetary distribution as well and the thing the problem with being at zero is it's very difficult to get out of zero this is also why people get stuck in poverty you0:39:17know you can't get a bank account if you're if you don't have any money right if there's a bunch of things that start to move against you when you're at zero that you can't shake it's very difficult0:39:27to get out of the to get out of the that the pit here because zero is a kind of pit okay so now we've got the creative0:39:38achievement questionnaire and we're going to take your score and your score is summed across all the categories and and and all the exemplars of the categories that you've chosen so then0:39:47the question is well can you predict creative achievement and and this is this is this is how we did it with this was construct delegation the first thing we wanted to know was was the creative0:39:57achievement questionnaire actually associated with something that you might regard as creativity okay so we got a number of students to come in and we0:40:07gave them a collage kit and so then everybody got exactly the same tip and then we had to make a collage out of the collage kit then we have five artists rate the collage for0:40:17quality and then we averaged across the ratings now the first thing you would do if you did that is because you would might think well can artists actually come up with a a measure of how creative0:40:28a collage is and the answer to that is actually technical if all say you guys are the panel if all of you identify the same collages as of high quality and the0:40:38same ones as of low quality then we can assume that there's something about your judgement that's like independent of your idiosyncrasies we could say well there is a judgment that emerges as a0:40:48consensus across artists and the first thing we found was that there was there is quite a high correlation between each artists judgment of the quality of the0:40:58collages I can't remember what the inter-rater reliability was but it was something like 0.8 it was really high so it was clear that trained artists could make reliable judgments about the0:41:08quality of collages because you had to check that out first because if they're all over the place you got no measure right it's like everyone's using a different rulers got no measure so they0:41:17have to be using the same ruler well we found that the correlation between the creative evaluation of collages and the total taq was 0.59 which is0:41:26mind-boggling I told you last time that under 5% of published social studies social science studies have a are0:41:36demonstrate a correlation coefficient of an effect size greater than 0.5 this is 0.6 and if you if you square it point 50:41:45squared is 25 percent of the variance point 6 squared is 36 percent of the variance point 6 is a lot more than 0.5 and point 5 is unheard of and so the fact that you could estimate someone's0:41:55lifetime creative achievement by having them do a collage that for artists rape was an indication that there really is something real at the bottom of it right0:42:04that's like the definition of real the creative personality scale you use circle adjectives that are associated with creativity from a very large list0:42:13of adjectives that work pretty well Goldberg's adjective markers that's another Big Five variant that was correlated at about 0.5 1 it doesn't measure0:42:22to experience it just measures intellect but be that as it may it's still an personality marker of trade openness it0:42:31was correlated at 0.5 won the Neel PIR openness was correlated at 0.33 and then we use the divergent thinking tests and I told you about those already's how0:42:41many uses can you think of for a brick for example and so those are scored according to fluency how many answers you provide and then also originality how many unique useful answers do you0:42:50provide and that was nicely correlated as well overall correlation of 0.47 and then fluency 0.38 originality 0.46 and0:42:59flexibility point 3 7 so so what does that mean well the creative achievement questionnaire indexes lifetime creative0:43:08achievement in a way that's powerfully associated with actual creative production of a single item plus creative creativity as it's indexed by personality markers on the C IQ is also0:43:19potently predicted by IQ which is exactly what you'd expect so you can do an extraordinarily good job of determining how likely someone is to have high levels of creative achievement0:43:29across their lifespan by using psychometric tests so it means that creativity is a real thing that's the first thing both in terms of thinking creatively that would be the divergent0:43:38thinking tests and also in terms of creative production and and that creative production and creative thinking are quite tightly aligned so that was good that's been a very0:43:48influential paper I think it's got about 500 citations now people use the creative achievement questionnaire a lot to assess creativity it's also associated with a higher than average0:43:57likelihood of psychosis and the other thing you see with creative people is that they tend especially if they're writers they tend the pathology that goes along with that is often manic0:44:06depressive disorder and that's partly because manic people become unbelievably fluid I think they speak incredibly quickly they generate ideas like mad and0:44:15it's a hyper arousal of the positive emotion system roughly speaking and that can have as a side effect creativity so0:44:25this is a cool study I just found this one today it's a terror management study so what I'll read it to you the relationship between creativity and0:44:35symbolic mortality had been long acknowledged by scholars in the review of the literature we found 12 papers that empirically examined the relationship between creativity and mortality awareness using0:44:46a terror management theory paradigm overall supporting the notion that creativity plays an important role in the management of existential concerns also a mini meta-analysis of the impact0:44:57of death awareness on creativity resulted in a small medium weighted mean effect we examine the existential buffering functions of creative achievement as assessed by the creative0:45:06achievement questionnaire in a sample of 108 students at high but not low levels of creative goals creative achievement was associated with lower death thought0:45:16accessibility under mortality salience well that means if you remind people that they're going to die the creative people were less likely to generate death related thoughts as a consequence0:45:26to our knowledge this is the first empirical report of the anxiety buffering functions of a creative achievement among people for whom creativity constitutes a central part of0:45:35the cultural worldview it's like a empirical examination of some of the existential theories that I was presenting to you previously because part of the idea that was put forth to0:45:44say by people like Nietzsche was that one of the ways to fight back against existential anxiety and death anxiety and all of that is to engage in creative production and so that was actually put0:45:54to the empirical test in this study so I thought that was quite cool0:46:05so there's another paper this was by Kaufmann and a couple of my students Jacob Hirsch and Colin Dion I'm on that paper as well near the end there they0:46:15were interested in whether openness and intellect predicted different elements of creative achievements or goes back to your question about the differentiation between the artsy end of creativity and0:46:25maybe the more practical idiot and the practical end associated for example with the proclivity to like nonfiction the Big Five personality dimension0:46:36openness / intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement little is known however regarding the discriminant0:46:46validity of its two aspects discriminant validity is whether one aspect predicts one set of things and the other aspect predicts a different set of things if0:46:55there's no discriminant validity if they can't be used for different purposes then there's no point having them so you want to see that they're actually capable of differentiating between0:47:04between real world phenomena two of its aspects openness to experience reflecting cognitive engagement with0:47:14perception fantasy aesthetics and emotions and intellect reflecting cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information primarily through0:47:24reasoning in relation to creativity in four demographically diverse samples totaling over a thousand participants we investigated the independent predictive0:47:33validity of openness and intellect by assessing the relations among cognitive ability divergent thinking personality and creative achievement across the Arts and Sciences we confirm that hypothesis0:47:44that openness predicts creative achievement in the arts and intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences inclusion of performance0:47:54measures of general cognitive ability that's IQ and divergent thinking indicated that the relationship of intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these0:48:04abilities lastly we found that extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts independently of openness so what that means is that creative achievement in the arts is0:48:14actually a function of higher-order trait plasticity right because plasticity was openness plus extraversion and that's associated fundamentally with activation of the0:48:24underlying dopaminergic system which is the system that mediates exploratory behavior so if you're dominated by that the function of that system you're an exploratory gregarious person0:48:34then you're more likely to manifest creative ability in the arts so apparently it's time stop yeah I think0:48:45that's the same student who always does that alright we'll see you on Tuesday0:48:54[Applause]0:00:002017 Personality 20: Biology & Traits: Orderliness/Disgust/Conscientiousness
0:00:002017 Personality 21: Biology & Traits: Performance Prediction
0:00:002017 Personality 22: Conclusion: Psychology and Belief
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:11I called the course personality and its transformations and I think you could think about that as a restatement of the idea of being and becoming and that's0:00:21what you are you're for whatever that means you're an entity that both is and is transforming and there's a rule that goes along with that by the way which is0:00:30don't sacrifice who you could be for who you are which means if you have to choose to transform in a positive direction or maintain your current0:00:40position then it's better to transform in a positive direction so you might even think of that as the core of your being that's a piagetian idea it's a union idea as well who are you you're the0:00:50thing that transforms who you are now you're also who you are but on top of that you're the thing that transforms who you are and I do think that that's0:00:59and that's not an arbitrary statement you know one of the things that modern universities do dreadfully now is convince their students that value0:01:11structures are relative and that and that's a that's a big mistake it's there's a lot of things wrong with that idea and one of the things that's wrong0:01:20with that ideas that doesn't include what I just mentioned which is that's a good moral rule is you are the thing that is and you're the thing that becomes and you should put the thing0:01:29that becomes at a higher place than the thing that is that means you also have to allow yourself to shake off those things about you that you might be pathologically attached to habits and0:01:40people for that matter ways of thinking all of those things you have to allow yourself to shake those off and that's more like a burning that's why the Phoenix is that's why the Phoenix is the0:01:49symbol that it is right it's all in a deteriorate so bursts into flame and then it's reborn it's like well do you want to be reborn like that's not the question the question is do you want to0:01:58burst into flame and the answer to that generally is no but that's the wrong answer the right answer is you let all that nonsense burn away and you know and0:02:08you might say well I don't know what I should leave behind and the answer to that is that's a lie you know some of the things that you should leave behind you all you have to do is ask yourself0:02:17you'll come up with a list instantly of a hundred stupid things that you're doing that you know you could stop doing some of them maybe you don't know you could stop doing well fine leave those alone for now but0:02:27there's a bunch of things you perfectly know well that you could stop doing that would improve your life and so do that see what happens that's a good that's a0:02:36good idea all right so it's personality and its transformations because partly I wanted to talk to you about talk to you about what you are as a human being and also0:02:47as an individual but also what you could become and that's actually a crucial question in the domains of clinical psychology in particular because a lot of what you're doing with people as a0:02:57clinician is trying to figure out who they could become that's right you come you have a problem your life isn't what it could be it's like fine let's see what it could be like if we changed it0:03:07we'll figure out how to change it that's got to be a negotiated dialogue right because like I don't know what the hell you should do with your life I can help you figure it out maybe we can talk0:03:16about it but you are the person who has to decide if the things that you're aiming for you know get you out of bed in the morning because that's really the that's at least one of the crucial0:03:25issues so you got to specify the goal and then you go to specify the transformation processes and start practicing them and you have to understand that you're going to be bad at it but it doesn't matter because0:03:34Bad's fine persistence is what you need to be if you persist with tiny improvements if you persist you win so0:03:44okay so in a broader you know in a broader context you can think about this as a more fundamental ontological question so one the one question is how0:03:56you should act to the world the other question is well what is the world and that's a complicated problem this this is a scientific answer to that question and that is that the world is a0:04:06collection of objective phenomena and that's a very powerful perspective and we have a good method for determining what the world is like as a collection0:04:15of objective phenomena and and that's made us very technologically powerful and so more power to us and all that but leaves a question unanswered and the0:04:26question is well the world isn't just a place of objective phenomena because it's not a panoply of inert matter it has living conscious creatures in it and0:04:35that's a different they're a different order of be and the fundamental issue for conscious active creatures is not what is the0:04:45world from an objective perspective but how it is it that you should conduct yourself in the world and that's a and there's a very there's a kind of unbridgeable gap between those two0:04:54domains of inquiry and I think the reason for that is that there's a the scientific method removes value from its description so that's actually what it0:05:04does and so once you're left with value free descriptions it's very difficult to extract out a value proposition from them because you've that's the scientific method removes the value0:05:14propositions you're supposed to be left with only that which is objective right and value propositions are in the domain of the subjective so I think the idea that you can derive what you should be0:05:24or do from a collection of facts is flawed a because the collecting the facts themselves gets rid of the value structure but B there's an infinite0:05:34number of facts and so which how are you gonna pick which ones should guide you you can't you can't you you have to do something else the facts do not tell you0:05:43what to do with the facts you need something else to help you figure that out well it's come to me over the years that that's what essentially that's what the narrative cognitive framework does0:05:54it's the framework that we use to specify how we should act in the world and so you could divide the world into the world as it is and the world as perhaps it should be0:06:04that gives you some direction and you need that and we know this technically right you need direction the reason for that is its direction that produces the0:06:13primary that produces primary positive emotion and so if you need positive emotion to move through life which you do because you can't even move without0:06:22positive emotion and also positive emotion is a good bulwark against terror and pain if you need those things then you need direction you need a goal you need a value structure so that doesn't0:06:33seem particularly disputable to me you could still say well what value structure it's like okay fine that's a good question but I was you know I've thought a lot about that too so if we're0:06:43gonna adopt a value structure there's a couple of rules that go along with it and this is why the bloody post modernists are wrong as far as I can tell is a it can't just be my0:06:52value structure because I'm stuck with you and we're both stuck with all these other people and so if I'm going to lay out a value structure which is a way of0:07:01interpreting the world let's say and there's an infinite number of potential ways of interpreting the world it's like the out fine no problem except that I have to interpret the world in a way0:07:10that I can use while I'm dealing with you and the world two of us are dealing with everyone else and while all of you are dealing with everyone else and so that that's the piagetian game0:07:19proposition if you want to be a popular kid on the playground you better play games that other people want to play that's a brilliant brilliant brilliant observation and I told you that Piaget0:07:30was trying to heal the rift between science and religion and that's one of the things that he did that he thought helped do that his question is well where the moral judgments come from0:07:40well they partly come emerge as a consequence of consensus and it's a bounded domain if we're gonna if we're gonna occupy the same space for any length of time and those are two0:07:50critical propositions the same space and a long time then we have to figure out how to play an iterative game that doesn't spiral downward hopefully that0:08:01might even improve that we both don't object to because otherwise it's not gonna work right you'll walk away and play another game or the game will will disintegrate catastrophically so there's0:08:11massive social constraint on what constitutes an appropriate frame of reference so so much for the relativist argument and then there's another issue0:08:20that's equally relevant and it's associated with the idea of objective reality to some degree but it's not exactly it's not that's not exactly correct because it's not exactly0:08:29objective reality let's say that you and I decide to occupy the same place for some substantial amount of time and we figured out how to solve the problem of0:08:38being together but you and I still have to figure out how to solve the problem of being together in a manner that doesn't make the world object too much and it isn't just other people although0:08:49that's a huge part of the world you want them to know what object you may even want them to support you that would even be better but you also have to deal with the you know the the the tendency of0:08:59matter to object because so your mode of being in the world your interpretive framework as a description of how you should act0:09:08is actually the laying out of a strategy that will produce the ends that it predicts which are the things that you want so this is the pragmatist0:09:18perspective this was worked out by William James and his people back in the late 1800s in New England the only genuine brand of American philosophy and what the pragmatist said is how do you0:09:28decide if something's true the answer is how the hell can you you don't know anything well that's true but that isn't helpful because there you're stuck with0:09:37the problem of how to be in the world well so what you do is you lay out a mode of interpretation that has an endpoint and then you run the mode of interpretation embodied right because0:09:46you act it out and if it doesn't produce the outcome then it's not let's say true the claims within it aren't they're not0:09:55true by the definition of the game itself so you might say well you're a kid on a playground you want to play a game one of the implicit demands is that the game is fun if it's not fun it's not worth0:10:05playing so you play it for a while and then you see well was that fun if the answer is yes then you keep playing the game you say well that game is it's good enough it's accurate enough it's true0:10:14enough and so you lay out interpretations in the world and they're subject to massive constraints other people have to go along with them and cooperate with you because if they don't0:10:23then look the hell out like it's a major serious non-trivial constraint and then the other thing is well social proof isn't good enough it also has to work in0:10:32the world outside of the social world you know so if you have an illness and you have some hypothesis about how to construe it you might say well is my0:10:41understanding of the illness correct well it implies that I take these actions well how do you know if it's correct while you take the actions and if the illness gets worse then by the0:10:51definitions that are implicit in the framework of reference that you're using you've made an error and so there's no relativism in that you could still say0:11:00well there's a lot of potential solutions to any potential set of problems it's like yeah yeah there's lots of different ways to play chess on the on a single board right but that0:11:10doesn't mean that any old solution is as good as any other solution it doesn't mean that at all so okay so then we're looking at things two ways we're trying to figure out well0:11:19how does the world present itself and then how is it that you should act in it and so well there's other there's other constraints on the mechanisms of0:11:29interpretation that you place in the world so we could say well you're constrained in your interpretations by the constraints that other people place on you but there's internal constraints0:11:39as well we talked about those mostly from a biological perspective because you could also regard yourself in some sense as a loose internal society that's0:11:48sort of a psychoanalytic dictum right you're you're a collection of sub personalities or you could say your collection of subroutines I don't care how you how you formulate it but you're0:11:58a unity but you're a you're a universe unity that brings together a plurality of sub components and part of the constraints on how it is that you lay0:12:07out your interpretation of the world is that you have to satisfy those internal subsystems right so you're the ego but it's more like you're the captain of a ship full of people who were rowing you0:12:17got to keep the people rowing you're not you know a tyrant you're not an impotent tyrant of your own destiny you're constrained by the nature of your own being and so you have to provide0:12:27yourself with food and you have to provide yourself with shelter and you have to provide yourself with water and all of these things and and those are demands that are laid on you by the nature of your internal processes and of0:12:37course how they lay themselves out as demands and what the appropriate solutions to that is to those problems are is is debatable infinitely but you0:12:47can see that constraints stack up you have to satisfy your internal constraints so they have to be brought into a unity that seems to happen at least in part but between the ages of0:12:56two and something like between the ages of birth and four years old maybe even two years old you bring yourself together into something that's sort of functioning as a unity then you have to0:13:05turn that unity into a unity that can function in the social world in with increasing breath and that unity in the social world has to be a unity that can0:13:14function inside the natural world it's something like that so it's you're stacking up these games into a hierarchy of increasing complexity and one of the0:13:23questions that emerges from that is well what should be at the top of the hierarchy if it's a hierarchical structure it has to be a hierarchical structure because some things have to be worth doing more than others or0:13:33you can't act which is another thing I really don't like about the postmodernist ethos because it claims that value structures are there to eliminate to exclude and oppress and0:13:43never once notices that well yeah fair enough but value structures are also there so that you know which way to walk because you can't figure out which way to walk without saying that that0:13:53direction is preferable to that direction so you stuck with the damn things and and they do exclude obviously category structures exclude the question is if0:14:02you're going to have a value structure how is it that it should be constituted well ready to describe some of the constraints like if your value structure is perfectly functioning except that you0:14:12don't get enough to eat that turns out actually to be a fatal problem right and it might be you can run into all sorts of fatal problems you're too lonesome while means you're let's say that your0:14:22value structures too narcissistic there's lots of reasons to be lonesome but that might be one of them or you're too timid or something like that like you're gonna be informed by your own0:14:31internal biological mechanisms when the value structure that you're laying out in the world is insufficient to keep itself propagating across time and some0:14:42of that's just you and some of that's other people in some of that's the natural world constraints galore and so in the phase of all those constraints and absolutely unreasonable to say and0:14:52the old solution goes try it generate a random solution run it as a simulation in the world and see and see how many slings and arrows come your way they'll0:15:01be plenty and you might say well I don't care about slings and arrows it's like ya know that's a claim you don't get to make so okay so you know you're you're0:15:13being informed internally as to the nature of your value structure you have to specify where you are you have to specify where you're going you have to integrate all your underlying biological0:15:22mechanisms into that into that schema it's something I think that's actually kind of weak about the P a jetty an idea say because Piaget a great fan of Piaget0:15:32but Piaget tended to think that the child came into the world with nothing but a set of reflexes and that's his technical claim and that the boots drop off those reflexes and I think that's it0:15:42underestimates the degree to which the child comes into the world as it already prepared unit and I mean he just thought of those things that's so self-evident that you don't need to talk about them but that's0:15:52actually not true you do need to talk about them we know for example that if you provide children with food and shelter and an adequate food and shelter but you don't interact with them0:16:01socially almost all of them die in the first year right it's not optional touch is not optional for children attention is not optional for children play is not0:16:11optional for children so it isn't just like well the child comes in to the world with a set of reflexes and can adapt to any old environments like no the environment has to be structured in0:16:20a certain way or the child will die and it's very interesting when it comes to things like play and touch because you wouldn't think of those as fundamental necessities right but it turns out that0:16:29they are if you deprive a child badly enough of play and touch in the first three years of their life even if they survive what comes out at the end of0:16:38that is often something that's like barely recognizable as a functional human being and cannot be repaired after that point and that that experiment was done with Romanian orphans back in the0:16:48back in the 90s so it was it was an ugly situation to say the least okay so now you take these underlying biological systems and maybe they0:16:57aggregate themselves into something that vaguely looks like your temperament your your five temperamental dimensions so maybe if you're an extrovert you're dominated by the dopaminergic system0:17:07just like you are is if you're high an openness and if you're if you're you know if you're high in eroticism it's mostly that you're dominated by anxiety systems and systems that mean mediate0:17:18emotional pain and if you're agreeable you're dominated by the function of the underlying maternal slash care affiliation systems but so you could say well you've got these loose you've got a0:17:29multitude of fundamental biological predispositions that manifest themselves as implicit stories something like that and they organize themselves into the0:17:38primary temperaments and the primary temperaments are biasing factors that determine in part the nature of the interpretive structure that you're going0:17:47to lay out in the world it's not entirely determined by your temperament we know that personality is only predicting you know something like let's say 10% of the variance in most complex social outcomes and and the other0:17:57elements are well temperamental as you might be used have to get along with other people in the world so you you know you come in with these internal biases but they have0:18:06still have to be modified extensively by your social and your natural surround okay and then you develop your routines from the bottom up as Piaget pointed out0:18:16and sometimes from the top down because now and then you can think yourself into a radical transformation but mostly what you're doing is building the micro units of your interpretive schemas and your0:18:26behaviors and aggregating them into higher order structures that you can then tag with higher order abstractions and we talked about that you can't tell a three-year-old to clean up his room0:18:37and the reason for that is he those are empty boxes as far as the kid's concerned clean he's doing he might he might have room he might have that clean0:18:46he doesn't have he might have pick up the teddy bear and put it in that space right so that's one of these little micro routines and maybe you say you put0:18:5520 of those micro routines together and now you can say clean up your room and basically what you're saying is here's implement the 10 micro routines that you've learned and so a well-functioning0:19:04personality has all the micro routines in place that's actually something that you help people with if you're a behavioral therapist because one of the things you assume if you're a behavioral0:19:14therapist is that sometimes the reason people aren't doing things is because they don't know how you know sometimes maybe the person is depressed but potentially high-functioning they got0:19:24all the damn micro routines they're well socialized they're just dormant you got to get them awake again and implementing them but sometimes you get someone in your in your practice say who's just0:19:33been neglected like you cannot believe right the parents never paid any attention to them or maybe just punished them every time they did something good that's really fun and then you know they0:19:42didn't make friends and so they're really really big and and and poorly articulated and so then what you do is you work at the bottom of the micro0:19:52routines and get them to practice building up all these little attributes that they didn't build up and you know one of the things you can think about in terms of character development is so now0:20:01maybe understand something about your own personality you might say well what could you do to improve your personality and the answer is develop some of the micro routines on the other side of the0:20:10personality distribution so if you're disagreeable as hell maybe start learning how to do nice things for people and that actually works by the way so if you take disagreeable people0:20:20who are depressed and you get them doing nice things for other people their depression tends to lift but then by the same token if you're agreeable then you should practice doing some things for0:20:29yourself and being more tough minded in your negotiations and so you can sort of place yourself on the on the personality trait distribution you know you're extrovert it's like okay man learn to0:20:39spend some time with yourself right you're low in openness well try reading a book that's outside of your you know your your sphere of interest now and then if you're conscientious well you0:20:50should probably learn how to relax occasionally and and so forth so you can I think partly what you're doing is you're developing your personality is not moving the mean much the average0:20:59where you know where you're located but you're extending the standard deviation so that you're a bigger bag of tricks than you were before and I think you can practice that consciously it's like0:21:09you're hyper orderly it's well get a dog you know dogs they're messy horrible things you know it's just what you need if you're hyper orderly because they're gonna leave hair everywhere and force0:21:19you live with it and so okay so and so this is sort of you right this is your personality it's this connect collection of root subroutines that you've turned0:21:28into a hierarchy and then there's something at the top of it and that's that's a big question like what the hell should be at the top of the hierarchy because that's the ultimate question of unity and then the clinicians would say0:21:38well it's the self-actualized person or it's the self or something like that you know that's that's the ID that's the implicit and perhaps explicit ideal that you're aiming for and you might say well0:21:49is does such thing exists that I would say well do you admire people because that's your answer right do you despise people well you like some people and you0:21:58don't like others you respect some people you don't respect others well you're acting out the notion that there's at least an implicit ideal you do the same thing when you go to movies0:22:07you know you you know who the hero is you know who the bad guy is you're acting out the proposition that there's some sort of value hierarchy and there's some sort of manifestation of it that's0:22:16coherent across time so you appear to believe that and you know you are driven at least to some degree by your own inner ideals and so you tend to answer the question is that0:22:27real with an affirmed and if you don't there's catastrophic consequences Nietzsche and the existentialist we're very good at detailing that's like you let your value hierarchy disintegrate well then what0:22:37well part of it is nihilistic chaos whoo that's not so much fun and then there's the alignment of nihilistic chaos with the intrinsic desire that someone will0:22:47come along and tell you what to do right so what happens is if you let this devolve you end up with nihilistic exists not with nihilistic chaos or the demand for for the tyrant to come forward and0:22:57we've had that happen lots of times and doesn't seem to have gone that well so all right well so what happens when you0:23:07you lay out these little routines in the world at different levels of analysis well this is how your emotions function broadly speaking you know you're aiming0:23:16at something and this is an oversimplification which is why I want to show you this right when I show you this assume that it's made out of that0:23:27right it's just a schematic oversimplification because even if let's say that I'm trying to do something as simple as walking towards the door I0:23:37mean that the action of walking towards the door is predicated on the existence of all the subroutines that enable me to propel my body across time and space and0:23:48like there's that took a lot of internal organization to get that right it's a traumatized now and so you can treat it like it's invisible but implicit in any0:23:58one of these structures is this entire structure and you actually see this in therapy very frequently too so I was talking to a client the other day it was0:24:07so interesting this person said something he had been talking to his mother and he's he just made a casual comment he said he was talking to his0:24:16mother who was in a state of grief for for good reasons that were it independent of this particular person who said and I hate her and I thought oh0:24:27that's interesting like where did that come from and so I made a comment on that that's a Freudian slip right because there was the conversation was flowing and then this little emotion tagged0:24:38utterance came forward and whenever an emotion tagged utterance of that sort comes forward you know it's associated with a whole rat's nest of0:24:47underlying pain and anxiety and and and on what would you call it disappointment and frustration that hasn't been properly rectified so it's like a marker0:24:57and yet you know this when you're talking to people they say something and you think oh you know what Wow too much information that's one way of thinking about it's like just what are0:25:06you up to and and then if you have any sense you just forget that that even happened and you continue but that's that's like the snout of a dragon peeking out from a cave and you might0:25:15say well it's just a snout man but it's not because dragons snouts tend to be attached to the whole damn dragon and so this is also something to know about relationships because when you're in a0:25:24relationship with someone they'll do that now and then they'll you know utter something and you think huh-huh it's like there's a bump in the road well we're gonna look underneath that at our0:25:34peril but if you do go down there and you look at it then then the whole thing comes you can start to disentangle the the web of of memories and and0:25:44experiences that are all tangled together as a consequence of their emotional identity because I could say well everything that makes you anxious or everything that makes you upset is0:25:53the same as every other thing that's ever made you upset and so and then there's an even different subset instead of that which is all those things that have made you upset that you've never0:26:03dealt with they're all laying down there at the bottom of your nasty little soul waiting to pop themselves up in some in some random utterance right and so then you go in there at your peril because if0:26:13you're the person who pokes around in that then you're gonna get blasted with all of that stuff it's gonna come out like almost uncontrollably then then you can sort it out and so what you find is0:26:24if you ask a person a question like that and then you let them free associate which is just talk about it they'll do a wandering around like that maze that I told you about they'll do a wandering0:26:34around of that entire territory and sometimes just having them worn during it can help them straighten it out but you might find out that something happened to them 15 years ago that left0:26:44them with a terrible sense of guilt or dismay or frustration and then when when they interact with their parents in a certain way the parent knows exactly how to tap that and then that all comes up0:26:54and that's what produces that that little that little utterance and so that's the material of the world manifesting itself that's what matters manifesting itself and it almost always0:27:04manifests itself as an object something that objects we're having a conversation it's going quite well no problem there's a bump in it there's an emotional0:27:14disjunct right now we're no longer in the same place at the same time we're no longer playing the same game so that I might say okay well let's open that up and see what's behind it0:27:23well the question is what's behind the game you're playing and the answer to that is all the world that you're ignoring always so when so when imagine0:27:35that think about it this way you're trying to do well in a class and you get a bad grade okay so you're in this0:27:45little frame you want to get a good grade that isn't happening you got a bad grade okay what is it that's manifesting itself as the bad grade well you could0:27:54say well it's a c-minus on a piece of paper it's like well that's you know really no that's the objective manifestation you got a piece of paper with a c-minus the value-free0:28:04proposition is that you've been delivered a piece of paper with a curve on it a little you know negative sign well you think well that's what that is well you know it's as dopey as thinking0:28:15well here you got your failing grade you go into the lab and you like weigh it on a scale then you burn it and see what it was made of it's like well why did I get so upset about that it's just paper it's0:28:25like no that's not just paper it's an entity that exists in a web of connections the fact that it's signified by paper is almost completely irrelevant0:28:35what is it the answer is you don't know and that's why when you pick it up you get this paralyzed sinking feeling because your limbic system is a lot0:28:45smarter than your perceptual systems and your perceptual systems say well that's a piece of paper and your limbic system says nah for sure dragan right right and0:28:56so then you're sweating and then maybe you put it away and you go play video games because you know better the hypothetical dragon than the real dragon and so instead you pull out the piece of0:29:07paper maybe and you think okay why I did I get this c-minus well that's a hell of a question isn't it it's like maybe you're stupid well that could be0:29:18or at least stupid compared to who you think you are like that's that's the real horror that's lurking there writes like all I thought it was kind of smart that's a that's a proposition of the0:29:27highest order I thought I was kind of smart it's like yeah well what about this c-minus it's like well that goddamn professor right that's the first thing it's it's I've0:29:38been attacked by a predator that's the first response right so it's it's a nonsensical message it's just delivered by someone evil and predatory well that's you know possible but I wouldn't0:29:49go there I wouldn't go there first necessarily so but then well then say you don't go there okay well so what is this exactly do you not know what you0:29:59thought you know are you not who you think you are do you not work hard enough or your values not organized properly do you misuse your time are you0:30:08in the wrong field is the way you're construing your life completely inappropriate are you acting out what your parents wanted you to do it and you're pissed off about it so you're0:30:17only running at 40% despite them despite the fact that they're paying $25,000 a year for your education because that's a fun game yeah I'll go do what you want0:30:26me to do but I'll fail but not completely because then that would wouldn't cost you very much I'll just fail a little bit so that you have to0:30:35spend all that money forcing me to do what I don't want to do but you'll never get to escape from it and then every time we interact I'll stab you in various ways that you don't quite understand just to show you how0:30:45irritated I am that I happen to be acting out the destiny that you've put forward for me so maybe that's part of the dragon' right and then that pulls in the whole parent thing and you know it's0:30:55these are bottomless pits often when you when you're in the world there's something objects to you something that matters objects to you then in the0:31:05entire unrealized world is in that thing that objects it's all tangled up inside that's why it's the great dragon of chaos it's everything that's outside of0:31:14your conceptual structure and what is that it's everything that lurks outside of your of your walled city and it's manifested itself like the snake in the0:31:23garden and the easiest thing to do is say I'm not having anything to do with that but the problem with that is well you get your c- and you don't do anything about it0:31:32maybe you're a little bitter and more resentful in your study habits get a little worse so the next time you get like a d-plus and then you collect a bunch of FS and then you stop going to0:31:41school then you stop showering right then you end up jumping off the bridge and so that's a that's that's how the dragon eats you when you don't pay attention to it and so it's no bloody0:31:51wonder that people avoid you know it's really no wonder that they avoid because error messages contain within them the implicit world now the upside of that is0:32:02while they contain within them the implicit world and the world isn't all negative and so maybe you get your c-minus and that's actually the best gift you ever got because somebody0:32:11finally took you and went whack you no clue in and so you take that apart and you think oh I don't know how to write I don't know how to think I've never read0:32:21anything in my life my study habits are abysmal you know like maybe I'm working at 2% efficiency which which is probably I would suspect that you know some of you aren't doing that but I bet you that0:32:31I bet there's thirty thirty to fifty percent of the people in the room are working at two percent efficiency it's like you got it that's so to find that out is so optimistic I mean if you're0:32:41barely hanging in there but you're only working out 2% you might imagine what you could have as a life if you work it out like 50 percent so so that the0:32:50c-minus can be the best gift you ever had and that's the gold that the Dragon hoards right that's exactly what that means and so well so you're moving from0:33:00point A to point B in your little circumscribed world you've made everything invisible and as long as that works then your Theory's good enough it's accurate enough it's true enough0:33:09you're in your little paradise but if something comes up and objects well that's where your character is tested fundamentally that's the character test0:33:18it's like what do you do with messages of error and that's a tricky issue okay so here's a solution to that here's what not to do I am a bad person0:33:29I got to see mice I'm a bad person I'm out I'll just go jump off the bridge it's like no that's not good because what that means is that every time every time you try to learn something you're going to make a0:33:38mistake because what do you know so you're gonna make mistakes and if the rule is every time you make a mistake you're gonna go jump off the bridge then that's not a useful problem-solving0:33:48strategy and so when you make a mistake you don't get to beat yourself to death with a club it's a bad strategy and you'll have your internal tyrant in0:33:57there who's perfectly happy about doing that that's the you know overactive super-ego that Freud talked about maybe it came to you via a parent who was too0:34:06authoritarian or a grandparent or or maybe it's just you because you're disagreeable and neurotic and so you'll take you're at hyper conscientious you'll take yourself apart well starting0:34:17the and so you've got a problem something has objected to you then the question is well what does that mean well maybe you're not looking at the0:34:26world right maybe your goals are wrong maybe you're not acting properly it's okay so the question that arises when an obstacle emerges is which part of this0:34:37structure needs attention and the first answer can't be all of it which is why when you're arguing with someone in an0:34:46intimate relationship and you're angry at them and you want to win which is a big mistake you want to win you say well your this0:34:56is what you're like here's another ten examples of how you've done that in the past and I can enumerate more of them if you'd like and so it doesn't that's actually what you like and I've tried fixing you and didn't work and so it0:35:06looks like you're gonna be like that up into the future and you're basically saying to them well you're a bad person and the only thing they can do is either collapse or punch you and punching you0:35:15is actually better than collapsing look you don't you know what I mean it's such a counterproductive way of arguing they you don't leave the person any out and so maybe while they're civilized so it0:35:24doesn't get physical well maybe that's good and maybe it isn't but then they end up either really not happy with you in a way that they will manifest the first possible opportunity they get or0:35:33they have to go off in the corner and cringe it's like great you won it's like now your partners either hates you or is cringing it's great that's a real good victory man cry rack up about a hundred0:35:43victories like that and you'll be in divorce court and spending two hundred and fifty thousand dollars while being miserable about it yeah so anyway so something objects to0:35:53you and you think okay well I need to I need to take myself apart right because there's a piece that's broken somewhere and then you might think well let's let's assume it's a little piece to0:36:03begin with that's the right mechanism it's like okay you got a c-minus that doesn't prove that you're stupid and now it implies that you might be stupid but0:36:13it doesn't right really it does and that's why you don't want to look at it maybe it implies that you're lazier implies that you're ignorant or like it implies all sorts of terrible might imply that you're a bad person even but0:36:23you don't want to leap to that and that's sort of the proclamation of innocence before guilt assume that you're the least amount of reprehensible0:36:32and ignorant possible and so then you look at the micro routines it's okay well I got a c-minus in this course maybe I should study for that course0:36:42fifteen minutes more a day for the next three months and then you ask yourself do you think you could do that no I'm too useless okay how about fifteen minutes every second day you think you0:36:52could do that you put it in your schedule like 15 minutes every second day in the morning and that's while you think well what's wrong with me well I'm not very good at managing my0:37:02study schedule that's not quite down here at the behavioral level but it's pretty close because what you you can take an action you can open up your schedule and you can say all mark 500:37:11minutes of it aside then you can practice doing that it's pretty low level in the hierarchy means while you're still not a horrible person you just gotta polish up your work ethic and0:37:21so what you want to do is you want to it's like it's like the old adage you got to stand up for yourself but you don't want to make unnecessary enemies that's a really good thing to know it's0:37:31like shut the hell up most of the time but now and then you don't shut up because it's time to say something you don't you don't want to make unnecessary enemies though well you don't want to take yourself apart any more than is0:37:41absolutely necessary start little and you do that with people around you too like if you have a child you know and the child does something that isn't right0:37:50then you think okay minimal necessary intervention what can we do to decrease the probability that that's going to occur in the future so and that's so0:37:59that's a good thing to know with children it's also a good thing to know with your partners you have an argument some it's like okay what the hell do you want what's the minimum thing you can0:38:08request from them that would satisfy you and the evil part of your soul is going to be I want them cringing in a corner it's like yeah get that get that stuff0:38:17under control man see if you can figure out what that person could offer you that would be minimal that you would accept and then tell them that it's like here's the words I would like you to say0:38:26in the apology I would like you to formulate assuming that you think you did something wrong we have to argue about that because maybe you didn't but if you did I want to specify it0:38:35precisely and narrowly and I want to give you an escape route and you know you might only be able to do it badly because you're still mad so you apologize half-heartedly it's like you0:38:44get a pat on the head for that good next time it'll be 51% not half-heartedly right so it's careful training its0:38:53careful training of yourself and other people with with the goal in mind but also with the least amount of harshness possible and then the other thing to do0:39:02as well and this is also true for you and this is something I learned from studying the behavior is like watch the people around you like a hawk whenever they do something that you think is good0:39:11you tell them that's wisdom man you'll get so far with that you cannot bloody well believe it because most people you know they're afraid of any number of0:39:22things but one of the things they're really afraid of is that now and then they'll creep out of their cynical shell and try to do something good you know it's like they're it's like they're popping out this thing that's0:39:31unbelievably vulnerable to try to do something good and creep right back into their persona and they'll look around see if anyone noticed and sometimes0:39:41they'll get punished for it and then well then they won't do it again so don't do that but then now and then you think hey I saw you do this it was actually that was actually pretty good0:39:50Oh someone noticed it looks like wow and then they'll think yeah I could maybe I like I could do that again and if you0:39:59want to live with someone for a long period of time I would say every time they do something that you would like them to do more of number one notice0:40:08number two tell them right because I know you don't want to because you really want to dominate them and you don't you don't want them thriving0:40:17because then maybe a they'd be competition to you and you wouldn't be able to go complain to your mother about what a miserable partner you have and you know how delightful that is so you have to forego0:40:26all that pleasure if you actually help your person develop so you got to get over all that it's really annoying so you know you've got this person peg this yeah you're stuck with them and you know0:40:35maybe it's the best you can do but you got one eye open and then every time they do something good you don't want to notice because if that elevated them a little bit you wouldn't be able to feel so resentful and miserable and keep your0:40:45eye open for the next possible affair and that is what people are like that is what people are like and that's what you're like - that's what people are like so you got to decide if that's what0:40:55you want or you want to help the person that you're with grow you know that's dangerous because they might out sign you well good then you have someone to0:41:05compare yourself to that would be a good deal it's really rough with kids you know because parents will stop their children from succeeding beyond them they get jealous and then they'll put0:41:15them down and then they have kids that do not like them and they'll pay for it so one of the things that I figured out0:41:24over the last years is this is a good proposition so you know it's pretty self-evident that life is has got its rat's nest of miseries and that's for sure and maybe you could even make a0:41:34categorical statement that life is mostly a rat's nest of misery you know and you can make a pretty powerful argument for that but then there's a counter question which is well what if0:41:43you tried not to make it any more miserable that had had to be right then what then what would it be like and my suspicions are is that a lot of that0:41:52misery I would suspect that most of that misery would go away because it's the unnecessary misery that really brings you down you know it's like well someone has cancer it's like that sucks but it's not like it's not0:42:05like you can say if only we had done this differently then that wouldn't have happened but when someone's out like torturing you in a malevolent way or0:42:14maybe you're doing the same you could always ask yourself was it really it's this really necessary is this just like an useless add-on to the miseries of life that's what disheartens people and0:42:23so even in your own life if if you if you aren't suffering from self-imposed misery and your only suffering from an escapable misery0:42:33maybe you could handle that and you know you could you could survive you could bear it and even maybe without becoming irredeemably corrupt so the goal would0:42:43be well yeah life is a rat's nest of miseries and maybe it has no ultimate meaning we could say that for feeling particularly pessimistic but it still leaves one question open which is if you0:42:53didn't do everything you could to make it worse how good could you make it be and the least answer is well it it could be tragedy but maybe not hell and I0:43:04think that's right I really believe that that's that's the most pessimistic proper statement the worst-case outcome in the worst of all possible worlds is that your life could be tragic but not0:43:13hell and that's blood better than hell right it's it's and you think I could give you an example of the difference you're at your mother's deathbed well that's tragedy here's another0:43:24scenario you're at your mother's deathbed and all you you and all your idiot siblings are arguing well that's the difference between tragedy and hell and you might be able to tolerate the0:43:34first circumstance and maybe it would even bring you closer together with your family members the second one no one can bear that you walk away from a situation like that sick of yourself and sick of0:43:44everything else - and you know it's often the case that tragic circumstances bring out the Dragons because the stress is high and all those things that people0:43:53haven't dealt with they don't have the energy to repress and and all the bitterness comes pouring forward it's like seriously man you know so that's0:44:03actually a good it's a rough lesson but it's a good hallmark for figuring out whether or not you're you've got yourself adjusted properly and in relationship to your0:44:12siblings it's like if you are all gathered around the bed of someone close who is dying could you manage it if the answer is no it's like well put your0:44:21life together because it's going to happen and you should be the person who's there that can do it and do it properly and then maybe you'd find that it isn't the sort of thing that will0:44:30undermine your faith in life itself and I've seen I've seen both of those situations you know ugly ugly ugly situations you know murderously ugly0:44:41situations and then they're opposite where people had terrible things happening to happen to them as a family and you know they pull together and they rebuild their0:44:51damn ship and they sail away so that seems to me to be a lot better that makes you know when the flood comes right well okay so the same thing the0:45:02question emerges well who are you well you could say your this plan that's what people usually that's how people usually0:45:11identify maybe they have no plan at all and they're just in chaos right that's like being in the belly of the beast they're nihilistic and chaos they have no plan they're just chaos itself and0:45:20that's a very dreadful situation for people to be in or maybe they conjure together a plan that's their identity it's kind of fragile and they're holding on to that with with everything they've0:45:29got it's their little stick of wood that they're floating in the ocean clinging to you know and so they're identifying really hard with that plan that's what happens when you're an ideologue is that0:45:39you're identifying really hard with that plan the problem is if something comes up to confront it well how do you act well you can't let go with a plan because you drown then you cling to it0:45:49rigidly well that's no good because then you can't learn anything then if that's you you're a totalitarian you're not going to learn anything you're gonna end up in something that's close enough to0:45:58hell so that you won't know the difference and you might drag everyone along with you that's happened plenty of times right it's the whole story of the 20th century happened over and over and over and it happens in people's States0:46:09it happens in their business organizations it happens in their cities it happens in their provinces it happens in their states and it happens in their psyches all at the same time you can't0:46:20blame the manifestation of that sort of thing on any of those one levels it happens when a society goes down that way it goes down everywhere at the same0:46:29time it's not the totalitarians at the top and all the happy people striving to be free at the bottom it's not that at all it's totalitarianism at every single level of the hierarchy including the0:46:39psychological and so you don't want to be the thing you don't want to be in chaos that's for sure but you don't want to be the thing that clings so desperately to the raft that you can't let go when someone comes to rescue you0:46:50right you don't want to be that so then you think well exactly what are you you know what the chaos you not the plan maybe you're the thing that confronts0:47:00the obstacle and I would say that's the categorical lesson of of psychology insofar as it has to do with personal0:47:09transformation that's what you always teach people in psychotherapy I don't care what sort of psychotherapists you are you're always teaching them the same thing you're the thing that can you not you're not the plan you're the thing0:47:20that can confront the obstacle to the plan and then when you know even further that the obstacle is not only an obstacle but opportunity itself well then your whole view of the world can0:47:29change because you might think well I've got this plan something came up to object to it it's like it's possible that the thing that's objecting has something to teach you that will take0:47:38you to the place where you develop an even better plan that's a nice framework to use it's like are you so sure that this is a problem is that the only way that you can look at it or is it an0:47:48opportunity I mean I'm not trying to be you know naively optimistic there are some things that's pretty hard to extract gold from some dragons and maybe the death of a family member is a good0:47:58example of that but in even in a situation like that I can tell you that it's an opportunity for it's an opportunity for maturation that's for sure and the thing is you might say well it's0:48:09pretty miserable to go to be digging for gold when someone's falling into the grave well if they really love you first of all that's what they'll want you to do and second you're gonna make their0:48:18death a lot more palatable experience for them if you're someone who can be in the room and be helpful instead of be you know quivering in the corner and feeling that the entire world is collapsing in on you I mean that's0:48:28another you want to be the useful person at the funeral how's that for a goal that's a good goal man you know that you've got yourself together in a0:48:37situation like that because you're gonna be at them and maybe you want to be the person on whose shoulder people cry that'd be a good goal that's kind of you know I don't like being naively0:48:47optimistic so when I tell you to get your life together I'm not gonna say roses and sunshine it's like that's that's that's that's pablum for fools0:48:56but it really is something to be the reliable person out of funeral right and you can aim at that you can do that it's and you got to be tough to do that0:49:05because it also means that you can sustain a major loss without collapsing and that you've got to be a monster to do that right because you might think and I've0:49:14had clients like this while I love my child I love my mother so much that I couldn't survive if anything happened to0:49:23them it's like you have some serious thinking to do about that it's like you really want to curse someone with that kind of love do you I couldn't live without you it's like my0:49:33god get away from me really it's terrible that's the eatable mother right that's like I'll forgive0:49:42you no matter what you do it's like really you no matter what I do eh you are not my friend that's for sure not at all it's a horrible thing to do0:49:52to someone that's that's the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story all gingerbread and outside to the lost kid inside you feed them candy and make them0:50:03fat and eat them right that's Hansel and Gretel that's the eatable mother that's one of Freud's major discoveries it gets a major discovery it's like the0:50:12devouring force of love you want the person to be able to stand on their own and price you pay for that is that you stand on your own it's like good to have you around I'm0:50:22glad you're here but if if tragedies win and if and when tragedy strikes either of us I hope that one of us is standing when it blows past and and that there's0:50:33a harshness about that that's unbelievably cruel because you know you say well if my mother died I could live well what kind of monster are you exactly death of your mother doesn't do0:50:43you in well turns out that being a monster is the right thing so and that's a rough thing to learn but it's necessary to learn you know because it0:50:53also makes you you know at some point for example as you get older mm-hmm by the time you're in your mid-20s something like that you should start0:51:02having a relationship with your parents that's approximately one of peers and you can tell if you have that so here's a little trick you can use so you have0:51:12parents obviously they have friends you probably care what your parents think I would imagine do you care what their friends think of you and answer that is well not nearly as much and so then I0:51:22would say well why do you care what your parents think of you then they're the same you know what I mean it's just luck of the draw that your parents are someone else's kids friends they don't think the0:51:33same way about them that you do well that's where you see that you have a projection right if by the time you're 30 if what your parents think of you matters more than what say a random set0:51:42of their friends think of you then you've still got your parents confused with with God that's one way of looking at it you've still got them confused with an archetype and you're still a0:51:51child and you might think well it's pretty damn rude not to think about what your parents think of you anymore not to care it's like yeah it's kind of rude but maybe you'll be useful for them when0:52:00they get old and that's a much better form of caring it's like you're going to be independent enough and strong enough and and detached enough so that when the0:52:09taught when the when the power dynamic shifts which it will that you'll be the person that can carry things forward well you can't do a better thing for0:52:18them than that right that's the best of all possible outcomes for your parents0:52:29well you can think about the world this way you can think about it as your orderly little plan that's a place and you can think about it as the place that0:52:39things that disrupt your plan comes from that's another place this is a bigger place than this because there's an endless number of things that can0:52:48disrupt your plan and only a tiny number of them that can you know that will help you work it out so part of the question then too is like are you the friend of your plan or are you the friend of the0:52:58thing that disrupts your plan and I would say you should work to become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan because there's a lot of that and then if you become the friend of the0:53:08thing that disrupts your plan then you start to develop strength in proportion to the to the disruptive force and that's really what you want you want to be able to implement your plan obviously0:53:18but you want to be able to take on the consequences of error and learn from it and then then you win constantly because0:53:27even if something goes sideways you think there's something to be derived from this that's wisdom fundamentally so and so those are the eternal domains0:53:37right there's the domain of order that's a snake by the way and that's a domain of chaos and that's the world and maybe you're in the order and maybe0:53:48you're in the chaos but those can flip on you and maybe you shouldn't be in either of those places maybe you should be right in the middle and that's where you should be as far as I can tell and I0:53:57think this is this is another escape from postmodern nihilism let's say that's actually a real place it's not metaphysical or maybe it is but it's0:54:07metaphysical if metaphysics is more real than physics and you can tell when you're at that place because that's a maximally meaningful place and you drift in and out of it all the time in your0:54:16life and when things are really bad for you you're not there hardly at all right because everything is overwhelming you or the things have become sterile but if you watch your life even over a week or0:54:26two you'll see that now and then you're there I think you stand up straighter right because you're in the right place at the right time you think aha I got0:54:35the forces of chaos and order properly balanced it's unstable and it'll fall apart on you but you know you can practice bringing things together continually and then you can end up so0:54:45that you're there more often than not and then that's that's a meta place it's not a place it's a meta place and it's a place that you can be in all places and0:54:55and it's not an illusion of any sort it's the deepest reality your nervous system is always orienting yourself your is always orienting you to that place0:55:04always and and that's because it's a real place that's another way of thinking about it well that's the normal world with that's the garden with the0:55:15snake in it and that's chaos that that's the chaos that arises when your plans collapse right that's the world in the underworld and so the underworld is always there and it's lurking beneath everything it's like the figure of the0:55:25shark in the jaws poster right there you are swinging at the top and there's that terrible thing underneath that can come up and pull you down that's the world so0:55:35you need to be able to operate here and you need to be able to operate here and when you operate here well that's when you rescue your father from the belly of the whale that's when you go down you0:55:44see when you're down in chaos and you don't know what the hell's going on you have to rediscover the values that orient people have oriented people forever that's what you have to discover0:55:53so for example when I'm dealing with people have post-traumatic stress disorder and they've usually encountered someone malevolent they have to relearn the description of good and evil because0:56:02if they don't they have no framework they're lost they think well there's a malevolence afoot in the world and I'm a naive I'm a naive I'm a prey animal a0:56:13naive prey animal for the malevolence of the world it's like well good luck functioning under that set of assumptions man you just do not recover from that you stay at home in your0:56:22burrow that's what you do well you have to you go down into that you think okay well malevolence is afoot I better be the sort of person that can understand0:56:31it and deal with it and that's another reason why you have to transform yourself into a monster that's the Jungian incorporation of the shadow it's0:56:40no bloody joke because the only thing that a monster won't mess with is another monster and you might say well I don't want to transform myself into a monster it's like you don't have a0:56:49choice you can either be a pathetic monster or you can be a monster with some power those are your options there's no non monster alternative weak0:56:58or strong and I don't mean strong like dominating tyrant strength that isn't what I mean at all I mean strength like functioning at a Funeral strength and0:57:08that's a kind of monstrosity and when you're down in chaos that's what you have to rediscover well that's partly what that means you're lucky if you come0:57:18back out remember I told you the story of Jonah at the beginning of the course it's like he had something to do and was refusing to do it and so God pulled him0:57:27down to the depths of being and threatened him with death but worse not just death he'll really well he decided it was better to come popping up back0:57:36into the light and go do what he was supposed to do well there's a reason that like that's the oldest story of0:57:46mankind as far back as you go into the archives of history you find this story right and it's because well it's because0:57:57not only is it because it's true it's because it's true and everyone knows it's true even though they don't know that they know that this is the story - it's the same thing there0:58:06always a city it's always enclosed right there's always people who inhabit it there's always someone who's willing to0:58:15notice that the dragon hasn't gone away the skulls are still around there's someone who's willing to come out of the fortress and and take that on right and0:58:24to prefer perform the job of rescuing that's an eternal story are you the city are you the dragon are you the thing that engages voluntarily in combat with0:58:36what lies outside your range of safety because that's what that image represents it's that is the monster amalgam symbolic amalgam of all that0:58:45which lies outside your realm of safety you want to be safe forget that right that is that's not that's not in the cards you're not gonna be safe well then0:58:56you have to be meta safe and that's way better because then you're not safe but you know how to cope with danger well find that that solves the problem and0:59:06maybe it's even a better solution because if you're safe then you just have to stay in your burrow but if you can confront danger then you can go wherever you want and you can have an0:59:15adventure and maybe that's what you need to do is to go out and have an adventure so you don't even want safety because of how exciting is that not Dostoyevsky0:59:24said very clearly let's say we made you perfectly safe all that you had to do is eat cakes and worry yourself with the continuation of the species what would0:59:33you do you'd smash it all down as soon as you possibly could just so you had something interesting and challenging to do so you don't want safety you want to be able to0:59:42cope with danger that's a whole different thing and I'm like this isn't again metaphysical that did clinical data on this is clear when you treat someone for an anxiety disorder like0:59:52Agra phobia you do not get rid of their anxiety you make them braver that's way better there's no going back like once your agoraphobic your heart's not doing them1:00:03you know it's it's it's missing beats now on that it's like death like the crocodile that's got the clock and it's in his stomach death is after you there's no there's no1:00:12going back to naivety you don't get to be safe ever again well so what happens you get to be stronger well hey it turns out that's a better bar anyways so Lin is Bell an evolutionary1:00:27arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brain in primates a radical new theory suggests the idea proposed by Lin is Bell and1:00:38anthropologist at the University of California suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted1:00:47to gain the upper hand that's Hercules right well that's infinity that symbol and this is the snake you cut off one head and seven more growth it's like the it's an infinite snake you're never1:00:57gonna run out of snakes those are the things that object to your plans well you can't get rid of the snake so what do you do you learn how to handle them right that's it that's that's the1:01:06answers you learn how to become a handler of snakes both physical and metaphysical see you see the little halo around it I think that's st. George1:01:15might be st. Michael but I think it's st. George why is he go to halo well that's the Sun well what does that mean it's gold - Gold is pure it's the pure gold Sun it's associated with1:01:25consciousness it's the pure gold Sun of consciousness that can confront the terrible thing that paralyzes and that's1:01:34the same thing that's death right the clock in the stomach of the crocodile it's already got a taste of Captain Hook Captain Hook's no st. George that's why Peter Pan doesn't want to grow up I'd1:01:43always sees his Captain Hook I don't want to be Captain Hook he doesn't see this so he stays at home and plays video games with the rest of the Lost Boys look I got nothing against1:01:54video games by the way I mean everything in moderation right and I mean they demand skill well so what's this you know there you are you go down into1:02:04chaos and then you come back up and so you might say well am i this or am i the chaos or am i the new new solution an answer is you're not this or you1:02:13shouldn't be because that's your old dead self right that's the thing that needs to burn away you know what chaos itself but you're also not the new regenerated order you're the thing that1:02:23can make the journey and more than that you're the thing that decides to make the journey voluntarily and then more than that you're the thing that decides1:02:33to make the journey voluntarily for as long as it takes and that's where you derive your strength it's like there's no getting rid of chaos it's eternal there's no getting rid of order1:02:43it's eternal those are both traps you mediate between them and that's where your strength lies and that's not only strength for you it's strength for you it's strength for the people around you1:02:53strength for the community and strength for everything it's the thing that makes everything order itself properly and thrive you have to ask yourself and this is the1:03:02thing you ask yourself this is the existential question do you want things to be ordered properly and thrive because if the answer to that is yes you1:03:11have to give up your hatred of being you have to give up your resentment you have to give up your martyrdom and your victimization and all of that because to the degree that you carry that forward it will corrupt you and you will not1:03:22want the best because to be if you aren't the best you have to be without Rachel hey treated rancor and and resentment because you know if I resent1:03:31you for your inadequacies or even for your for your accomplishments I'm not going to have a conversation with you where I'm aiming for the best I'm gonna1:03:41have all sorts of motivations I'm gonna take you down somehow you know especially if you're successful that's the Cain and Abel story it's like I bet I want to be who you are but I can't be so I'll just cut you off at the knees1:03:51and that'll do just fine and then I can get my revenge on you and I can get my revenge on being and you know the fact that it helps turn everything into hell1:04:00well maybe that's just an additional benefit that's represented all sorts of different ways the masculine Sun and the1:04:11feminine moon and that's Horus in gold right Horus is all speech and eyes and that's Osiris the god of tradition and Isis the queen of the underworld you see1:04:22the same thing here suffering individual that transcends it by accepting it nested inside of society and the patriarchal structure nested inside the1:04:31natural world and the feminine that's the same idea there that's Buddha1:04:45emerging from the lotus flower and the lotus flower if its roots go down into the murk at the at the bottom of the of the the pond1:04:55so it emerges out of the darkness and manifests itself and then it climbs upwards towards the light and then the Lotus floats on the surface of the water and blooms open and inside that the1:05:05Buddha sits golden buddha sits in the light it's the flowering of being and that's that's a Mandela from the Union perspective it's the Mandela opens up1:05:14and it reveals this mode of perfect being that's what the Buddha means and he found enlightenment underneath the tree because that's the human environment1:05:23there's to find enlightenment underneath the tree he's got the Sun on his head - and he's gold for the same reason gold is pure1:05:41you see the same thing in Hinduism so that's the yoni feminine symbol case you were wondering masculine symbol that's1:05:51the union of the two right that's the union of chaos and order with a snake lurking in the background and it's golden because it's the union1:06:00of those two things that produces the power of the snake that's something that you might think about you could think about those as two halves of the DNA molecule that is what they are although1:06:09I can't tell you how I know that but it's the same idea it's the same idea here so this what happens here is that1:06:19you see this is a very remarkable picture so this is Eve Eve is handing out skulls to mankind right it's self-consciousness and the discovery of death this is Mary as the1:06:29church on this side and she's handing out these things that are the hosts it's those are pieces of Christ's body and see so he's put up there on this tree1:06:38the same as the skull as an antidote the antidote is something that you incorporate and the thing you incorporate is the voluntary acceptance of suffering as the cure for death1:06:47that's what that picture means people worked on that bloody picture for a long long long long time and you know we see1:06:57the picture but we don't know what it means but that's what it means means the same thing that this means it means the same thing that this means means the1:07:06same thing that this means see there's there's pride rock this is the Scandinavian world tree there's pride rock right there there's the territory1:07:15outside see it's a serpent it's a snake that's the territory outside that's outside of the light and that's all in a tree that's how can you not read that as1:07:24a history of the evolution of mankind that's exactly what it is that's our eternal home1:07:39well we better stop before that girl comes in it was very nice having you all in the class and I appreciated the warm welcome1:07:49I got especially in January because it was a rough time in January and so I'm glad this all worked out so well and it was a pleasure teaching you so good luck to you all1:07:58I mean it be what you can be God you let the world dissolve around you otherwise that's not a good thing you've got something that everyone needs man1:08:07including yourself it's like let it out that's where everything you want is and it's this it's the case for every single one of you so you know hoist up your1:08:16goddamn privilege and go out there and do something in the world see ya [Applause]0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 01: Context and Background
0:00:000:00:09I should tell you first about the genesis of this theory I suppose is the right way of putting it0:00:23when I was about your age that was back in the early 80’s or thereabouts0:00:35and this was particularly true around 1984 but it was true before that too every generation has its worries real or imagined0:00:47the primary worry for people of my generation was nuclear war and you know it was a genuine worry0:00:59at one point many years later I went down to Arizona to visit an ICBM, a decommissioned ICBM0:01:08nuclear missile silo and ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missile were, very large rockets right they flew at, they could fly half way around the world0:01:20it was deep underground and behind very thick steel doors, it was light green you know that pastel green that everyone seemed to like in the 1950’s0:01:30it was like pastel green Star Trek console that’s what it looked like and ah, so we went down out in the yard, it was in the desert, out in the yard there was a very0:01:42I would say magical object for lack of a better word0:01:51and that was the nose cone for the ICBM and it was quite big about that big, about that high, pointed like the point of a bullet0:02:03about ¾’s of an inch thick, plastic you know kind of a resin and it was designed to melt on re-entry so that was just sitting there0:02:12so that was fairly thought provoking, let’s put it that way and then we went into the missile silo0:02:21interestingly enough appended to the front of it, it had been decommissioned under Regan, by the way in the front of it there was a museum0:02:30with artifacts from the 1980’s featuring Reagan and Gorbachev meeting multiple times0:02:40and it was staffed by these Southern these Americans from the South who were grandparent age and they were and they were just super friendly0:02:50and you know , they were happy to be in the museum, and it was like going to visit your grandma’s nuclear missile silo and so it was jarring you know, because it was obviously a portentous0:03:04place, and yet it was conjoined with hospitality and welcoming it was surreal in that manner anyways we went into the0:03:15into the silo and they ran us through a simulated launch, so imagine0:03:24a panel like this made out of metal except twice as long with another one of these things at the other end 16 feet across or so0:03:34basically 1950’s technology but updated and then imagine what you had to do to launch it was that there was a guy with a key and there was another guy with a key and if I remember correctly the keys were around their necks0:03:47although I don’t think that they were stored around their necks permanently but and so to launch the missile you had to put the key in the lock both of you that was the safety0:03:58precaution, had to be two of you put the key in the lock and hold it for 10 seconds and then away the missile goes and it wasn’t as big, the missile wasn’t as big as the rockets that went to the moon0:04:10but but it was plenty big you know the silo itself would have easily been as wide as this room is and perhaps larger and many, many, story’s tall, you know because it was nested underground0:04:23so they ran us through a simulated launch which was surreal, I would say and then they told us that0:04:33someone asked, that the keys were in once now, they wouldn’t tell us when but you know that would have been during the Cuban missile crisis0:04:43because, we were that close and we were close again at other times, although perhaps not that close0:04:52and there seemed to be another peak of conflict, in 1984 when there was a movie showed at that time called0:05:03“The Day After” which at that time garnered more views than any movie ever had on TV, and it was a story about0:05:12the aftermath of a nuclear war and the people that were left and it was pretty realistic and and pretty frightening, it, it turned out0:05:23as I found out later that that movie was one of things that influenced Ronald Reagan to put pressure on or negotiate with the Soviets depending on how0:05:34you look at it and so well then you know 5 years later the Soviet union collapsed, no one saw that coming0:05:45and it really didn’t collapse in 1989 in some sense, you know, like a huge machine like that0:05:54doesn’t fall apart all at once, it falls apart over time and then at some point it just becomes unsustainable and topples and you know, it’s like they lost faith in their doctrine0:06:07and for good reason you know that0:06:16the system in Russia the Soviet Union, which was a collection of states, an empire and the system that Mao establish in China and0:06:26the system that still exists in Korea as a remnant of the cold war and systems in South East Asia and in Africa0:06:37were all predicated on Marxist presuppositions presuppositions that were Utopian in nature0:06:46and that and that posited a Utopian future where property was held in common and everyone had0:06:55enough and everyone was called upon to do what they could ight, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need0:07:04which is a lovely sentiment and you can imagine how it would be attractive even intellectually, because of course other systems, all other systems0:07:15produce vast disparities in income it’s like a natural law, that’s actually governed by, you can model it0:07:25with a distribution called the Pareto distribution, and the Pareto distribution looks like this it doesn’t look like a normal distribution, a lot of you guys have been told about, not, normal distributions and how0:07:38many things many things follow on normal distribution, most things, but that’s really a limited case you can understand a Pareto distribution if you0:07:49you’ve all played Monopoly I presume at the beginning everyone has the same amount of money we will include property, the same amount of wealth0:08:00and then what happens as the game progresses, and really as a function of chance I mean, I know that you have to use a head a little bit in Monopoly but the basic rule is just buy everything you can get your hands on0:08:11and then trade meanly, something like that so at the beginning everybody has the same amount and then as you begin to play0:08:20if you had enough players you would develop a normal distribution because some people would win relatively consistently and some players lose relatively consistently0:08:30and so the money starts to be distributed in a normal distribution, but the thing about money, and the thing about lots of things0:08:41is that zero is involved and zero is a weird place because if you are playing a trading game and you hit zero0:08:50then you’re done and so, and it is very hard to recover from zero, and you know it’s really hard to recover, you know when you are doomed in Monopoly0:08:59you know, you, you can tell, you’ve got some resources but there is going to be some crisis when you land on some hotel and you are going to get wiped out, you know it, so0:09:09there is a point at which you’re headed for zero even if you have something you know and you might be rescued by,0:09:19luck, but you know when you are doomed So what happens as you continue to play Monopoly,0:09:29more and more people stack up at zero and fewer and fewer people have more and more money and when the game is over0:09:39every person has no money and one person has all of it, now the funny thing about that is in some sense that is how trading games work,0:09:48you know, you got, you might wonder why there is inequality in a society and it is easy to consider that it’s because the society is corrupt and perhaps,0:09:58you know, society is somewhat or horribly corrupt, that is the variation, there is no society that is not without its criminal0:10:07element, its fixed element anyways trading games tend to produce a Pareto distribution so that very many have very little0:10:19and a tiny minority have a tremendous amount that’s the 1% that you hear about, right, and the thing about the 1% is that0:10:28it has happened in every society that has ever been studied, it doesn’t really matter what the governmental system is, it certainly happened under the Soviets, that’s for sure0:10:37and there was enough people that had enough zero that they just died, so, you know, the, the Utopian dream0:10:49was completely un-implementable for a variety of very complex reasons, one is that it is very hard to fight against that distribution pattern0:10:58when people are trading because mere statistics will do that, and then there are other things, and I should tell you as well that the Pareto distribution governs a lot of things, so,0:11:09if you look at books, if I remember properly last year there was something like a million English language books published0:11:18and I think that 500 of them sold more than 100,000 copies which is none, right, that is none, and of that 500 you can be sure that one of them was by Stephen King0:11:29and he took half the money because like there is 5 authors in the English language who are on every airport0:11:38paperback stand occupying the top rung and that’s massive real estate, right, because it is replicated everywhere, and because they are so0:11:47prominent and because they are no names when people are in a hurry and want something to read, they just grab that, and more money goes to those people, so you know,0:11:57success breeds success and failure breeds failure, and it not necessarily linear and that is a really difficult thing to deal with, and it is hard on societies, because,0:12:08one of the things we do know is that, you know, as you stretch out the inequality, you make men, particularly, on the lower end of the distribution,0:12:20more and more likely to be aggressive, it’s sort of like, you imagine every man has a threshold for violence, um, and status is important to men,0:12:29not that it isn’t important to women but, it’s different, it’s a different kind of status, it’s status that is important to men because it’s one of the things that makes them0:12:38marketable as partners to women so it actually turns out to be quite important to men men tend to compete with one another for status, hierarchy position, and0:12:49in a really unequal society, if you are like a low rung guy, then, and you don’t have any opportunity to rise because0:12:58the society isn’t structured so that there’s mobility, then the more aggressive guys, tend to turn to criminality, and you know and so you could say0:13:09there is a threshold for criminality, and the more inequality pressure you put on a particular area, geographic or political area,0:13:19the more inequality pressure you put on it, the more men slip past that threshold and into criminality, and you know there have been some pretty good studies done of0:13:30drug gangs in Chicago, that was the best one, a sociologist actually went out and hung out with a drug gang he got into it, I guess the drug gang leader was,0:13:40you know, I wouldn’t say necessarily narcissistic, that might be a reasonable way of thinking about it, and he was kind of0:13:49happy with the idea of maybe being the subject of a book and, so this guy was able to associate with them, got to know them quite well,0:14:01and then the housing project in which the gang was housed was slated for demolition and the gang broke up and he got the books0:14:10because they kept books and what he found was the average street drug dealer, first of all was employed in another job, as well,0:14:19and was making far less than minimum wage now, but guys further up the chain of course followed the Pareto distribution so there was a tiny minority of them that were raking in a tremendous amount of loot,0:14:32and the guys at the bottom were just waiting around for the possibility that they could rise up the hierarchy and you know it’s a pretty violent game, so,0:14:42the chances that someone’s going to be, taken out it pretty high and so then a slot opens up for some opportunistic0:14:52second rater and perhaps he can move up the hierarchy. So the Pareto distribution governs all sorts of other things too, I mentioned0:15:07it governs the popularity of books the sales of books but it also, it also characterizes the distribution of everything that people produce,0:15:19so if you think of creative production of any sort, artistic production, industrial production it doesn’t matter,0:15:28almost everything fails and a few things succeed beyond anyone’s wildest imagination Apples’ a good example of that, you know I mean, the iPhone,0:15:40they have their competitors but it is an extraordinarily dominant product, and they rake in billions of dollars don’t know if Apple is valued at a trillion dollars but0:15:51it’s close to that, and that is a lot of money, and I think if I remember correctly, it something like this, I probably have the figures wrong but the top 40 people,0:16:00the richest 40 people in the world have as much money as the bottom 2 billion right, now, you know it not like they are stuffing their mattresses with that money0:16:09or they have a skyscraper full of cash, that money is out in the economy doing whatever money does, so0:16:18you can’t spend 28 billion dollars so, and sometimes you can even do some good with it, you know, Bill Gates seems to be doing something reasonable with his money,0:16:29but the reason I am telling you this is because one of the things you should know is that this proclivity for inequality0:16:38is pervasive among the products of human beings it is the case with the goals scored in hockey, my son told me and he is a reliable source on hockey statistics, that0:16:50if Wayne Gretzky, if you don’t count any of the points that Wayne Gretzky managed with scoring, he still had enough points just with assists to have more points than any hockey player that ever played,0:17:02so, you know, even at the upper end of the distribution there is some person whose, aahh, that is so good at what they do,0:17:12and then there is another person that is so much better than them that it is not even comparable and so, and the benefits flow to people who are in that position, and you can understand why ,I would say because0:17:25you know, say you start writing, and you get a book and rare things, very rare things to have happen, and some people read it and they like it and then of course0:17:35it is much more likely that you’ll get a next book and if people like that then it is even more likely that you will get a third book and then people start to know who you are and then because they know who you are, they phone you up and offer you opportunities and your network grows,0:17:48it’s like this exponential increase in your reach and your capacity for production, and more and more flows to you, and0:17:59then on the other hand if you start to fail, and you know, why would someone fail, well God, one idea that is very common in our culture is that poverty is caused by lack of money and that’s a very stupid idea,0:18:15because money is very difficult to handle, I had clients who were drug addicts, and the worst possible thing that could happen to them is that they got some money0:18:25they’re just done, first of all, they were hanging around with people who were a little on the sociopathic side and so, especially if they weren’t that bright and couldn’t defend themselves very well0:18:37as soon as they got money, well it was off to the bar with all the friends, and, you know, one guy I remember in particular, you know every time he got his,0:18:48his disability cheque, he was gone for 5 days, you would find him in a ditch, you know, because he would go to the bar, spend every cent he had on alcohol and cocaine, and,0:19:02wake up in a ditch ¾’s dead, well, eventually completely dead, and, you know then he was ashamed and horrified and repentant and0:19:13he would straighten himself out again and then that was all well and good, until, as long he was broke until the next cheque showed up, and then, bang the same thing, so, you know,0:19:23it’s not like money is necessarily a good for everyone it’s hard to manage money, it’s really easy for it to disappear, I mean elderly people have a hell of a time now because0:19:34you know, crooks are contacting them on the Internet non-stop, and so just giving people money money it’s like, it’s like pouring water in their hands0:19:44it’s not that helpful, not necessarily that helpful, and then of course, contributors to poverty are , well, it’s not that helpful to have a low IQ you know, people don’t like the idea of IQ0:19:56because it seems so arbitrary, you know, have a high IQ well it’s not like you deserve it exactly, you are set up that way pretty much right from the beginning, it’s a very, very, very, very stable.0:20:10You can make a high IQ person stupider by not educating them up to the level of their possibility, but taking someone who has a low IQ trying to raise that, it’s like if you can figure out how to do that0:20:21well, you know, it’s Nobel Prize time for you because people have tried that a lot, and most recently with those you know Luminosity, Lumosity games and that sort of thing, the evidence that those produce0:20:34anything other than brilliant performances on the Lumosity game itself is basically zero. We haven’t been able to figure out how to,0:20:44see, ‘cause, intelligence is a cross domain phenomena and you can get really good in a single domain by practising like mad and what you want is to practise like mad in a single domain and hope that it generalizes to other domains0:20:58that’s the holy grail of intelligence increase, no, no one has done it, people claim it, but the claims never hold up, and people have been trying for a long time0:21:08to do it, and then haven’t been able to do it, and, difference in IQ really make a difference, you know, I mean,0:21:22you guys average IQ’s is probably 125, 130, at 115 you are at the 85th percentile0:21:32and 115 would barely get you going for a hard university, 130, you are probably graduate school material, you know, 1450:21:42you are up there at the range probably where you can pretty much do whatever you want but as you get smarter, the scatter between your abilities increases0:21:52so you might have a very high verbal IQ, but not be so good at mathematics, or the other way around, but it’s a massive contributor to lifetime success, and, I don’t know what to do about that.0:22:05Why do smart people make more money? Well, they get to where the edge of production is faster so if you have a 1000 people and you rank order them by IQ the smart people are going to come up with the new ideas first0:22:19and they are going to have more ideas, and they are going to strategize better, and, you know, with an IQ of 90, which is,0:22:3115% of the population, think about that, 15% of the population that is pretty much the threshold for reading instructions and being able to follow them0:22:43so you know, and our society is increasing sophisticated so it is by no means obvious you know the liberals think, well0:22:53that society is unfair because there is unemployment and conservatives think that, well there is a job for everyone but none of them think well there are massive, massive, massive differences in people’s ability0:23:06far greater than anyone realizes, and that poses a structural problem. I had a client and I got him a volunteer job which is way harder than you think0:23:18you need a police check, for example Like it's harder to get a volunteer job than a real job But I, We got him in a volunteer job and he had to fold0:23:27pieces of paper, letters, it was, he worked at a charity he had to fold pieces of paper, in three so that he could put them inside envelopes and0:23:36and the the letters, which were in a pile had to matched with the proper envelopes which were also in a pile, some of them were French and some of them were English0:23:45so the French ones had to be carefully matched to the French envelopes and, and then if, you know, if there was one envelope out of order, well then he had to figure out whether it was the papers0:23:57that were out of order or the letters that were out of order and then, Some of the letters had photographs attached to them and you weren't supposed to bend the photographs, but0:24:08they weren't all in the same place, so that meant you had to figure out how to fold the paper in three, a bunch of different ways without creasing the photograph0:24:17and then, the other thing is, and I never realized how difficult it is to put a piece of paper in an envelope until I watched someone that couldn't do it0:24:28and he probably had an IQ of about 80 you know if you met him on the street you wouldn't think anything different of him, he was a normal looking guy had some other problems0:24:40I trained to fold those damn papers for like 30 hours and he got reasonably good at it, but you know, if you are good at it0:24:49and you probably all are you fold it, and the edges line up exactly like really exactly, the tolerance is probably 1/2 a millimeter or something like that0:24:59and then you do the second fold and, the tolerance is the same but let's imagine the first fold that you you are out by an 1/8th of an inch and the second fold you are out by an 1/8th of an inch0:25:10so it's a little crooked, and that means in total you are out by a 1/4 of an inch then it won't fit in the damn envelope so then you kind of crumple the envelope when you put it there and then it gets stuck in the sorting machine0:25:22and so he sweated blood trying to do that job and eventually they eventually planned to fire him0:25:31so imagine what that's like, eh, you know you can't get a job and then so you get a job at a charity as a volunteer0:25:41and a charity decides to fire you you know I mean, really that's just, so I talked to the women who was running it and0:25:51suggested that that might be a little on the devastating side, I mean she had her reasaons you know,0:26:01he, he,. he was always asking people questions about how to do his job and you know so that meant he was interfering with the productivity of other people and it was genuine interference, I mean, she wasn't being mean0:26:13and it was her job to make sure that the place did what it was supposed to, so and, you know, she was between a rock and a hard place0:26:24he eventually decided that the job wasn't for him relatively soon after that, I think it was too stressful and uh, he quit, so that solved that problem, except then, he didn't have a job0:26:36which of course is a problem it has a happy ending this story, as far as I know um, he0:26:45he got a dog because he was very lonesome, and that dog, man, having that guy train that dog, that was something else, that dog just I think he lost thirty pounds while he was training that dog0:26:54because dogs, you know, they are dominant he had to have a tussle with the dog to figure out who was in charge, and it's a lot of responsibility to have a dog0:27:03but he was pretty damn committed to that dog and he managed it, the things he went through to keep that dog you cannot possibly imagine, it's like a, like a0:27:15it was surreal, just like the nuclear missile silo, I mean, he had people following him around informing on him because they thought he was abusing the dog0:27:24when in fact, because I watched the dog was clearly abusing him so, he got a job helping a women who trained dogs0:27:35and then he had a job so hurray, you know, but it was like a miracle fundamentally, so Anyways, the reason I am telling you all this is because0:27:46there was a reason for the Cold War and the reason was that there is inequality and there are different theories how to address that0:27:56inequality and different theories as to why it exists and there was a Marxist theory about why it exists which was roughly something like property equal theft0:28:05and those who have more have taken it from those who have less which seems to me to eliminate any conceptualization that there isn't a fixed pot of money0:28:17you know money expands actually, as we become more technologically proficient and, lots of people who have money have it because generated a lot of wealth0:28:28Bill Gates is a great example of that right he popularized computing he made it possible for everybody to to have access to computing, it's like, it seems like a good, good for him you know0:28:40and you could say the same thing about Steve Jobs and maybe you will be able to say the same thing about Elon Musk, and you know, these guys have tremendous resources at their diposal0:28:49but you know, they're not like bathing in bank notes, you know, they're trying to continue to do things, they use their money to do things0:29:04anyways The Russians set themselves up under Marxist presuppositions and tried to0:29:13equalize the distribution of property and to call that catastrophic barely scratches the surface, I know that0:29:22you guys probably don't learn much about this because for some reason people aren't taught about it, but0:29:31good estimates are that the Russians killed about 30 million of their own people between 1919 and 1959 you know and it's0:29:40brutal brutal, a lot of that was through starvation you know I saw a photograph the other day, which I tweeted which is the worst photograph I have ever seen in my life and that is actually saying a lot because,0:29:52I have seen a lot of really terrible photographs because I've done so much investigation into totalitarianism this was a photograph taken during one of the early0:30:02starvation... periods in the Soviet Union where about three million peasants died was a picture of a peasant couple standing behind a table at a market selling human body parts for food0:30:15and you know, I have this weird quirk which I don't think does me much good, but maybe helps me understand things better0:30:24when I see that someone has dome something extreme, I learned to this a long time ago when I worked briefly in a maximum security prison0:30:35I try to imagine, what I would have to like what kind of situation what sort of situation would I have to find myself in to do that and believe me, man,0:30:45that's a horrifying enterprise because it is actually possible no matter what you read about someone doing and no matter how unlikely you think that you would do that0:30:57It's possible, to imagine yourself in that situation, and that well that's enlightening, that's what I would say, that's enlightening0:31:09you know because one of the things about enlightenment is that you get enlightened by doing things that necessary that you really, really, really do not want to know0:31:21don't want to do and imagine, imagining yourself as a perpetrator of that sort is that tells you something about the world, and it tells you something about human beings, but0:31:35it's a hell of thing to swallow, you know, in a very well structured society such as ours where we are so peaceful well because we have the heat0:31:46and it always works, and we have electricity, and it always works and we have plumbing, which a bloody miracle, and it always works you know, it's just0:31:56One of the things that this imagination process has done for me is keep me alert to the absolute miracle that my life is everyday0:32:08It's horrbly cold out there You can't grow any food You'd die if you were out there for 24 hours If any of the infrastructure was unreliable for any length of time we would be in serious trouble0:32:22and it's never unreliable It's so unlikely and so we are, with all this reliable infrastructure0:32:31and because of that we don;t have to compete with each other much I mean, some You don't compete for food You don't compete for shelter, or some people do but not many0:32:41So, it really easy to think of yourself as good, because You're not doing anything nasty to anyone0:32:50but, you know, a cynic might say well that, that's just because you don't have any reason to but, those reasons have arisen many times in the past, and0:33:01in fact they're the norm, not the exception, we're the exception, this insanely functional society that0:33:10we have somehow managed to generate is it is incomprehensible to me that it exists so,0:33:23Anyways back in the industrial, the end of the industrial revolution The conditions of the worker were pretty brutal0:33:32I mean George Orwell wrote a book called "Road to Wigan Pier" which I highly recommend, it's a great book and he went up in the 30's0:33:42I think it was the 30's To work, to live with the coal miners up in Northern U.K. and, those poor guys your know they had to crawl to work for two miles down a tunnel that they couldn't stand up in0:33:56just to start their shift and after their 8 hours of hacking away at the coal walls which is rather difficult, dirty and dangerous0:34:06and of course you get black lung from it fatal and of course they didn't get paid very much so after doing that for 8 hours then you , crawled back, your 2 miles0:34:17and you didn't get paid for that, that was just the commute and the housing for those people was not good, the food wasn''t good, most of them had not teeth by the time they were 300:34:27you know, I mean being poor was no joke even in a place like the U.K. which was relatively well off and so there was every reason to be concerned between the disparity between rich andpoor0:34:39and poor is the natural state, you know In the Western world, in 1895 the typical person lived on a dollar a day in today's dollars0:34:48and, you know, that's not uncommon in many places in the world now so there are reasons to be concerned with inequality0:34:58and, you know, the Russians took one pathway inspired by Marx and we took another pathway inspired by0:35:07John Stuart Mill and John Locke the English tradition I would so, democracy and, competed for0:35:1670 years and, things seem to have worked out better here but, with a hell of a competition0:35:25and there were real differences of opinion at the bottom of it and those two systems turned into armed camps, and that's not over exactly, you know, I mean0:35:36there are Chinese, although they're a hybrid now between Communism and capitalism and hopefully they are more interested in getting rich than they are, in, you know0:35:46having a war greed is a good motivator surprisingly enough it is kind of reliable0:35:55but, anyways, by 1989, the jig was up it was obvious that the Soviet system, could not0:36:04was not functional, there, was no consumer goods, that's for sure, even in the main department stores in Moscow0:36:14people just kind of lost faith in the whole project you know, it became huh! for a while, I don't know if you know about the show Dallas0:36:24Dallas was a soap opera that ran at night a serial, and uh, it was about these rich Texans, who lived, you know, a 1% lifestyle0:36:36and it was the most popular show in East Germany the streets would empty so people could watch Dallas well, when you are sitting in you horrible Soviet architecture flat0:36:48that, you know you had to struggle to get with your informing relatives, because 1 out of 3 people in East Germany was an informer, a government informer0:36:58and you watch Dallas, you know, there is a little cognitive dissonance occurring and so, it fell apart0:37:08and quite peacefully actually, you know, there was a war in there was a bit of a war in Eastern Europe but0:37:18it fell apart remarkably peacefully, and so here we are and we don't know what do with the pesky Russians, but at least there is no evidence that they are our mortal enemies for fundamental reasons of0:37:32axiomatic presupposition and things are a lot better in the world despite what everyone tells you0:37:42than they were 40 years ago, and they are so much better than they were 50 years ago that is absolutely staggering We have lifted more people out of poverty in the last 15 years0:37:51that have been lifted out of poverty in the entire history of the world before then people are, gathering economic resources0:38:00at a rate that even the wildest optimist really couldn't dream of speeding up so,0:38:09It's not like we are not without our problems, but, So during that period of time0:38:18I was obsessed, would be a good word with a question, and the question was0:38:28Why, would human beings produce two camps0:38:37and then produce a massive arsenal of hydrogen bombs and I don't know what you know about hydrogen bombs, but they have atom bombs for triggers0:38:47and, you know, that's worth thing because an atom bomb, you know, hey, that's that's something, but a hydrogen bomb that's the sun, that's really something0:38:58so, and you know, at the peak of the cold war, and this is still true to some degree there were literally tens of thousands of these weapons aimed0:39:08at the Soviet Union and at the West, and that was enough pretty much put and end to everything and, that's a dangerous game, man, you know and0:39:19not only because of intent, but also because of the possibility of accidental just an accident, you know just a mistake, or just someone whose a little crazier than you might want them to be0:39:32you know, and you might think, well no one would want to bring about the destruction of the world but that just means you don't know very much about Stalin because0:39:41of all the people who lived in the 20th century who had power Stalin was the most motivated to bring everything to an end0:39:52There is some evidence that he was murdered, by Khrushchev, and his crew, and Khrushchev was the next leader and0:40:01if he was not murdered, he was at least not provided with medical attention when he was dying and uh, there is reasonable evidence that he was gearing to invade Western Europe0:40:14and he really didn't care how much destruction would go along with that, I mean, he had already killed tens of millions of people he had a lot of practice, he was good at it, it didn't really bother him, maybe even enjoyed it0:40:30so, what the hell, that's what I thought, how can it be that you are doing this, it's so insane so then I started to think about belief systems, you know0:40:43because you could say that each camp had it's own belief system, the one in the West was derived and had a very lengthy history derived from the Greeks and the Romans, and the Jews and the Christians0:40:56and from various schools of philosophy and from the Enlightenment and all that, and then the Soviet Union was basically predicated on a rational philosophy0:41:06that, that opposed the axioms that the West had evolved and each group organized their societies around that, and0:41:17Now I took political science for quite a long time and the political scientists and the economists0:41:26they basically thought that people competed over resources but that wasn't a very good answer as far as I was concerned, because it wasn't obvious to me why people valued the resources they valued0:41:37The economists just assumed that there are resources that you valued, but but, you know, people can value a lot of different things, it's it's not exactly fixed, I mean, you tend to value food very highly if you are hungry, obviously, but0:41:50but there are lots of thing that we value and that we want that seem somewhat arbitrary, somewhat like a decision so I got more interested in why people valued things, and, what it meant to value something0:42:03and then what it meant to believe something and then how it could be that someone could believe something, so deeply0:42:12that they would risk their own death, to protect it, or at least risk the death of other people and maybe on a massive scale, like, man, people are committeda to their system0:42:25now, you know, a system of belief is not just a system of belief, that's one of the things I came to understand is that it's not appropriate, to make this too psychological0:42:36people defend their belief systems, but that's not exactly right, you know we have a shared belief system well it's sufficiently shared so, that, here we are0:42:45we don't know each other, we are a bunch of primates we are in this room and it's peaceful, and no one's scared and that's pretty amazing and that means we are all acting out our roles0:42:58so, we acting out our roles and we have an expectation with regard to those roles and those two things match and that's the important thing, and we will talk about that a lot0:43:09it isn't the belief system, or the integrity of the belief system even it's the match between the belief system and the actions of the other people within the belief system0:43:19what you want to maintain is that match you want to act out your beliefs in the world, and you want what you want to happen0:43:28that's a good thing, you get what you want and you validate your belief system, great perfect, security but a lot of that is, we are interacting, even right now0:43:38there is a whole set of expectations that are governing what we are doing, like you don't want me to take your little tablet there and smash it, that would be shocking, right, you wouldn't know what the hell to do0:43:48right, you would be somewhere different it I did that and you wouldn't know where you were and that is another thing to know, because0:43:58that is a fundamental difference, there is a fundamental difference between knowing where you are and not knowing where you are I think that it's, in some sense, the fundamental difference, you can think about it as the distinction between0:44:12explored and unexplored territory, but you have to0:44:21I don't know if you have taken a cat to a new house, cats hate that and, because in their old house, and maybe in their old neighborhood, they've slunk around0:44:33you know, at the edges, checking everything out they start out afraid they check everything out, they know where to hide, they now what's safe0:44:43and they know that because they go somewehere and nothing happens, so then they assume that it is safe and they slowly, build up a neighborhood that they are comfortable with0:44:52My dad used to take the dog for a walk, and the cat got lonesome and it started to follow him, and First of all, it would go along the buildings, the houses on their route0:45:02hiding, really from predators, and after a while it got kind off comfortable with that then it follow right behind the dog but, it had a border, and if0:45:13my dad took the dog over one street to many for the cat the cat would just sit on the corner and you know, cry, like a cat cries, it was like0:45:24that's it for me man, I am not going any further out into the unknown and so, the distinction between the territory that you have mastered0:45:36and the territory that you haven't mastered, is a fundamental distinction it is the distinction between home and the strange land and the thing about familiar territory for people, is that most of the familiar territory that we inhabit0:45:51is other people because we are so social, you can't really think it's a weird way of thinking about territory, it's not exactly geographical, objective territory, it's0:46:02territory with a dominance hierarchy in it and the dominance hierarchy has a predictable structure and you know where you fit in it most of the time and so when you act out in that territory surrounded by your people0:46:14then often you get what you want and, you are so thrilled about that, because you just don't want someone acting erratically around you like, and you know that, so you walk down Bloor0:46:25and there are people there that really should be institutionalized, but we de-institutionalized them all so that they could be free, and free to be, you know0:46:36suffering and malfunctioning, and out on the street, that's what the freedom ended up being but you know, you'll walk by someone like that whose0:46:45muttering away to the voices in his head and, you know, maybe striking out against what ever it is that's plaguing him and0:46:55you'll make eye contact you might even go across the street, you are certainly give him a wide berth, you are going to keep a distance between him and you.0:47:05and you are going to hope that you don't attract his attention because, he's not in the dominance hierarchy and you don't know what the hell he might do0:47:14and that's unexplored territory too and that's another way of thinking about it We inhabit time and space, not just space, and not just time, we inhabit time and space0:47:26and out territories are spatio-temporal, we are here - now and this is safe, now and it's safe, partly because of the physical structure and it's working0:47:37but it's also because none of you are manifesting peculiar behaviour but if you started to manifest peculiar behaviour0:47:46if you stood up and started muttering or yelling or maybe attacking someone next to you all the rest of you freeze first because all of a sudden this would be unexplored territory0:47:58the match between what you want, which is a peaceful lecture that you hope has some content the match between what you want and what is happening, has vanished0:48:10and so then, you're not, you don't know where you are and so what do you do when you don't know where you are what do you do when you don't know what to do0:48:20well, if you are a computer then you just crash but you know, what good is that to you, you are just going to die, that isn't helpful0:48:30you freeze, first and then you maybe cautiously attend, or maybe you don't, maybe you just keep you're damn eyes averted and you sit there and you hope that no one notices you0:48:41that's a prey response, right that's like a rabbit frozen when it thinks a fox is looking at it and we were prey animals for a long time there was a cat0:48:51that they recently discovered, a prehistoric cat that had this bottom single tooth and they found out that it a human skull fit right inside it's mouth and so it could grab you here and pierce the back of your skull with it's0:49:05single tooth, and that is what it was evolved for, so, you know It's under such conditions we evolved and we are predators obviously0:49:16but we are tasty predators, and so other things were perfectly happy to eat us and so where you are don't know what to do you act like a prey animal0:49:28and that is probably what you should do because maybe if you keep your head down and shut the hell up there won't be any attention attracted to you and maybe you will get through it0:49:39you might decide, unlikely, to intervene and take the guy down but0:49:49but you would be the exception rather than the norm, and it's unsurprising0:49:59OK, so What is came to understand is that belief systems regulated emotions but not exactly psychologically, like, it isn't exactly0:50:10it isn't exactly, and this is sort of like the terror management theories, it's not exactly like you have a theory in your head, and because the theory explains the world, and because the theory explains the world0:50:20the theory is what is making you secure it's kind of like that it's like you have a theory in you head and the theory makes you feel secure because it explains the world0:50:29but the reason it explains the world is because other people have the theory in their head and when you both act out the theory you both get what you want, and it's the coming together of the theory0:50:41and the outcome that makes you it's life not only does it stop you from being anxious and often make you happy because you get what you want, but0:50:53it's not just psychological you know the fact that we do this, that we cooperate within our societies, we match our belief systems and then act them out0:51:02that's the predicate a productive society so, it's actually, it isn't that just that it saves you from death anxiety like the terror management0:51:13theorists have it, it saves you from death and, that's good, I mean, being protected from death anxiety, yay, well, good that's great too man, but actually not dying, that sort of the fundamental thing that you are after0:51:27and so, people have reason to defend their territory if you think of territory that way, if you think about it as a domain where the fundamental presuppositions0:51:36of each citizen are matched by the behavior of their co-citizens They have every reason to defend that and if it falls apart, it can have mortally0:51:48serious consequences, it's chaos, you know that chaos just doesn't destabilize everybody psychologically it destabilizes everything, it can destabilize the currency0:51:59it can destabilize the industrial economy, the lights can go off it's like it's not good, so hey, no wonder people protect it0:52:14so then I started thinking about what a belief system was and0:52:23I realized that a belief system was actually a set of moral guidelines and moral guidelines are guidelines about how you should, behave0:52:33also how you should perceive and the reason that a moral guideline is necessary for you to perceive is that0:52:42you can't look at anything without a hierarchy of value right, think about it, how may things in this room could you look at there is an innumerable in this room to look at0:52:53there are just all the squares, the little tiny squares in this fabric you could look at those things, for, until the end of time, one at a time, but you don't do that0:53:02in fact, if I took most of you out of this room there is a very low probability that you would be able to tell me what color the walls were, or even if those things were on the walls0:53:13and the reason for that, is that, who cares as long as the walls don't move color is irrelavant, and there is no reason for you to remember it0:53:23it has no emotional significance it has no value and so what you do instead is well, this is what you're doing, so, why are you here0:53:34I don't mean in, the broad metaphysical sense, I mean specifically why are you here right now and I would say that you are students, obviously0:53:43and you are trying to get a degree, and you know you believe that will have some functional utility maybe you will be a little wiser, and a little more literate and be able to think a little better, and be able to write a little better and so you will actually be more functional in the world0:53:58that would be good you know, and, maybe you are interested, but anyways it's You're in this particular lecture, so that you can take this particular class0:54:09so that you can get a particular kind of degree so that you can launch your life, and then in your life you are probably going to meet someone that you have a long term relationship with, and you are going to have children, and you are going to partake in the society, and0:54:22that's why you are here, all of those reasons, simultaneously is why you are here and so then that helps you decide what to look at0:54:31and so what you look at is at the moment or listen to is me because, in principle I am the gateway to that set of accomplishments, at this moment0:54:45and so you focus on me and that's because you value that and so what that means is that you can't even look at the world without a value structure0:54:56you know it's chaos, if everything is equally unimportant or if everything is equally important it's chaos, so a value system, structures0:55:05the very way that you perceive the world, and I don't mean that metaphysically there is plenty of experiments that have demonstrated that like the invisible gorilla experiment, how many of you know about the invisible gorilla experiment. How many don't?0:55:20Well, Roughly speaking, what happens is that there are two teams a white team dressed in white and a team dressed in black0:55:30and there is a video of them and the black team is passing a basketball ball back and forth and the white team passing basketball back and forth and you are supposed to count the times the basketball gets passed back and forth0:55:40there is only one basketball and so, you know, you're diligent for whatever reason you do what the experimenter asks you0:55:49and you count the basketball tosses and you think well that's not so hard, it's like 16 so you tell them 16, and they say, Did you see the gorilla?0:55:59and half of you say, what are you talking about and the experimenter says, let's watch again but this time, don't count0:56:08Well, sure enough, like 30 seconds into the video and, you know, the players fill the video screen, it's not like they are 300 yards in the distance, you know, like little ants playing basketball, they're right0:56:19filling the screen, you can see their faces Sure enough, minute into the video this guy in a gorilla suit, and he is not little, and neither is the gorilla suit, and he comes out0:56:30bangs his chest right in the middle of the screen for five seconds and then disappears and half, more than half actually of people don't see that, and it is even worse, Dan Simon did another experiment, where0:56:44you are at a counter, you know at a store, and there is a clerk there you are talking to the clerk, and the clerk, goes down0:56:53hypothetically to get something, and then a different clerk pops up and you think, Hey! I would notice that! but you don't and you can even vary the clerk quite a bit,0:57:04and, people don't notice So, We focus on very particular things and the reason we don't notice is because it doesn't actually matter0:57:14in terms of the ongoing, our ongoing action at that point, the clerk is interchangeable as long as the entity there acts like a clerk0:57:24that's sufficient0:57:38So, belief systems structure your perceptions, value systems, we are going to call them value systems they structure you perceptions0:57:47and they also guide you actions because you act, in accordance with your values conscious, or unconscious, you have values that you don't know about because you don't know yourself very well0:58:01You can tell that, that you have values that you don't know, very well, because sometimes you get attracted to people that you know perfectly well that's a mistake0:58:11or, you are trying to tell yourself to study and you don't, and, you know so there's You are not in control of yourself to any great degree,0:58:20some, and the more integrated you are the more control you have but, you are kind of a loose collection arguing sub-personalities, and they are more or less directed towards a single goal,0:58:30but it depends on how committed you are to that goal, how much you have thought it through, much you buy into it, how many of the contradictions in your world representation you have managed to iron out, and all of that0:58:44So, but in any case, it's value systems that govern action and perception, and so, we are going to take an existential0:58:56perspective, a phenomenological and an existential perspective in this course, and phenomenological means that we are going to we are going to base our presuppositions on0:59:06the idea that what you experience is real, all of it we are not really dividing the world into object and subject, that isn't how this particular approach works, it's more like0:59:17you have a field of experience, it includes things like pain, which is not really something objective, I mean but it's real, I mean, one of the things I've come to understand is...don't....0:59:29You are not required to believe what I am telling you, by the way If you have an argument about, why some of this doesn't make sense0:59:41then, you know, follow that sucker, because I am trying to tell you what I have reached with regards to bedrock presuppositions, and I haven't been able to0:59:51put prybars underneath them, but that doesn't mean you won't and, you know, you should try, anyways1:00:04Moral system, tells you how to act what to see, and a shared moral system keeps your emotions under control, and fulfills your motivational needs1:00:20Now there is this old idea, of David Hume's and David Hume famously,1:00:30posited, that you cannot derive and ought from and is and what he meant by that was that merely knowing the objective facts about something1:00:43does not tell you how to implement those facts in your life and that's actually a gap, now, you could say, and I think that this is the case1:00:52that is a necessary consequence of the scientific endeavour, because one of the things you are trying to do as a scientist is to strip away the value of the object, right, because1:01:03I don't care what your idiosyncratic notion of the object is I want to know how you perceive the object such that everyone else will perceive it at least that way1:01:14and so that takes the subjectivity completely out of it, and so it might just be a necessary consequence of the scientific method that it doesn't have a morality implicit in it1:01:24people argue about that, Sam Harris, for example, argues, he believes that we can come up with a scientific morality I don't believe that, because I don't think that you can make rational judgments about value, it's too complicated1:01:42it's far to complicated, it's something that has to emerge, it can't be I mean Marxism was supposed to be a scientific Utopia predicated on scientific principles, and all of that, and you know, it just didn't work1:01:58Anyways, so I kind of buy Hume's argument that you cannot derive an ought from an is, now1:02:08that's a problem first of all it's a problem because you have factual knowledge but you don't know how to implement it, you know, it's like should you spend money on AIDS or should you spend money on cancer or should spend money on higher education1:02:20how the hell are you going to calculate that rationally you can't because you just don't have the information at hand It's not possible to1:02:29you know, I worked for a U.N. committee at one point and, the U.N. committee had like a hundred proposals for how the world could be improved, but there was no order to them, it's like it wasn't, this is more important than this, it's like, well1:02:45that's the end of that, you know, you have got to start with something and so that means you have to make something more important that other things, obviously in your life if everything is of equal importance then you are paralyzed1:03:03Now you know, it's a truism and probably an oversimplfied one that since the dawn of the scientific revolution1:03:15a wedge has been driven through the heart of our societies, such that the moral systems that we use to unite us1:03:25so those would be religious systems, fundementally have been subject to an intense critique from the scientists, and1:03:34you know it's a pretty effective critique even if you have maintained a traditional faith, it's like1:03:44the scientific onslaught is no joke and that's a problem as far as I can tell because1:03:53and the problem is that you are still left with the problem of how you should act and Nietzsche, the philosopher Nietzsche he would say that1:04:02we are running on the fumes of Christianity in the West because over it's thousand years of domination, let's say 1500 years of absolute domination1:04:13it produced a consensus of morality that was predicated on metaphysical presuppositions and that organized societies1:04:22and those societies are predicated on certain beliefs, like the belief in really I would say in something divine inhabits each individual1:04:31you know, that sort of the presumption that is embedded in law, sort of the idea that underlies the idea of natural rights, right there is something about you that is so valuable that even the law1:04:40has to bow to it even if you are reprehensible, even if you are convicted and reprehensible Now that's, man1:04:49the idea that people came up with that idea, that's a bloody miracle, you know because generally speaking your proclivity is that if someone is being even accused of doing something , the general human proclivity1:05:01is that if someone is just been accused of doing something terrible that's enough so that you can stone them to death or do whatever you are going to do with them presumption of innocence before guilt, good God1:05:11of all the things that aren't automatic, that's got to top the list you know, it's unbelievable that occurs and it is interesting to me because1:05:21it seems to me that that presupposition that there is something valuable, transcendent about each individual1:05:30I wouldn't call that a scientific presupposition, but it seems to be a highly functional presupposition, right I think, in that1:05:39it isn't unreasonable to notice that societies that have valued the individual and made the law, subject to the individual even with regard to voting1:05:51because that's basically what voting does, it puts sovereignty the hands of the people those societies actually seem to work Now, whether they will work for the next 300 years1:06:02who the hell knows, but they work pretty well for the last 500 years, let's say We've got it pretty good right now, and, you know, I suspect most of you1:06:14are rather pleased that the law recognizes you value as individuals and you take that for granted, right, you think you have rights and of course the rights you have, natural rights, are1:06:28logical consequences of your transcendent value, and that is nested in, this is Nietzche's observation that is nested in a set of metaphysical beliefs1:06:38and his idea was that if you wipe out, wipe out the metaphysical beliefs eventually you wipe out the whole system because you have knocked out the cornerstone1:06:47and it might take a long time for the thing to shake and fall, but, it will now, whether he was right or not is hard to say1:06:58it looks to me like what has happened since Nietzsche announced the death of God in say the late 1800's is that Western society has oscillated between extremes1:07:10you know, extremes on the right Germany extremes on the left and you know, with the democracies, at least the other democracies1:07:21the democracies managing to stay the course somewhere down the middle but1:07:30but it is not obvious to me that that can be maintained without the underlying metaphysics and that is a problem because1:07:40whatever you might say about the underlying metaphysics it is not true the way that science is true and that could be OK because there might be more than one form of truth, in fact, I think there is1:07:54I think that there is pragmatic truth, and I think that pragmatic truth is actually deeper than scientific truth and pragmatic truth is the truths that enable you to act in a manner that best1:08:08that improves the probability, roughly speaking, of your existence and reproduction maximally that is a Darwinian idea, one of the things about the Darwinian theory1:08:20this kind off puts it in opposition to scientific materialism I would say, is that the Darwinian theory is that you do not have privileged knowledge of the world1:08:30and you can actually tell that because, you die if you knew enough about the world, you would not die, and you do die and so you are embodied theory of sorts1:08:40and that theory is good enough to get you along about 80 years and produce some reasonable probability that you'll have children and that they will survive, that's it, man, that's what you have managed after1:08:563 billion years of evolution it's a good enough solution it's a good enough way of acting, and we don't know a better way of acting, and our world conceptions are actually nested inside the Darwinian system1:09:10and , they might be predicated on pragmatic truths rather than objective truths, pragmatic truths are truths that have functional utility1:09:19and we are alive, we care about being alive we tend to use our theories as tools it's possible that our theories are tools1:09:29and that they are tools to help us stay alive Now, I was reading a bit about Camille Paglia, the other day1:09:41and ah, I have noticed some similarities between, she's a famous gadfly, I would say of feminists1:09:51classic modern feminists, although she would regard herself as a feminist Unbelievably smart, like if you want to watch someone whose verbally1:10:01Who has verbal mastery beyond belief You could watch Camille Paglia, she seems a little manic to me, she can1:10:10rap off an argument at a rate that's just mind-boggling and is very coherent, and she tends to shred her opponents in arguments, she is so brilliant1:10:20She said something interesting, and she has been influenced by some of the same people I have been influenced by, she liked this book by Erich Neumann called " The Origins and History of Consciousness" which1:10:31I would recommend if you are interested in Jungian theory, Carl Jung It's a good introduction to Jungian theory and it's about the development of consciousness1:10:40and, It's predicated like Jung's work, and Joseph Campbell's work and Mircea Eliade's work, all which has been criticized or ignored by the post-modernists1:10:55Predicated on the idea that human beings have a central narrative and that,1:11:04that central narrative is the dramatic expression of the necessary human system of values1:11:16and that is built into us it's part of our nature, we have a nature as human beings we're not, infinitely malleable by culture1:11:28which is a post-modernist claim and a dangerous one It's dangerous if we have a nature1:11:38Paglia has this idea, that the reason that you come to university and you study the humanities, or the proper reason if you do that1:11:49is not to engage in premature and destructive critisism of something that you don't even yet understand1:11:59but to, learn, as much as you can about art and literature and poetry and drama1:12:10and fiction and religious thinking and this all kind of a, you can think about it as a What is that? What is all that? It's art,1:12:21it's culture, music belongs in that category and like, what the hell, what about music, it's like everyone loves it, or almost everyone1:12:30It's a mystery, you listen to music and it is very meaningful I mean music gets people through some pretty dark times, why?1:12:39It's not obvious, that for sure you know, and in most cultures music plays a very central role in identity formation,and you guys, I think you will probably find as you age that your favorite music1:12:49will be the music that you listened to between the ages of 16 and 20 It's kind of like it imprints on you and it defines a, maybe it defines a generation1:12:59and maybe, in our tribal past, and this is highly likely When you were being inculcated into the tribal culture,1:13:10That was inculcated with dance, and with masks and with music, all at the same time, so you are invited to participate in this drama and to take your place in this drama1:13:20and to think of that as a representation of the objective world is just not right, that isn't what it is It's an invitation to a drama1:13:30now then the question might be, well, is the drama real? and the answer to that is, It depends on what you mean by real. I think that great dramas are more real than real, they're hyperreal1:13:44They're They're hyper real because they provide guidelines about how to act that are abstract1:13:54and even perhaps generic, but applicable across an extraordinary broad range of situations So, imagine this you know, you get up in the morning1:14:04you do a bunch of things and someone asks you what you are doing, what you did and you you know, you tell them, well the first thing I did this morning was open my eyes1:14:14the second thing was think about whether or not I wanted to go back to sleep, and then you know, I took off my blankets and then I put my feet on the floor and I stood up, and I was blinking while I was doing all this, and I was also breathing1:14:27and then, you know I looked for my clothes, and do you really want to listen to that guy? You don't want to listen to that guy. It's like, why are you telling me that ? I want you to tell me something interesting.1:14:38Well, what is it that is interesting? And why isn't that interesting? It's not obvious. So, so then imagine the guy actually tells you a pretty good story, a little adventure.1:14:49Probably, he was doing something normal, something unexpected happened he had to conjure up some new responses he either settled the problem, or he didn't settle the problem, yeah, you're interested in that.1:15:01Especially if he settled the problem because if he can tell you how when he encountered some unexplored territory he was able to sew it back together1:15:11then, maybe you can do that thing happens and that's pretty cheap wisdom for you, he had to go through all the aggravation of figuring it out and all you have to do is listen1:15:21you know, and that's kind of a classic story, the classic story roughly speaking is There is a guy, women, doesn't matter1:15:30going about their life relatively normally, something blindsides them and they are in a state of chaos1:15:39chaos is a place chaos is the place that you end up when what you are doing and the world stop matching, and the chaos can be of different degrees , you know you could wake up and find that1:15:54your house was burgled, you could wake up and find that a parent has Alzheimer's, or some fatal disease or that you do or that your whole family was murdered, or that there is a war starting, you know1:16:06there are different degrees of chaos and I think that you can Quantify the chaos by calculating1:16:15how much of what you do and expect is likely to be disrupted by the event now, because that, the more disruption, the more destabilized you are going to be, which is why1:16:28if someone tells you that you are going to perish painfully in 3 months, it's like That's a bad one1:16:39you're really in an unexpected territory there, nothing that you assumed that was real, roughly speaking, in the world is real anymore1:16:49We like to watch people, in their normal life blindsided by something experiencing this interregnum of chaos where they explore1:17:01and gather new information and retool their character, or retool the world because either of those would work as a solution and then, come out the other side1:17:12and things are better than they were to begin with or at least as good, but, better is better, that's a happy ending, right? That's a happy ending, that's a comedy. technically speaking, and so1:17:24what you want, you want your life to be a comedy not that it's supposed to be funny because comedy doesn't have to be funny, technically speaking it's just the opposite of tragedy1:17:34tragedy is when you are going along pretty well and you get blindsided, and that's that and, you know, that can certainly happen, it happens to people all the time. It's a comedy that you want.1:17:50Now, what I hope to provide you with is a magic code1:17:59You know, there was a book published a while back Tom Hanks was in the movie he was a Harvard professor who went around solving symbolic mysteries1:18:11Do you remember what is was called? The Da Vinci Code, every one liked that, it sold a lot and it was full of little mysteries, it was full of hints that there was more to the world than1:18:23you think, and, which is definitely true and that, you know, there is a way of getting access to that knowledge and it would be really worthwhile1:18:33and people like that idea, and the reason for that is because it is actually, it's true. It's true1:18:42it's true like like fiction is true, so OK let's go back to the guy who is telling you about his morning well he tells you something exciting1:18:51well then imagine that 10 people tell you exciting, and then, you extract out the pattern of them dealing with this problem1:19:01from that, and do then you have a, that's what you do when you are an author Right, because in a book you don't want the book exactly to be about1:19:10what ordinary people do in ordinary times in thier life You already know hoe to be ordinary during ordinary times of your life, what, that's not useful1:19:19you know, you wouldn't watch a video tape of yourself Imagine you videotaped yourself during a day, and then the next day you watched that1:19:28It's like, God, who would want to do that So what seem to happen in stories is that they distill They distill so they, they watch people, people watch people1:19:39and then they tell stories about what they see, but they leave a lot out of those stories Everything that is boring, hopefully, and then more and more stories about exciting things get1:19:50sort of aggregated, and then maybe a great writer comes along and writes something really, really interesting profound character transformations1:19:59and then, well you say "That's fiction" and then you say, "That's not true" because it's fiction but then, then maybe that's not right1:20:09maybe it's more than true because who wants the truth, the truth is mundane reality and you have already got that mastered What you want is the distillation of1:20:20interesting experience and you might think, well why is it interesting, well that a really good question, because you don't actually know and believe me, you really don't know because you will be interested in things that just don't make any sense at all1:20:31I am going to walk a bit today through Pinocchio, and we will do that more the next time too You know, but I want to tell you a little bit about that movie to begin with just so you know how crazy you are1:20:43so, you know the plot, how many people have seen the Disney movie Pinocchio? so lot's of people, so that's strange enough in itself that so many people have seen it1:20:54and it's worth thinking about, you know, you tend to show your kids that movie and, but if you think about the movie it's you are doing some pretty weird things when you are sitting there watching that movie, man. First of all,1:21:06it's drawings, right and they are low resolution drawings You don't care, and you watch the Simpsons or maybe, what's that called1:21:16the one that's been concentrating on political correctness so much [Students]: South Park South Park! God that animation man, it's just awful Right, it is just horrible, it couldn't be worse1:21:26you don't care, like, Round heads, smile little bit of shuffling, that's a person as far as you're concerned it's just irrelevant and if it was higher resolution, it wouldn't help1:21:38You just need the bare bones, right to hang your perceptions on So, so you watch this drawing, that's Pinocchio, beautiful drawings,1:21:50animated in a sequence You are not watching something real, you are watching a pure construction and then you think about the plot, it's like It's completely absurd, everything about it is absurd, it's like1:22:02Well, one of the characters is a bug and he turns out to be like the conscience, and so, what the hell is with that? and then, another character is this puppet, marionette, and,1:22:15you know, somehow he gets free of his strings and then goes on this adventure and then and then you know he gets enticed into1:22:24various nefarious places by a fox and a cat and then, he rescues his father from a whale and you don't even know how his father got in the whale, it's like the last time you see his father1:22:36he was in a rainstorm and the next thing that happens is, he is in a whale and you are sitting there thinking, "Hey, no problem, this all makes sense." It's like, what? really?1:22:46Why? How does that make sense? Well the answer is you don't know That's the thing that is so cool you don't know, you don't even know what you are watching1:22:56but it doesn't matter You watch it, and you are interested in it, you want to see what the hell happens to this puppet You want to see if he ends up becoming a real boy.1:23:05because there's, it seems important Well, you say, "Is Pinocchio true?"1:23:16Well that's a stupid question. It's partly a stupid question because the answer is it depends on you mean by true1:23:28and, it isn't obvious to me what you should mean when you1:23:38say that something is true and the reason it is not obvious is because, We have this idea in our society, and it's a very profound idea and that idea is that the ultimate truth is scientific truth1:23:53That that tells us about the nature of the world, and it does that in a final way in some sense, there is no brooking any arguments about it1:24:02The physicists have got it right, and that's why they can make hydrogen bombs, and that's a pretty good demonstration of their being right1:24:13but you don't act as if that's true and you don't and you watch things and pay attention to things and are captivated by things1:24:25that aren't predicated on those assumptions and, it seems, to me, that1:24:36There is a problem of what the world is made out of, but there is a bigger problem and that is the problem of how you should conduct yourself in the world And that is what you really want to know, people want to know that more than anything1:24:47Because you need to know, it's like, here you guys are in university, you don't know what you are doing I mean, some of you know more than others but you are at the beginning of your life and1:24:57life is very complex and chaotic and It isn't exactly obvious, you know, what kind of relationship you should form, or what sort of character you should develop or what you are going to do for a job, or1:25:07what's the meaning of life, that's a good one, what's the meaning of life Well, and you know, people come to university, at least many of them, and that's kind of what they want to find out1:25:18Now Paglia, her notion is that you could think about it this way, is that articulated knowledge1:25:27is embedded in inarticulate knowledge and inarticulate knowledge is,1:25:36a domain of literature and art high culture let's say and it's, we sort of know what it means1:25:46but we don't know exactly know what it means, it means more than we know and then outside of that is what we don't know at all and that's an idea that Jung developed as well and maybe Paglia picked it up from Jung1:25:57because Jung believed that you know, there was this domain that we had mastered in every domain, and then there was domain outside of that you could think of as unexplored1:26:09territory and what we met unexplored territory with was our creative imagination and what we were trying to do with our creative imagination is to1:26:18figure out how to deal with that unexplored territory, we are producing dramas that we could act out that would help us deal with what we still hadn't mastered1:26:29and outside of that there is just what we don't know at all and Paglia's idea, and this was Jung's idea was that1:26:42without understanding that surround you are too atomized1:26:53you are not part of your historical tradition you haven't incorporated the spirit of your ancestors who built all this1:27:02you're just here now and, and you don't know what to do either, you don't know how to maintain your culture and you don't know how to serve it1:27:11and, you know you might say why should you serve your culture and, well I have a hypothesis about that, you know1:27:20You can think about this, I don't know if it's true but People ask what the meaning of life is, and it seems to me that1:27:29Meaning is proportionate to the adoption of responsibility You know, like let's say have a little sister who's like three1:27:42you are going to take care of her Questioning whether that is a good idea seems stupid You know what I mean, it just doesn't seem like the right kind of question1:27:51It's like, well obviously self evidently, let's say, that's what you do and, do you find it meaningful, it's like probably1:28:01you know, interacting with a little kid when I had little kids, you know when they were like two and under we took them out to seetheir1:28:11relatives and they were older people you know, they watched that two year old like it was a fire you know, every second that that little kid was in the room1:28:22every single adult was focused on, focused on , on him or her1:28:31That is something that people attend to , and that's a source of meaning and, what else is meaningful, well your family relationships are meaningful to you and1:28:41maybe the responsibility that you adopt as a friend, that seems meaningful maybe your decision to pursue a particular career and be of some utility1:28:50in society, you know, part of that's governed by your desire to establish some security and get ahead, it's fine but1:28:59You are also playing an integral role in the maintenance of the structure that supports you and, my observation has been that1:29:09in my clinical practices people just have a hell of a time if they don't have if they don't slot in somewhere, you know You know, I got to go to work at 9:00 in the morning and you know I have got this rigid schedule, it's like1:29:22It's probably a good idea to be grateful for that, because what I have noticed is that if people pull out from those externally scaffolded systems1:29:32they drift they get depressed, they get anxious, they don't know what to do with themselves you know they are kind of like sled dogs with no sled1:29:41and we are kind of like sled dogs as far as I can tell, beasts of burden, we need a load, man, we need a load and the question is what sort of load do you need1:29:53and here is why I think we need, we need that You know, there is I've been thinking about how to figure out what is real for a long time, and,1:30:03because I am an existentialist I'm operating under the presupposition that you can tell what people believe by watching how they act I don't care what they say,1:30:13I don't care what their statements are about their view of reality because the correlation, the relationship between that and their actual actions is, not1:30:25certainly not perfect and sometimes doesn't even exist One thing that I've noticed is that people1:30:34no one argues with their own pain Everyone who hurts acts as if they believe that pain is real1:30:48So we could say the ultimate reality is pain That's how people act it's in keeping with the claims of many religious tradiations, you know1:31:00The Jews are always recollecting past pain I mean the Christian God is a crucified person, I mean there is a fair bit of pain there, for the Buddhists the fundamental maxim is that life is suffering1:31:13and it seems to me that there is a metaphysical claim there the metaphysical claim is that pain is real1:31:24now of course it depends on what you mean by real but people act as if their pain is real, so that's a good place to start1:31:35Now, that poses a problem1:31:44Life is a pain Life is suffering, let's say, and why is that? Well, it's because you can be broken1:31:55hurt and destroyed So, that seems pretty self evident and worse you know it and that makes people unique, like, that's our self conciousness, right?1:32:08That's really what separates us in some sense from other creatures I mean, other creatures have some self conciousness, like a chimp can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, and so can a dolphin, but1:32:20You know that's pretty bare bones self conciousness, you know real self consciousness is the knowledge of your borders and not only in space, but in time1:32:33and as far as I can tell human beings are the only creatures that discovered the future and that's really good because we can plan for the future, but it's really bad because, you know1:32:44the future is finite and that a big shock to the old system and it's the existential burden that everybody bears and it is associated integrally with suffering1:32:55and so then you think, well life is suffering and it's finite and that is part of the suffering that's part of what makes you question the value of1:33:04existing and maybe the value of existance itself So then what do you have to use as a weapon against that1:33:13Well, you know we talked a little bit about responsibility, that seems to work, you know The amount of responsibility that you adopt1:33:26in relationship to things seems to increase your meaningful engagement, and you might say, well what's the most meaningfully engaged activity, and you might say, well1:33:41How about a little reduction in the old suffering? You know, so you live your life so that you are not causing undue pain, especially pointless pain1:33:51that would be good, and maybe you could even be more useful than that and you could figure out some ways that some suffering yours, other peoples, both if you are really1:34:03hitting a home run, maybe you can figure out some way that some of that could be rectified, and that seems to be meaningful in and of itself, I mean if it's pain that makes you doubt the meaning of life, which is perfectly reasonable1:34:18then this cessation of pain the cessation of suffering, the minimization of suffering as a logical corollary should be the proper medication1:34:31and so I would say that means that there is some mode that you can conduct yourself in that makes you a good person1:34:42and, part of being a good person is to alleviate suffering and1:34:51I don't get think you get to question that actually if if the suffering itself is what is making you question the validity of your life then you can't also say that the cessation of that is not useful1:35:04I mean you can but it's completely incoherent, you can claim incoherent things if you want1:35:15So then I would say, these distilled stories that I am talking about the stories that are written, say, by great authors1:35:27I am particularly fond of Dosytoevsky, whose works are he is head and shoulder above anyone I have ever read in terms of1:35:40writers of fiction, he deals with the hardest questions that human beings face and, he, he has characters on both sides of the argument, and they're, they really lay out the arguments1:35:54it's not like Dostoevsky, has a belief so he has a character and that character has his beliefs and that character always wins the arguments that doesn't happen is a Dostoevsky novel at all1:36:04he sets up a character and then he sets up 3 or 4 antagonists and those antagonists they are not straw men, they're like iron giants they just stomp his protagonist, and the whole thing is a war between these1:36:18different conceptions of being, it's amazing to see, it's amazing to read.1:36:30so you distill these stories, great authors distill stories great storytellers distill stories and we have stories that are very, very, very old1:36:41those are usually religious stories of one form or another, but they can be fairy tales because fairy tales, some people have traced fairy tales back more than 10,000 years1:36:50and so they are a part of an oral tradition and, oral traditions can last for tens of thousands of years and You know, a story that has been told for 10,000 years is a funny kind of story, it's like, people have remembered it1:37:04and, obviously modified it, it's like the game of telephone where I tell you something and you whisper it to the person next to you and so on It's like a game of telephone that has gone on for a thousand generations and1:37:18all that's left is what people remember and maybe they remember what is important, because you tend to remember what is important It isn't necessarily the case you know what the hell it means, you don't know what music means1:37:30but you know it doesn't stop you from listening to it You don't know generally speaking what a movie that you see or a book that you read means1:37:39not if it is profound, it means more than you can understand because otherwise, why read it Well, so the idea is this, that1:37:50we are necessarily nested inside moral systems, the moral systems are predicated on narratives, narrative dramas of sorts1:38:00and, the moral systems are what orients us in life and the reason to understand them, to the degree that you can is because you need to know how to live1:38:11Nietzsche said that if you had a why, you could bear any how. and that's good, one of the things that the Auschwitz guards used to do to the prisoners1:38:24and this is very telling, so at Auschwitz there was a sign that said "Work will make you free" it was a little joke1:38:33not really a very funny joke It's the kind of joke that you have to be1:38:42satanic, is the appropriate term, to conceptualize and to dare to to state1:38:52so when the Auschwitz prisoners came to Auschwitz, they were already pretty pretty rough shape, they were in cattle cars they had been separated from their families, everything had been taken from them1:39:03they were transported for a long time, they were standing up the kids suffocating because there was no room, it was so packed in there they didn't have anything to eat, there weren't any toilet facilities of any sorts, it was like1:39:15You got rid of 20% of the people just transporting them, the one on the outside of the cars they froze to death because of course it was cold and pretty nasty1:39:24and when they got to Auschwitz, the guards use to have this game that they would play this is part of the work will set you free thing1:39:34They would get a prisoner, take a prisoner who is already in pretty rough shape and then have them carry a sack of wet salt, a 100 pounds1:39:44from one side of the camp to the other and, when you think of a camp you think of something like a football field, maybe something that big, fences around it, like no way man1:39:53these were cities, there were tens of thousands of people in these places so from one side of the camp compound to the other, that was a good hike and that wasn't bad enough, they had to get them to , carry it back and put it the same place1:40:08Now, that's poetic in it's malevolence, you know what you are doing is you're harnessing the human1:40:24compulsion to engage in useful activity and demonstrating how absolutely futile that is despite it's difficulty1:40:39seems like a bad thing to do people need it's a parody of meaninglessness, that's what that is1:40:50and you know, people need meaning in their lives because their lives are difficult and so , the question is to what end should you devote your life1:41:00and another question might be does it matter matter is an interesting word, because matter is matter, but matter is also what matters1:41:11and I would say that what matters is more than real than matter at least that's how you act, and then the question is, well, is there something that you should be aiming at1:41:22It's a good question, that's the question of the meaning of life and when one of the things that is supposed to happen when you come to university1:41:31is that the sort of question that should be addressed and as far as I can tell and this just might be my more cynical side, what I see happening to university students, generally speaking is that they come in1:41:44clinging to the wreckage of their culture and, floating, with the pieces and, those pieces are taken away by1:41:56professors who tell them that everything can be deconstructed and no, nothing has any real meaning, it's like1:42:05when you are finally educated it's when floating out on the ocean and you've got nothing to stay afloat with, then, you are done and you can graduate, and it's like1:42:17I don't see that as useful quite the contrary1:42:31So let me tell you a story The first thing I am going to propose to you, and we are going to talk a lot, is that,1:42:43you inhabit a story, that the framework through which you look at the world is actually a story, and here is the story The story is you are somewhere1:42:53and you are going somewhere and that can be conceptual or whatever, it's that there is a gradient between where you are and where you are aiming at, which means no more really than you are doing something while you are sitting there1:43:04and hypothetically you are aiming for something better and so, you are in a state of insufficiency always1:43:13the insufficiencies change and then you are trying to rectify the insufficiency and and you presume that your current state is less preferable to the state that you are aiming at1:43:23and then, the way that you bring those two together is, sometimes you can do that through thinking but fundamentally you do it through action1:43:32you do it through acting in the world and so that's sort of that's sort of the answer in some sense to the mind body problem you have a conceptual structure, but when you implement it, you're implementing,1:43:43it not abstractly, you are implementing through action, so that's the basic story, it's not a very interesting story but it's the framework through which you view the world, so it's a value laden framework1:43:56Otherwise you wouldn't be able to act and you wouldn't know what to look at so, it's a value laden framework you look at the world through a value laden framework so then we might say so what if the optimal value laden framework1:44:07That's what we are going to try and figure out. now, I told you about the war that went on between the Communists and the West and how that obsessed me and1:44:20so one of the things that I really wondered about was, well was this just an arbitrary thing You know, like, did the Communists, they had some axioms, and we had some axioms1:44:29so if you are a moral relativist you might say, well whose to say which set of axioms are better, or even, whose to claim that you could say that a set of axioms, one set is better than another1:44:41That's a moral relativist claim and you know fair enough! So I thought that maybe this is just an arbitrary thing and it is going to be settled by force1:44:55Because that is how you settle an arbitrary claim between two competing systems where there is no room for negotiation So I thought about that for a long time, I wanted to know1:45:04what the roots were of the Marxist system and what the roots were of the Western system, and what I surmised was that the Western system was actually something that evolved1:45:17whereas the Communist system was a rationalist construction that was imposed and they weren't the same thing, and so then I wondered, well what's Western culture grounded in and is there any reason to assume that that's real in any sense1:45:32and so, that's what took me into the study of the underlying stories fundemental stories upon which our culture, I believe, is based and some of those are very old1:45:43I am going to tell you a Mesopotamian story, it's one of the oldest stories we know, I am going to tell you and Egyptian story Those are sources of our culture,1:45:52and I think that those stories are grounded in much older traditions and I think that they refer to something real actually real, now1:46:02I already told you that, there are different ways of conceptualizing real and that, my initial hypothesis, presumption, axiom you might say is that1:46:15pain is the most real, and the reason I believe that is because that is how people act Now, you can criticize that You can certainly come up with an alternate conceptual framework which the scientists have1:46:28because they believe that the most real thing is matter maybe we need more than one set of tools to operate in the world1:46:37it's possible So now I want to tell you what I think is the fundamental1:46:48constituent elements are of stories and, one of the things that I hope is that1:46:57this, knowing this will make you immunize you against ideology and the reason I'm, because I believe that ideologies are fragmentary1:47:09meta-narratives and they have their power because they're grounded in the meta-narrative but they only tell part of the story but they have power, because they are grounded in the fundemental narrative1:47:20and so, here is the fundamental narrative, the characters let's say we are going to say that people are prone to characterize the world, we are social primates1:47:32we are social cognitive primates and we tend to see the world through the lens of a social creature and so, and partly because we're concerned with acting in the world and the world the world is mostly other people1:47:43then we conceptualize the ground of that structure for action in characterological terms1:47:53so the, the must fundamental reality is, chaos and chaos is what you don't understand at all1:48:03You can't even conceptualize it you come into contact with it in bits and pieces when the towers fell, when the Twin Towers fell1:48:14chaos reigned for a few days, everyone was shell shocked and that was chaos, and, chaos is what you experience when1:48:23your story falls apart and that is a descent into the underworld that's chaos, and basically you live in order and chaos, and order is where, when you do1:48:34what you think you should do, what you want to have have happen, happens that is order, that is explored territory and chaos is when, you do what you are supposed to do1:48:44to get what you want and it doesn't happen and then that place that you are magically in when that happens, that's chaos and it has different depths, you could say1:48:53it reaches all the way to Hell and that usually happens when your life falls apart very badly and you are down in that chaos and you realize that it was your fault1:49:03and that you did something wrong and that you knew it, and you ignored it That's the worst form of chaos1:49:13So there is chaos itself and then then the next thing is fairly straightforward, you could think there is the individual1:49:22the individual exists in culture and culture is embedded in nature pretty straightforward, nature is Mother Nature for reasons we will get into and culture is "Father Culture"1:49:32and I think that's because the fundamental dominance hierarchies in human primates are masculine and that Nature is assimilated to the feminine because it's1:49:43well for two reasons, first of all females do the sexual selection among human beings so that they are actually are nature from the Darwinian perspective and second, nature is the productive biological force1:49:56and so we have always conceptualized males and females and we used that conceptualization to sort out the world at large1:50:06it's a metaphor but it's not just a metaphor, it's reasonable to consider culture as a judgmental father, it's really reasonable because1:50:16you know you have a group of people around you, some friends some people that watch you work, some judges and that stretches across a very long expanse of time , and1:50:28those people as an aggregate, make an entity that is judging your reputation constantly and it is perfectly reasonable to personify that because1:50:39it's like a metaperson that is watching you and so, it's a useful metaphor, there is a metaperson that is watching you Well, yeah there is, obviously1:50:50so, now, you could say well that's not real, it's like, it's not real the way a scientific truth is real, it is a different kind of real1:51:05Well nature has two elements, destructive and creative, obviously there is the beauty of nature in it's bountiful element and there is1:51:15Anopheles mosquitoes and elephantiasis and cancer and starvation and all the terrible elements of nature1:51:24and then there is culture, and culture is tyrannical, because you have to shape yourself, involuntarily even to get along with other people, you sacrifice1:51:33a lot of yourself, and develop yourself, but you sacrifice a lot of yourself in that endeavor, right we have to kind of average ourselves out in order to1:51:42to live together, and some societies are more tyrannical that others but there is always a tyrannical element, you see that in university, you know, you guys know,1:51:51that to some degree, this is such a big place it's easy to feel like a number here, and that, whether you are here or not doesn't matter the institution doesn't care, well that's the tyrannical element of it1:52:02now it does care, because here you are and you are getting educated and all that and so maybe that's positive but it's got both, these characters always have two sides1:52:13you know, there's negative side and the positive side of nature and there is the negative side and the positive side of culture and then there is the individual1:52:22so the individual is like standing on an island in the midst of an ocean that's a good imagistic conceptualization of your position1:52:32there is solid ground, it has a limited expanse and outside of that is everything you don't understand and you as an individual have a positive and a negative element as well1:52:43and that's the hero and the villain and of course what good is a story without a hero and a villain and the villain is the person who isn't acting like a person should act and the hero is acting like a person should act1:52:54and so when you go to movies and you read books and there are heroes and there is villians and to some degree what you are doing is fleshing out your notion of a villain1:53:03you know you read about 30 villains and you think well there is something villainous about the villains that is the central element of villainy whatever that is1:53:12and, you can imagine you construct out a metavillain and a metahero, and those are the characters in1:53:21religious stories, generally speaking you know, and in the Marvel movies there is Odin, and Odin has two sons1:53:32right, Thor and Loki, and Thor is like1:53:41Thor is the world redeeming hero and Loki is the trickster who wants to bring everything down, and you have to recognize that in yourself1:53:50or it's useful to because otherwise you underestimate [student entering] Is this positive psyche? No, it's Maps of Meaning1:54:03Positive psyche...[laughter] It's definitely not that...[laughter]1:54:17Why might you be villainous? Well first of all because you can be, that 's a big deal1:54:26you can be, it's actually an offshoot of empathy this is something that took me decades to figure out I figured it out when I was studying the book of Genesis1:54:36because in the book of Genesis people become self conscious, and they immediately have the knowledge of good and evil I just couldn't figure that out, it's like what the hell is the relationship between that1:54:47and then really, I tell you I thought about that for like 30 years trying to puzzle that out, and then I realized what it was If you are self conscious1:54:58you can conceptualize yourself as a being you know that you are and you know what you're like and you know what hurts you and what doesn't1:55:09and soon as you know what hurts you you know what hurts her and so that is the knowledge of good and evil that comes along with being self conscious1:55:19this is something that distinguishes human beings from every other animal you know, a lion will eat you but it doesn't really want to tear you apart slowly1:55:28just for the fun of it well, it eats you, it just wants to eat you you know, you could call that evil, it sucks that for sure but, animals are beyond good and evil in that sense, but human beings, man1:55:40we can aim our malevolence and we are really good at it because we can imagine, God this would hurt, and if it hurts me, man, it's really going to hurt you so, and you need to know that you are like that, because you are like that1:55:52and it you don't know that you are like that, or if you don't think that you are like that you are more even like that than you think because the people who are most like that are people who don't think that they are like that at all1:56:03and you have to contend with that and that's why in many systems of thinking the world is conceptualized as a battle between good and evil1:56:12and it's an appropriate conceptualization it's a meta-conceptualization, and the culture is the wise king and the tyrant and that's always the case1:56:23and you are always stuck with that because as an individual, with your negative and your positive side your negative side is the resentful side that is1:56:32irritated and the limited conditions of being and the suffering that entails and it's arbitrary and unfair nature and no wonder, like, you got, that side has a case to make1:56:43and it is not trivial In the Brothers Karamazov, that argument is laid out beautifully, there is a character, Alyosha, who is a monastery novitiate and not really a sparkling intellect1:56:56but a very good person, and he has a brother Ivan, and Ivan is, a vicious genius1:57:07and Ivan just takes Alyosha apart, and partly does that by telling a story about Dostoyevsky took this from a news story1:57:16the news story was that this mother and father had taken their young daughter and locked her in the outhouse overnight when it was 30 below, and she stayed out there crying and screaming and froze to death1:57:28and Ivan basically said to Alyosha, you know, A world in which that could happen should not be1:57:40It's a good argument, you know and you can multiply that by millions of examples so the part of us that is opposed to being and resentful1:57:52it's got a point man, the problem as far as I can tell is that, if you act that out then it makes what you are objecting to worse1:58:03now you might be happy about that and you might think, well people couldn't be consciously pursuing that, but, yes they can I would recommend a book called Panzram if you are interested in that sort of thing1:58:16it's a book written by a man who raped 1200 men and killed dozens and burned things down to the ground every chance that he got and tried to start a war between England and the U.S. and1:58:27who was aimed at nothing but mayhem and he wrote an autobiography at the request of a doctor who had befriended him, and he tells you exactly what he did and why1:58:45this story hero and adversary order and tyranny, destruction and creation1:58:57that's the basic landscape, and outside of that chaos, and so let's take a break Here is another way of looking at this, idea1:59:12the individual is the person who pays attention and explores, and masters, or who looks away1:59:24and the the person who inhabits an explored territory and this is unexplored territory1:59:33and so, wherever you go there is you and the half, the two halves of you that you have to contend with, and1:59:43wherever you are with people there is the society with it's tyrannical and beneficial nature and the society in some sense is that match between what you are doing and what's happening1:59:55it's really important to get that right, and unexplored territory, that where ever and whenever, what you are doing stops working2:00:04and so, it's not exactly a geographical idea, you know, because when you think of explored territory you think of geographic landscape, like the domain of an animal, like your house2:00:15and, you know, that's that's definitely and element of it , but you know,2:00:24if you're in your house and a snake comes into your living room and you are in there it's like, well that's an important difference between your house 1 second ago and your house now2:00:34and so your house can turn into unexplored territory at the drop of a hat, and that is because we live in space and time and so the unexplored territory is conceptual, it's a conceptual2:00:46territory and it's just wherever you are when things aren't working for you the way they are supposed to be2:00:55and so, and these are permanent parts of the human experience which is why I think that they are fundamental characters in our narratives there is always you,2:01:05there is some subject of the story and that subject is an ambivalent person with many different potentials and you are always somewhere, with other people, because that's our territory, right, I mean2:01:16we are social beyond comprehension and you know even our primate ancestors, most of their territory was other primates, and their brains, and our brains, are specialized to view the world as an aggregation of personalities2:01:30It's really important to us, and so we tend to view the whole world that way and, then, unexplored territory, well2:01:40that's where, you don't know what to do and, but, you know you do know what to do when you don't know what to do peculiarly enough, it's rather non-specific, it's this generalized stress response and so what happens is2:01:54you freeze, roughly speaking, if the threat is enough, then you produce a lot of cortisol and a lot of adrenaline so that you're bloody well ready to move quick in whatever direction you have to2:02:06and then, maybe you pay more attention and that's what you do when you don't know what to do, and the problem with that is that you can stay in that state forever, man that is kind of what post traumatic stress disorder is, it's like2:02:17you are just like that all the time and the problem with that is, it's very uncomfortable, I mean You stay like that for any length of time you are going to get depressed2:02:26you are going to develop an anxiety disorder, you are going to get old because, you're burning up resources like mad, you know, your system is shunting everything to maintain that2:02:36state of emergency preparation and it's exhausting it's not where you want to be so, that's partly why people are so prone to2:02:47defend their territories, their familiar territories because if their familiar territory is invaded or disrupted then they default back to this state of emergency preparation and that's like2:02:59that can unglue you, if it's profound enough you know and you guys know this already, I mean I think that people experience this most particularly2:03:08when they are betrayed by someone they have an intimate relationship with you know, when they are lied to there are other ways the collapse of a dream or a vision that you've been pursuing or2:03:18an illness or the death in a family, there are lots of other ways, but betrayal is a really good one because, if you are with someone for a long time, you trust them2:03:27you have a representation of your past, you have a representation of you in the relationship you have a representation of them, you have a representation of relationships2:03:36you have a representation of the future you get betrayed, it's like, poof, even the past isn't what you thought it was you know, and what about you2:03:46How clueless are you ? and maybe not at all, or ultimately gullible, you don't know, is it your fault? are you so clueless that just can't protect yourself or2:03:56was the person malevolent in some subtle way that you failed to detect everything is up in the air not good, and this idea that human beings2:04:06travel to the underworld and come back it's a really useful thing to understand because we do that all the time whenever we fail, it's like, whoop, down into the underworld for a while2:04:17where everything is in chaos and then maybe we sort ourselves out and, bang, we are back up and so, one way of conceptualizing yourself is not2:04:27as order, and not as chaos but as the thing that traverses between the two domains and that I would say is mythological hero2:04:43so, I am going to start talking to you about Pinocchio a little bit weirdly enough I hope you enjoy this2:04:53and the reason I want to do it is because I want to put some I want to bring what I told you abstractly2:05:02down to earth and then you can start thinking, well, do the conceptions that I have introduced to you, are they good for anything do they help?2:05:11that's the, order descent into chaos, reestablishment of order that's paradise lost, profane history2:05:22paradise regained, it's the classic comedy and that's the story of life and so, the question is how do you manage it?2:05:32and so, that's a question you really want to know the answer to so you will go you will pay money, weirdly you'll line up and pay money2:05:41to see a story about that, even if you don't even know what that stories about and the reason for that actually part of you does know what the story is about you know, you have, your cognition has multiple layers2:05:53you understand things that you don't know that you understand in ways that you don't understand, and you can tell that because, you know2:06:02we talked about Pinocchio a little bit, how absurd it is and that it doesn't matter, well [Student] I have a question, so we have been talking, chaos is when people don't do what they2:06:16expect you to do in a negative sense, something bad happens to you. what if the reaction is extremely positive, like something that...like winning the lottery2:06:25Do you also go into the stress response, or? So it would be the same thing... [JBP] No it's not quite the same thing, it's a good question and we will address that2:06:35we will address that I mean, winning the lottery is generally not a good idea for people you know, because it's just too much it's too much for them2:06:44flips their lives upside down so, and they tend, at best, to return to their original baseline level of emotion2:06:53but yes, something remarkably good I mean, it's a lot better that something remarkably bad, obviously, but it still can have that destabilizing effect2:07:04so, depends on what elements of your life it disrupts like, in some sense you have a map that you are operating2:07:13within, in the world and that map is predicated on assumptions of different sorts some shallow, some profound when the profound assumptions are devastated2:07:25huge chunks of the map are invalidated and that can happen sometimes when dramatically positive things happen as well so, but the fundamental rule is, the more of your2:07:38axiomatic presuppositions are disrupted, the harder it is on you you know, like maybe you quit your job because you won the lottery2:07:47Hey, I am off to the beach, I am going to drink margaritas it's like that will work for about four days you know, you do that for three months you are a beach alcoholic, it's like that's a real improvement2:07:57you know, so it's not that easy, often too if you take people out of their routine you know, they just flounder2:08:06their circadian rhythms go, they don't eat properly, they don't know what the hell to do you know, so this is often why people have such a hard time when they retire2:08:16I am going to retire and relax, it's like if I relaxed for two weeks I would die you know, I need something to do2:08:27I need to be engaged in something so, OK Pinocchio, Disney movie, an early one, a masterpiece2:08:36so I am going to walk you through it and I am going to tell you what I think it means, and and you can tell me if you think that that is useful,2:08:45and I am only going to do that for about ten minutes today because I do want to cover some of the details of the class and then next class we will continue with this, so2:08:56So the movie opens, with the opening credits which are carved wooden signs, which is like a hint you know because Geppetto is a carver, and it starts with this song2:09:08which was actually quite a popular song and it's a bit of a what would you call it I don't think that it's, the poetry is particularly profound2:09:18but it was a song that people liked and people still listen to, and It's sets the tone for the movie, which is what music does2:09:27one of the things that is really interesting about movies, that's really mysterious is that you know, if you go to a movie, there is almost always a soundtrack2:09:36right, if you go to movie and there isn't a soundtrack it kind of feels empty, it feels like there is something missing, and you know, it's as if the music You know, when you go to a movie there is lots of things you can't2:09:46see, the characters are only partial, and you don't know anything about there background, so it's like a low resolution thing and what seems to happen with the music is that it's provides the emotional background2:09:56the complex context, let's say, it's like a substitute for the context and it guides you in your, in your perceptions of the movie2:10:06it gives you hints about what is going to happen and, and, the funny thing about that is that we just don't have any problem with that you know, it's like , yeah of course a movie has a soundtrack2:10:17and of course when there is a dramatic scene the music gets dramatic and but that doesn't happen in real life so you would wonder why we would accept it in a movie, and I think it is partly because we are willing to accept the amplification of reality2:10:31that constitutes a movie and in fact we find that compelling and music is one of the things that does that amplification the dramatization, and that's, that's acceptable to us2:10:42This song I find quite interesting so I am going to take it apart quite a bit, in some sense I feel foolish doing it because it's, you know, it's a childish2:10:55it's a childish song in some ways but, but that's OK, "When you wish upon a star, it makes no difference who you are"2:11:06well, OK, there's some mysteries there people wish upon stars, that's like a little ritual, right2:11:17Why, do they do that? well, and what is exactly is a star2:11:27that's another question because there are stars that shine in the heavens and there are people who are stars2:11:36and so, Why are people stars? Well they are usually famous people, right, they are people that who attract a lot of attention2:11:46and maybe they are people who, who have a lot of talent , that's a possibility Maybe they are models, I don't mean clothing models although sometimes they are, they are models for emulation2:11:57that's what being a star means, that's why People magazine is full of stars it's like they're heroes brought to earth and of course you know nothing about them, all you know is their public persona2:12:09and of course they are usually very attractive and so that allows you to project upon them all the things that go along with ideal humanity2:12:19and so they are stars and, but still, why stars? well stars beckon in the darkness, right? and they are other worldly that's the thing that's cool, they are not of this earth2:12:31and I mean that technically, because obviously they are not of this earth, but I also mean it I mean it, phenomenologically, I mean it as an element of human experiance, so2:12:43most of you are urban and so, you have not had the experience of perhaps of the full night sky, and you know that is really to bad because2:12:54the full night sky is one of those experiences that actually induces awe naturally, you know, and no wonder you look up there and there are just stars everywhere2:13:04right, you are looking at the edge of the galaxy, that's actually that's the Milky Way, right, it's the edge of the galaxy, it's like wrah! Wow! There is the edge of the galaxy2:13:13and there is just so many of them, and it's such an expanse, you are looking into infinity you are looking into the unknown, you are looking beyond yourself2:13:22that's for sure and, you know, that produces a sense of awe in people, like looking at the Grand Canyon or something like that and, it's, you are looking at something that transcends yourself, but that feeling of awe, that seems to be something that's2:13:35that's a natural part of our response and, you know, you might feel awe when you meet someone that you regard as particularly admirable as well2:13:44because you feel that there is something transcendent about them Here is an interesting thing to think about There are people you admire2:13:53and there are people you don't admire and that's a clue right, that's a clue as to your value system, and it might be not something that you can really put your finger on, it's like, you find this person captivating, you find this person2:14:05admirable and it's as if there is something inside of you that is looking for what is admirable you know, assuming that you are and that person who is admirable has a faculty, some faculty2:14:16that you would like to have for yourself and so they are a model for emulation and that's part of how people develop, you know, like little kids often develop little hero2:14:26crushes on older kids you know, not that much older but sort of the person that is just within their grasp and then they follow them around and imitate them and2:14:35So they are imitating what they find admirable, well The fact that you find something admirable is a hint as to the structure of your unconscious value system2:14:45and so, you could think even as an exercise, you could think what qualities of a human being do I find admirable, you have to ask yourself that, in a sense,2:14:55you can't really think about it, there is a difference between asking yourself a question and thinking about it You know, because, it's more like when you are asking yourself a question, it's contemplative2:15:06Well, what do I find admirable? It's a question, you don't know, and if you are fortunate, and this happens quite regularly, an answer will float up from wherever the hell answers float up2:15:17and, Oh yeah that's one, and you can write that down you get some idea of what your ideal is, you know and, and you have one likely and what your counter-ideal is2:15:31Star Well, to wish upon a star is to raise your eyes above the horizon and to focus on something transcendent that is beyond you to focus on the absolute we could say, to focus on the light that shines in the darkness2:15:44Now, a star is People wear diamonds because they are like stars or they are like the sun and they are pure and perfect and they glitter, so there is something about the light too2:15:54there is something about a source of light It's a source of illumination and enlightenment and the light that shines in the darkness is a deep metaphor, right, it's2:16:04it's what you want, you want a light to shine in the darkness and so, the star has all of that, and so, people wish upon a star because they have some intuition that aiming above the mundane2:16:17has the potential to transform themselves, they make a wish, well If you are going to make a wish you should aim at something high!2:16:28and even just aiming at that is more likely to make the wish come true, and this is not metaphor, you know I have this program which you guys are going to do2:16:39called the future authoring program it's one of two assignments, one is that you write an autobiography that's the past authoring, the other is that you write a plan for the future, that's the future authoring, I would recommend that you get started2:16:50on those right now, like, not right now, but really soon because, they are harder than you think and some of you are going to write like 15,000 words2:17:00you are going to get sucked right in, this happens all the time, you are going to get sucked right into it and so, you write an autobiography because you need to know where you are2:17:10and who you are, right now, because how the hell are you going to plot a pathway to the future unless you know where you are and then you need to write about the future because you aren't going to hit something unless you aim at it2:17:22that's for sure and lot's of times people won't aim at what they want because they are afraid the reason they are afraid is because if you specify what you want you have specified your conditions of failure2:17:33you know when you fail and it is better to just keep foggy, it's like, well I don't know if I am succeeding or failing but you know, I can't really tell. Well great! Except you can't hit anything you don't aim at2:17:45and so, the future authoring program is like a it's an attempt to have your articulate you character and so is the past authoring program. Who are you?2:17:56and, you know, the past authoring program asks you to break your life into epochs and then to write about the emotional, you know the things that you regard as important2:18:08Important events that have shaped who you are, and you know, you may find that some of those, some of that writing makes you emotional, and I would say if you have a memory that is more than 18 months old, roughly speaking2:18:19and when you bring it to mind, it has an emotional impact especially a negative emotional impact it's like part of you soul is stuck back there2:18:28and, I know that that's a metaphorical way of thinking about, but what I mean is that The reason that you still experience the emotion is because you have not solved the problem that that situation2:18:42faced you with, and it might be a real problem like maybe you got tangled up with someone who was really bad, and that's rough, man, because you have got to come up with a theory of malevolence to deal with2:18:51something like that, and that's no joke but, if its still producing emotion, that means you have not solved the problem, and your brain is still tagging it as threat, it's a part of you territory that you did not master2:19:04threat, threat, threat, threat and until you take it apart, and articulation really helps that, writing really helps that then, you are not going to free yourself from it's grip2:19:15and that, what might not be that pleasant, I mean this one of those situations where doing it tends to produce a decrement in peoples mood2:19:24in the short term, but quite radical improvements 3 to 6 months down the road you know it is often the case that you unfortunately have to do something you don't want to do in order to progress2:19:35it's very, very common so, and the future authoring program asks you about different dimensions of your life Like, because you're, you can think of yourself as a personality inside your head but,2:19:48you are nested in systems that transcend you, and they are just as real as whatever is in your head, its like Well, what do you need for life?2:19:58Well, that's pretty easy actually, some friends that's a good thing, intimate relationship, that's a good thing, a family, you know, either the one you are going to produce or the one that you come from where people2:20:12to some degree, love and care for one another, that's a good thing to work on, You need, you need some plan for your career, you have got to fit in somewhere that people regard as2:20:23important and that they will trade with you so that you can live you need something worthwhile to do with the time that you are not at work and you need to, pay attention to you mental and physical health2:20:34and you need to regulate your use of substances which is a strange one, but alcohol does lots of people in, so it's worth thinking about so that's why we put it in there2:20:43So then it's like, what the hell do you want? What do want from your friends? What do you want from your family? What do want from your career? If you could have what you wanted, and that's what the program asks you2:20:533 to 5 years down the road, you get to have what you want Now I am assuming that you are going to approach this like reasonable adults and not like 13 year old dreamers, I think, I want the most expensive yacht in the world2:21:09It's like, fine but, you know that isn't really what, it's supposed to be more concentrating on your character and so, then it asks you to write for 15 minutes without thinking too much about grammer2:21:24or sentence structure or any of that about what your life could be like in 3 to 5 years down the road if, if you were treating yourself like someone you cared for2:21:34and, you were helping them figure out what they wanted and then, it asks you to do the same thing in reverse which is to think about2:21:43the ways that you're radically insufficient and your faults and everyone knows this I think, you know, maybe not2:21:52but everyone has a sense of if they were going to degenerate how they would do it you know, some people would be an alcoholic, some people would be a street person, and it's like2:22:01there is some doom thing out there that is got your name on it if you are particularly incautious and you know, don't2:22:10and let things fall apart, so, want you to write about that what do you not want to have happen in 3 to 5 years and there is psychological for this, one is2:22:21If you have something to aim for, that's a source of positive emotion because your positive emotion is mostly generated by evidence that you are moving towards something that you value2:22:31it's not generated so much by accomplishing something because when you accomplish something, you are just left with the problem of whatever you are going to do next so you graduate from university, it's like2:22:40you know, hurray! one day you're at the peak of undergraduate university career, the next day you are unemployed and looking for a bad job at Starbucks2:22:51so, you know well you see what I mean, you know, it's that you know, one problem that you solve is replaced by another problem and so the idea that you are gong to be happy when you solve all your problems, is like2:23:02Hahaha! Good luck with that theory but, but you know if you are aiming at something worthwhile, and you really believe that it is worthwhile and you have thought it through, you know, so that you are not weak, you are not weak, you've got your damn arguments mustered2:23:16then when you make progress, even a little bit, you think, hey, that's alright, and you get a little kick a little dopamine kick and that's what you want, because that's where your positive emotion comes from2:23:26you can use cocaine if you want, but ha, but that tends to have relatively detrimental medium to long term consequences2:23:35but it activates the same system, so you have to aiming at something and you should be aiming at something that's realistic that you want that you could get, you know, like not easily2:23:46because if it's easy, in some sense you have already got it it's got to push you , and that's part of the pleasure actually because there is two things that want to do when you are pursuing something that is important2:23:57and one of them is to get the thing that is important but the other is make yourself better at pursuing things right, so so you can get both of those at the same time2:24:07you're aiming at something and increasing your competence at the same time it's like, that's a good deal, that's a good deal and there is a lot of intrinsic meaning to be felt in that, and second half of the program2:24:19you, you write out a plan for how you are going to do it and how you are going to keep yourself on track and you are going to write about why it would be good for you if you did this2:24:28and why it would be good for your family and what possible benefits it would have to the comminuty and. you know, because you want to nail this thing down and then you want to figure out what kind of obstacles are going to come up and how you might overcome them2:24:39and how you might keep yourself on track and all of that We know, because we have actually done a lot research on this particular program that2:24:48if university students do this, and this is more true if they're not to well oriented to begin with if university students do this they are2:24:58about 25% less likely to drop out, which is a lot and about, their grade point average increases about 20% so, Hurray for that, because you never know when you develop an intervention if it's going to work2:25:11there is also evidence, but not from my lab that doing such things improves your physical health and I think the reason for that is, is that when you go over your autobiography2:25:21and you scour out those negative places that you are sort of dragging along with you it lowers your overall stress load because your brain is kind of, I think it is calculating how dangerous the world is2:25:33by attending to the ratio of successes to failures that you have had in your life, something like that and so you know if there are holes in your map that you could still fall through2:25:44then your brain regards the territory still as a bit on the dangerous side and then, you are more prepared for emergency action and that hard on you, so2:25:53you want to go back there and fix up those experiences to the degree that you can Now, those are going to be peer rated2:26:04now that's complicated but here's how you do it write the thing so that you have written it for you2:26:13and then take everything out that you are not comfortable sharing with other people and so, there is a couple of reasons that I do it that was one is just, there is just no other way to do it2:26:23because if I want to do this with you the grading load is too high to do it so, I thought well it is still worth doing, and because this is a class about narrative and about self narrative it's the right thing to do2:26:36and most of you are graduating soon, and it's like it's helpful, I think that you will find it very helpful, that is what students report and so,2:26:45You'll each read Three people will read each of your offerings and give you a grade and then you get the average of the best two grades2:26:58and they are supposed to provide you with constructive feedback constructive feedback is sort of mostly what did you do right and maybe some hints about where you could flesh it out, and all that2:27:09but, so that's that and you need to write an essay this is all detailed on the website and, that's the website, if you go to jordonbpeterson.com, on the left there is classes2:27:23if you click classes you get a bunch of tabs and one of the tabs is Psych 434, and that's obviously this class there is some extra readings on there2:27:32and a list of how we are going to go through the course the dates aren't right, I have got to update it and I haven't finished that yet, but the rest of it is pretty much the way it is,2:27:42This writing program is an online program and it guides you through the process of doing it but really I would really recommend that you start2:27:51like this week because it also works better if you do it over time, and it seems like in bursts of writing, you know and to sleep between episodes because that's when your brain consolidates its new information2:28:05and, I would say do it meditatively you know, ask yourself ask yourself, it's a different way of it's really funny when you ask yourself questions because part of you will answer2:28:18and you don't know what the answer will be but, and answer comes almost always and you know, like you think well what happened to me when I was six, around six that was important2:28:29and, through some mysterious process perhaps a memory will come to mind so, there is a test2:28:38so there is these two assignments plus the essay the essay can be on anything you want2:28:47that's related to the class you have to make the case that's related to the class so, it's an opportunity to2:28:56write about something that you want to write about and there is a final exam and the final exam2:29:06if you read the book and come to the classes you will not have any problem with the final exam because it's not it's not tricky, it's just a survey of what we have gone through2:29:16and so, I did that, I didn't have that to begin with but you know, you need a carrot and a stick, because you guys are busy and you know you are going to triage2:29:25and do the things that are crucial and perhaps not the things that aren't and no wonder so I had to make this crucial because otherwise you won't read it and that's partly because it is hard2:29:36and so, hopefully the course lectures will help guide you through it, and and that's about that2:29:47So I am going to tell you about a bunch of stories, and I am going to try and explain what they mean and what I hope will happen is that2:29:56the world of narrative will open up for you, and that and like I found that incredibly useful, it's incredibly useful2:30:05to understand these things, it situates you better and it also helps you, see what people tell me about this course frequently is that2:30:18it's something like that they already knew what I am telling them but they didn't know that they knew it2:30:27so it makes sense, it clicks, it clicks and you know to me what that means is that you have the information represented in you, in action2:30:38in your procedures, in your habits and in your perceptual structures, it's implicit, it's the implicit you and then,2:30:48I can articulate in part what that implicit you is and it fits, click, oh yeah that's what I am like, that's what people are like, that's what people are like and so,2:30:57well, if any of that happened today during this lecture to you, well, then that's a good sign that, you might benefit from the course2:31:06if it didn't, well you could try one more lecture and see what happens but, you know this sort of what the course is like, and2:31:17if that's what you want then, this is where you get it Good to see all of you and I guess we are done, right?0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 02: Marionettes & Individuals (Part 1)
0:00:000:00:12So I am going to briefly review some of what I told you last time, and then I am going to walk through as I mentioned, I am going to walk through0:00:22the Disney movie film Pinnochio and which I presume most of you have seen How many of you have seen it? Yeah, OK, that's, that's...so as I think I mentioned that is something in of itself right?0:00:34I mean the fact that you have all seen it means that it's an production of cultural significance, and because it's such a strange artifact That's one way of looking at it, it might be worth0:00:45trying to take it apart to understand why it is, for example, that you even understand it. and so, I offered you the proposition last week that we0:00:55view the world as essentially through a narrative lens and I believe that we view the world through a narrative lens because the fundamental problem that we have to solve0:01:05as living creatures is how we should act in the world. and, that means, how we should act to maintain ourselves but also how we need to act in relationship to other people0:01:17and in relationship to the broader world in order to maintain our self across time. so that's a complicated problem, right, it's not just how you survive0:01:27it's how you survive now and next week, and next month, and next year and 50 years from now and maybe your, your descendants as well0:01:37if the culture is going to stabilize and then not only you across all those time frames but you and everyone else across all those time frames It's a viciously difficult problem0:01:47and so, I would say that we have evolved mechanisms to solve that I think that is self-evident in some sense because for example one of the mechanisms that0:01:58animals have evolved to deal with the problem of social being even if they are not particularly social animals is the dominance hierarchy, right, or you could call it hierarchy of authority or power, because0:02:10I think that considering human structures, social structures as mere power structures is a terrible mistake, it's a terrible oversimplification0:02:23because power is no means the only, like force is what I mean force is not a stable way of solving the problem of how to live together across time0:02:34the question is what is the stable way of solving how to live together across time, and the really is the question and it's part of the question that I am trying to answer0:02:45partly because it's a perennial problem, right, we face the problem of how to organize ourselves in small social units without undue conflict and then we face the larger problem0:02:56of how to organize ourselves into large social units without undue conflict and that conflict can be absolutely devastating, and, and frequently is0:03:07so, so then I would also say that the first way of solving this problem isn't conscious you see, not at all0:03:16and, you know you may know, and you may not know that there are there are different forms of memory right really technically different forms of memory, so for example0:03:27there is short term working memory which is the memory that you use to hold things like telephone numbers in your active imagination0:03:36it decays very rapidly, it's only 4 to 7 bits which is why well it's why phone numbers are, were at least 7 digits long, you know, you can kind of0:03:48manage that as a loop that, and then there is episodic memory, and that has two elements one is semantic and the other is episodic0:04:01it's, what's the name of that mmm, someone said something... [Student] Procedural?0:04:10Yes well there is procedural memory and then there is another the kind of memory that you use to represent your experiences to yourself, so let's say it is image laden and the other one is semantic0:04:22and semantic is your memory for facts and those are quite different, so for example procedural memory that is how you ride a bike, that is how you play the piano0:04:32that's how you play jazz music if you are in a combo it's, it's the memory, it's a funny kind of memory because it is built right into you, you know, I mean0:04:42so is, so is, the kind of memory that you use to represent your own life, but it is much more malleable is some sense so, what that means is that in your procedures0:04:53there is information that you don't know about, it's patterned information that you don't know about part of that is how to act you know, like, when you walk into a social gathering0:05:04you don't really think through how you are going to act you know how to act, and if someone asks you exactly what it is that you are doing and why, you could formulate a story about it0:05:15but the probability that, that it's the existence of that story that enabled you to act that way is zero, because you have to react way faster than that, and so, you know have social knowledge0:05:26built into your nervous system because you have practiced being a social being for a very long period of time and of course, then that social being has been shaped forever really, it's the right way of thinking about it0:05:40Now, we know that animals organized themselves into hierarchies and we will say of dominance, because it is more true the farther back you go in time0:05:49at least since the time of the crustaceans, you know , when we split from out common ancestor 300 million years ago, and so and it's true for social animals and non-social animals so0:05:59even animals that don't live together in groups have to organize themselves into a hierarchy in the space they inhabit, songbirds are a good example and they have dominance disputes all the time0:06:11partly that's, you can hear them having their little dominance disputes in the spring when they are singing because basically what they are singing is I am pretty damn healthy and I am ready to go and if you are another bird like me you had better steer clear of this tree!0:06:24and, the dominance songbirds you know, they don't live together, crows are social but don't most songbirds aren't the dominance songbirds get the best nest0:06:35and the best nest is the one that doesn't get rained on it's not to windy and it is close to food sources, and you know, so they have the healthiest chicks and they attract the best mates, and0:06:47like it is really important where you are positioned in the hierarchy even if you are not like a flock or a herd creature, now, we are more like herd creatures so it's even more0:06:56it's even more relevant to us , but there is just no escaping a hierarchical arrangement in social being0:07:05that is social being and, and, and it is evolutionary ancient beyond conception so 300 million years ago there weren't trees, you know I mean, so the dominance hierarchy is older than trees0:07:19so that is really something to think about and then, you know, when you are thinking about the reality that shaped us say, from an evolutionary perspective but also from a cultural perspective0:07:30what you have to understand is that that the things that have shaped us most are the things that have been around the longest, and so you could say those are the most real things0:07:39and you can't even see some of them, it's not like you can come in here and, well it's not exactly true you can't come in here and see the multiple dominance hierarchies that are at work0:07:48You can in a way, because, the chairs are set up to face this way and I am facing that way and that gives you some clues about the social order here and you take the cues instantly, right0:07:59you come down, you sit in the chairs, you organize yourselves according to mutual expectation and that's part of your procedural knowledge about how to behave as a social creature0:08:10now, that knowledge is really really deep and a lot of it is coded in your behaviour now, and in other peoples behaviour as well and that's, you know. that's the expectations you have of other people and of yourself, and a lot of those are implicit right,0:08:25so, when we are interacting there's, there is a very large number of things that you just don't get to do and you know that too, and you won't do them, and that way we can act as if we understand each other0:08:37even though we don't, because you are really complicated and I am really complicated and there is lots of situations where we might really be in conflict0:08:46but because we share a map of the culture, the cultural expectations it makes part of our, it's built right into our perception you will act out that set of expectations and so will I0:08:58and if neither of us can do that, even if one of us can't we are going to stay, we are either going immediately devolve into conflict or we are going to avoid each other like the plague0:09:08and that's exactly the right thing to do, and so, one of the really useful things to understand , and this took me a long time to formulate properly, you know,0:09:17you hear the terror management theorists for example and they have this idea that your, your meaning representation, the story you tell about the world regulates your death anxiety, it's something like that0:09:29but that is not right, I mean it is close to right and it is a smart idea it came from Ernest Becker by the way who wrote a book called "The Denial of Death", which is actually quite a good book even though it is wrong0:09:39you know, sometimes a book can be very useful it can be usefully wrong, and Becker's book is usefully wrong because he thought that0:09:49it's the internal representation of your belief system that regulates your anxiety and that anxiety is fundamentally in the final analysis anxiety about death, it's like well, OK, fine, it is a reasonable0:10:03proposition, but that isn't how it works, you see, it isn't my beliefs that right now that are regulating my emotion It is the fact that I'm acting out those beliefs, which include implicit perceptions, I'm acting them out0:10:18and so are you and so, what you're doing and what I expect, more accurately, what you're doing and what I want you to do and the way I want you to react to me, that's working!0:10:29so it's the match between my belief system and the way that everyone else is acting that is regulating my emotions it's not the belief system0:10:38it's mediated by the social culture and you see if you understand this then you understand more particularly why people are willing to fight to the bitter end to protect their culture0:10:49it's not a psychological structure that they are protecting it's a psychological structure and sociological structure, simultaneously0:10:58so the social contract is you have a set of expectations and I have a set of expectations they are actually desires, they are not merely expectations because as0:11:07living creatures we are desirous, we don't just expect and so you desire an outcome and I desire an outcome and we agree to act in accordance with that0:11:17that's the social contract and so people don't like having that disrupted well it isn't because it psychologically destabilizes them, although it does0:11:27it's because it actually destabilizes them right, if all of a sudden we can't occupy the same specified domain of territory it isn't only that we are thrown into psychological disarray, although we will be0:11:41it's that we will start fighting with each other, like, and that can kill you it's no joke, it kills people a lot, like it happens it can happen very easily that a cohesive social group can fragment along some fracture line0:11:55of identity let's say, and all hell breaks loose and you know, that's what the Tutsi's and the Hutu in the, in the, in Rwanda0:12:05and those things can get out of control just so fast it's just unbelievable and so and that wasn't, death anxiety, that was death, that's a whole different thing0:12:15and that's the other thing that terror management people don't exactly get, it's like it isn't just that your culture and cultural beliefs protect you from anxiety0:12:24and say anxiety about death even, it's that they actually protect you from death! as well as protecting you from death anxiety, I mean look0:12:33It's warm in here it's cold outside the fact that the culture is intact means that you are not outside freezing that's a hell of a lot more fundamental in some sense than mere anxiety, although0:12:46I am not trying to underplay the role of anxiety that's a major issue, but there is something that is a lot more fundamental at stake that mere psychology0:12:55so it's the match between your map of the world and other peoples actions that regulates your emotions and, and it regulates it completely, because0:13:06you know if someone in here starting acting seriously deranged like brandished a pistol, let's say all of a sudden you would not be in the same place0:13:17at all not a bit and so what would happen, well chaos would happen and chaos isn't just that you would get anxious, that's not a good enough explanation0:13:28what would happen is a lot more complex than that, what happens in some sense is that your body and it does this, it does this, what would happen is that you would react the same way that a rat reacts to a cat0:13:41it's exactly that, it's exactly that, you would respond as if a terrible predator had emerged in your midst And so, What is that reaction? Well it's not just anxiety0:13:51because, when you encounter a predator anxiety isn't the only thing that is useful, that would just make you freeze, that could be the worst thing you could do0:14:00freeze and well you are a pretty easy target so you have to be prepared for a lot broader range of responses that mere, mere0:14:09mere, petrification like how about a little aggression that might be helpful, you don't know it also might get you killed but, but maybe you could take the guy down and maybe that's a good idea0:14:21you know and, and maybe you have to run, so that's disinhibited as well and maybe you have to think really quickly and reflexively, so that happens, that's actively disinhibited I would say as well, it's like0:14:33your whole being thrown into intense concentration on the moment and you are burning up physiological resources like mad, and so what will happen after something like that0:14:43if you don't develop outright post-traumatic stress disorder, which some of you would is that, you'd, assuming that the situation was brought under control0:14:52you would walk out of here shaking with your heart rate at like 170, and it would take you like well it might take you the rest of your life and maybe you would never recover, but you could be bloody well be sure that it would take you the rest of the day0:15:05that's for sure! and so it's no joke when someone steps outside the confines of the social contract right, and that is kind of, there is a philosopher named Hobbes0:15:16who I suppose in some sense was a centrally conservative philosopher as oppose to Rousseau who is kind of his exact opposite Rousseau believed that people were basically good0:15:26in their natural state, so he believed that nature was basically good and he believed that culture was what corrupted people and so0:15:35Hobbes believed exactly the opposite, he believed that in the state of nature, let's say every person was at every other persons throat0:15:45and the only thing that prevented continual chaos was the imposition of a of a collective agreement that would be the social contract0:15:54that essentially governed how people would interact and that would keep that underlying chaos at bay and you know my contention is is that Hobbes was correct and Rousseau was correct, and0:16:06and I think that if you add Rousseau and Hobbes together you get a total picture of the world and that's really I think the picture of the world that I am trying to relate to you, it's both at once, it's like0:16:18well, you can't just attribute human malevolence and unpredictability to society it's a non starter0:16:27it's like, people built society so all you are doing is pushing the problem back, it's like where did it come from well, the society, the society before0:16:36well then, the one before that, it's like well you got to tangle up the individual in there at some point, right, because people created society and so,0:16:45you can't just blame human irrationality and malevolence on society well and also, it's, it's ungrateful for God's sake, it's like society obviously also makes you peaceful, part of the reason you are peaceful right now, all of you is because0:16:59well, you are not that hungry, you are certainly not starving to death, you would be a very, very different person if you were starving right now you know, or if you were enraged or if you were panicking or if you were terrified0:17:11because your future was radically uncertain, I mean you are not just any of those people right now, you're satiated, and I mean that technically, you're satisfied0:17:22none of your biological systems except perhaps curiousity which is a rather pleasant emotion are activated in the least0:17:31and, you know, because of that you all think that you are in control of yourself but don't be thinking that, that's just not right you mean, if you look at how the brain is structured, for example0:17:41the hypothalamus which is a really important part of the brain, it basically it basically establishes the framework of reference and the actions0:17:50the framework of reference within which and the actions you take in order to fulfill basic biological needs so the hypothalamus makes you thirsty, and the hypothalamus makes you hungry0:18:00and it makes you sexually aroused and it puts you into a state of defensive aggression, and it actually also makes you explore and be curious and all of that's hypothalamic, it is an amazing structure0:18:12and then and it's really small and it's right at the base of the brain and you could imagine it as something that has tremendously powerful0:18:21projections upward throughout the rest of the brain into the emotional systems and the cortical systems and all of that, like tree trunk sized connections, you know, metaphorically speaking and then0:18:31the cortex has these little vine-like tendrils going down to regulate the hypothalamus you know, and when push comes to shove0:18:40man, the hypothalamus, that thing wins! and so, you know you get people now and then who have a hypothalamic dysfunction and one of them produces a condition called0:18:51I can't remember it, it's not dypsomania although it's like that, it doesn't matter it produces uncontrollable thirst and so what will happen is that people that have this hypothalamic problem0:19:03will drown themselves by drinking water, which you can do by the way and so they just cannot get enough water and there is not stopping them, right0:19:14no more that there would be stopping you if you were suffering from raging thirst, it's like it's a happy day when the hypothalamus is not telling you what to do0:19:23and you know you live in such a civilized state that most of the time roughly speaking, you are tranquil and satisfied and0:19:32more or less you can imagine yourself as a peaceful you know, productive, well meaning entity0:19:41but don't be thinking that's you would be if you were put in the right situation because that's just not right at all so, you know lots of times soldiers develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they go out on the battlefield0:19:54they are kind of naive, they are young guys you know and... It is actually is worse if they are not that bright it turns out because having a lower IQ is one of the things that predisposes you to post-traumatic stress disorder, but anyways0:20:06they go out on the battlefield and they see what they are capable of under battlefield conditions, and like you know, we have been fighting wars for a very long time0:20:15millions of years, you know chimps basically have wars with other chimps the troupes right, because the juveniles will patrol the perimeter of their territory and if they find other chimps from other troupes that they outnumber0:20:29they will tear them to pieces like and chimps are really strong, and so, when I say they'll tear them to pieces I mean that literally you know hey tear them to pieces0:20:39and Jane Goodall discovered that originally in the 1970's, she didn't even report it for a while because she was so shocked, you know she kind of assumed like most followers of Rousseau that the human proclivity for warfare was0:20:53that was something that was uniquely human you know, it had something to do with our our unique self-consciousness or our intelligence or something like that0:21:02she had no idea that it was rooted that deeply you know, we split from chimps about 6, 7 million years ago something like that, and so0:21:11we were patrolling territory, we were gang members 7 million years ago, and, you know that's a minimum estimation because of course that ancestor0:21:24shaded back, maybe, 20 million years into entities that were roughly primate like0:21:33and so, territoriality and the proclivity to defend territory is so deeply embedded in us it's like,0:21:43the control center for our whole brain and so, there isn't anything more important to us I would say than maintaining the0:21:52match between what we want to have happen and what other people are doing in response to our actions, like that's that, that's what we want0:22:01and as long match is maintained then our emotional systems, and I would say that anxiety is probably primary in that regard0:22:10our emotional systems remain inhibited they're on they're ready like a nuclear reactor rod are on0:22:21and the rest of the brain dampens them down but it's like, you don't want them to take time to start up, man you want them to be on at a tenth of a seconds notice when it's necessary0:22:32and so, you know that's kind of why, well if you look at a wild animal it's like, its alert you know, it's ready to dart this way or that way, especially a pray animal0:22:41instantaneously and it has reflexes built into it as you do that will respond way before you're conscious So, for example if you happened to be walking down a trail and you detect something snake like in the periphery, you will leap away0:22:57before even know that you leapt and that's because it takes a fair bit of time to actually see a snake by which I mean, form a conscious representation of the snake0:23:08you know, and maybe it takes a 1/4 of a second or something like that or even longer but it doesn't matter, maybe it takes a tenth a twentieth of a second, a tenth of a second but the thing about the damn snake is that it's way faster than that0:23:21it's really fast that thing and it co-evolved with primates by the way and so it can nail you way faster that you can look at it so, you have0:23:31your eyes map snake like objects right onto your reflexes so that the eyes go, the eyes make you jump and then they see after that, yeah well now you can see that's no problem0:23:45so alright alright now what I would say that what we do is that we live in a shared story and the story is a way of looking at the world and it's a way of acting in the world at the same time0:23:58and that story has to operate within narrow parameters and this is something that is extraordinarily important to understand because, and this is something I think that Piaget figured out, Jean Piaget0:24:09figured out, better that anyone else, I think that he really got this right and by the way, one of the things that Piaget was trying to do you never hear about how strange these great thinkers are0:24:19Piaget was a very strange guy and he was a he was a hyper-genius, he was offered the curatorship of a bloody museum when he was 10 years old, you know, because he wrote this little paper0:24:28on mollusks which apparently was very good and so they offered him the curatorship of a museum and his parents wrote back and said, "Well you know,0:24:37no, probably not because he is actually ten." and so that was Piaget, man, the guy was a genius and, you know, he was actually motivated by the desire to reconcile science and religion0:24:48that was actually was his entire motivation for what did, you never hear that but that is the case and so,0:24:57Piaget was very interested in how you produce structures that enable you to regulate yourself because you are kind of like a a colony of strange sub-animals that have to figure out how to get along0:25:08so that you can sort of be one thing you kind of learn that, I would say between the ages of 2 and 4 as you are being socialized, you know how erratic 2 years old's are, I mean they are a blast and0:25:18and it's part because they are erratic, it's like they are unbelievably happy and then they are unbelievably hungry and then they really hot and then they are really upset and crying, you know and then they are really scared, it's like0:25:29and all of that's just untrammeled so it's really fun to be around them, especially when they are happy, because they are just so happy that it's just, you know you don't ever get to be that happy0:25:38and so, it's nice to be around a 2 year old because you can kind of feel that again, you know, and a lot of, one of the horrible things about being a parent is that you spend0:25:49a tremendous amount of your time making your child less happy and the reason for that is that positive emotion is very impulsive0:25:58you know, because everybody says well you should be happy, it's like well, no, when you are happy you are actually quite stupid and so, because happiness makes you impulsive,0:26:07happiness makes, happiness says, "Hey, everything is really good right now, get what you can while the getting is good!" and so, as a, like if you are hyper-optimistic, manic we'll say0:26:18It's like every stock investment looks like a really good stock investment and it's like, you go out and spend all your money because look it, there's those wonderful things everywhere and you could do so great things with then, and then0:26:29you know, you spend all your money and then, you crash and think, oh God, my life is over, you know because I just, I just spent all my money on all this useless stuff and it's all under the grip of impulsive positive emotion0:26:43you know and so. when you're telling your kids to be quiet and settle down it isn't because they're making a lot of noise being in pain0:26:52it's because they are running around like wild baboons having a blast! And disrupting things like mad, you know and so, well kids, have to settle down, you know like,0:27:02"Quit having so much fun!" and it's kind of awful that you do that but but you do and that's because the emotions and motivations have to be brought into0:27:14like a relationship with one another within the person so that, you know one thing I remember with my son who was quite he is quite disagreeable by temperament0:27:23which is actually a good thing as far as I am concerned although it brings its own challenges and so with my daughter when she was misbehaving, she was pretty agreeable0:27:34and uh, you know, if she was misbehaving I could basically just look at her and she would just quit, you know, but my son, it was like0:27:43that was just nothing, you're looking at me, it's like, no that's just not going to go anywhere man so then I would like tell him to stop, and that really wasn't having much of an effect either0:27:52he would just sort of maybe laugh or run away or whatever, he was a tough little rat, and you know, what I would do with him, is that he would be doing something and I would interfere and he would get upset, and you know0:28:04angry, and so then I would get him to sit on the steps and I told him, this was when he was about two I said, look, you are going to sit on the steps, that's time out, you're going to sit of the steps0:28:14until you've got control of yourself, and you can come back and be and play the family game again I basically said, be a civilized human being and they you are welcome again0:28:24and so he would sit on the steps, it was so interesting to watch because he was just enraged, he would sit there like have you every seen a two year old have a temper tantrum? It's really quite the bloody phenomena0:28:35if you ever saw an adult do that, you would like, you would call 911 right away, it's like oh my God! and I have seen adults do that, you know because people, say, with borderline personality disorder will have temper tantrums and it's like0:28:46man, you want to about 30 feet away from that person, that's for sure, it's really, but in kids, it's like well first of all they are only this long, so how much trouble can they really cause0:28:57but it's like, you know they're just completely gone, they are like on the floor, their face is red, they are just furious, like way more furious than you ever get0:29:06if you are even vaguely socialized they are just outraged and they are kicking and hitting the ground and like, it's like a little epileptic fit of anger you know , they are completely controlled by their rage and0:29:18we took care of one kid for a while who he was actually a pushover, that kid, you could get him to behave by you know, kind of shaking your finger at him, but, his mother thought he was really tough0:29:28because he had her fooled, he had her figured out and one of the things he would do is have temper tantrums and during the temper tantrum he would hold his bloody breath until he turned blue!0:29:38it's like try that, like you know as, that's your homework go home and, go home and have a temper tantrum and while you are doing it hold your breath until you actually turn blue0:29:48it's like, you won't be able to do it you don't have the willpower of a two year old that's for sure, that little varmint, man he would just have a fit then he would hold his breath and then he would turn blue, it was like, Wow! that's, that's amazing0:29:59and we would just let him do it, and you know he would turn blue and everybody would be gone and he would come out if it, you know, and it didn't work, so he just quit doing it, I think he did it like twice, and then he figured out, oh well,0:30:12that's a lot of work for very little outcome, and you know it's not like two year old's are stupid, they're they're not stupid, but they are probably smarter you but they are not civilized, by any stretch of the imagination, and so, anyways back to my son0:30:25I would put him on the steps and he'd be like "RRRRRR!", just like enraged! and, and trying to get himself together, you know and I'd wait a few, like I had a strict rule which was0:30:36as soon as you are done you're welcome again so, it's completely under your control, you you can get yourself calmed down, you come and talk to me again0:30:46if you are calm enough so I like you then you are welcome back in the family, no grudge, nothing and so, it's harder that you think, like people think that they like their kids, like don't be thinking that0:30:56they are hard to like, they are little monsters, and they are very very pushy and provocative and so lots of their parents do not like their children and they do terrible things to them their whole life0:31:07so, it's no joke, and uh, it's very common and, you know, that was Freud's observation, fundamental observation, that a lot of psychopathology is rooted in the family and you can be sure of that0:31:17you know and, when you hear about some mother who's done something terrible to her child, which happens reasonably frequently you know perfectly well that she has very terrible capacity to discipline, the child has just provoked her0:31:30and provoked her and provoked her and provoked her and provoked her it just happens to be a day where her new boyfriend left, and she is quite hungover and she got fired, and it's like0:31:39that's the wrong day to provoke her and then she does something that is not good! And you read about it and you think, "Well how could that happen? How could anyone do that?" Well0:31:48that's how they do it and so, kids they are very provocative, just like little chimps chimps will the adolescents will, like throw little pebbles and sticks at the sleeping larger males0:32:01and bug them and that teasing, which it is, that teasing turns into full fledged dominance challenge behaviour once the adolescent males get big enough to do it0:32:10and so when you are being provoked by a child, which they provoke you all the time, they are trying to figure out well just, "Where are you exactly, what happens if I do this? What happens if I do this?" You know and0:32:22how else are they going to figure it out? Anyways, he would sit on the steps and just he is just enraged and trying to control himself and I would watch that and then you know I'd0:32:32come back after about two minutes or whatever and he would still be "RRRRRRR!" and I would say, well, you know, have you got yourself under control are you ready to get of the steps? And he would go "NOOOO! NOT YET!"0:32:43and then, you know, he would get himself under control and then he would come back, and you know, he'd be contrite and then I would like him right away, you know0:32:52you got to watch that, you know because, you don't like being dominated by a two year old, no one does and so if the child hasn't mastered himself and started to act in accordance with the prevailing social norms0:33:05you won't like them, well you think, "Yeah I will because I am a good person.", It's like, no you won't and no you are not a good person so don't be thinking about that at all, it's just not true0:33:14so when he was contrite then he'd come and then, you know, we would just go on like nothing had happened because that is what you want to do, right as soon as you get compliance0:33:25especially if the compliance is in the best interests of the child you want to reward it instantly, right, that's the right thing to do because so then0:33:34and you could just see him gaining control over himself, and so what was really was happening is His, in his mind, in his brain we'll say there was a war between the psyche, the ego that was starting0:33:47to become integrated, you know and starting to become a continuous person, an identity and it is fragile in two year old's and it can be disrupted all the time, and it is, that's why they are so0:33:57hyper-emotional, it's fragile that little ego and it doesn't have a lot of power and so what you want to do is reward it when it wins! You know, when it, he gets control over the underlying motivations you want to say0:34:09Hey, good work, man! Good work, kid! You did it, you know, you got yourself under control, way to be! And the kid is really happy about that because it's actually not that much fun to have a temper tantrum0:34:20It's exhausting, you know, it takes you over Question? [Student] Could you give an example of what you would reward him with? [JBP] Oh, just a pat on the head or, you know, "That's good!" kind words you know or whatever0:34:34[Student] Notice it. [JBP] Yeah, notice it pay attention, that's it, that's it, pay attention and that's a great it's a great thing to know with people, like in your relationships here is the key to a good relationship, it's not the only one but0:34:46Watch your person carefully, carefully, carefully and whenever they do something that you would like them to do more of tell them that that was really good and, mean it, and it's not manipulative, because if it's manipulative it won't work0:35:00It's like you have to say, "Wow! I am so glad you did that!" And you have to be precise Here is what you just did that I though was great! and then "Oh boy, that's so nice that you noticed, I can't believe that noticed" It's like0:35:11you know, you do that twenty times and the person will be like the rat that's just pushing the lever for cocaine, you know so but no, I'm serious, Skinner established this, B.F. Skinner noticed this a long time ago0:35:23Reward is intensely, useful in terms of modifying behaviour, but the problem is, is that it's really hard to notice when things are going right.0:35:32Right, because you are kind of primed to notice when things are going wrong, and so you use threat and punishment more often as agents of shaping the people that you are around because, you know, when everything is going right0:35:47what are you going to say, everything is going right it turns to zero, you just assume it and that's, that's not good that's not good, you want to pay attention and if your person, your children, your wife0:36:00whoever, your mother your sister if you want them to if you want to rectify your relationships with them, and I am not saying to do this in a manipulative way, it won't work0:36:12but if they do something that's promoting harmony and peace and goodwill, it's like attend to it, tell them that you noticed, it's like so useful and you have to get rid of grudges and your resentment to do that0:36:24right, because you don't want to, you are kind of mad at your sister and then you know, she does something good, you think there is no goddamn way I am going to reward her for that so you ignore her when she does something good, it's like0:36:34that's brilliant that is, because then you just punished her for doing what you want and people do that with their kids all the time you know, because they let the kids dominate them, then they get resentful0:36:45then the kid will run up to them to show them something that's kind of spectacular and they'll they are not happy, they'll like, "Oh yeah, that's, I'm working."0:36:54You know, little kids all sad about that and he has just learned something so and it's not perhaps what you want him to learn and so you have to keep your relationship with your children pristine0:37:07and that means that you can't hold a grudge or resent them and that means that you have to help them learn how to behave so that you like them0:37:16and that way, if you like them and you are kind of sensible, and maybe your partner also likes them, so, you know, you have got a consensus going there there is a reasonable possibility that other people will actually like them too0:37:28including other children and then the world open up to them you know, then you'll bring them to peoples houses and the people will actually smile at them0:37:37and give them a pat on the head instead of thinking, "Oh my God that brats coming to visit again I wonder what he will break this time." You know and that's just a horrible thing for your child to experience repetitively0:37:49in situation after situation all they learn is that adults have a false smile but they are really lying all the time God! It's like a bit of hell and there's a lot of children who are trapped in that, it's really awful to see0:38:03I can see kids like that when I walk down the street, you know, it's like they are little doomed things and they're, they are, you know, they are screwed in 15 different ways and there is no way out of it0:38:14It's really awful so, I would not recommend that you do that It's better to notice that you are a bit of a monster or a lot of a monster0:38:23and notice that you are much happier with the people around you when they behave in accordance with reasonable social norms and then you actually feel genuinely connected to them0:38:34you want to work on their behalf so that everything works out but if you think that you are a good person and that you would never do anything that was harmful to your children then you can just forget about that because you will never take it seriously enough to actually learn0:38:47so, alright, so anyways we live inside this story as far as I can tell and you know we kind of put the story together inside us to begin with0:38:57and that happens between 2 and 4 when you are integrating those motivations and emotions into a relatively functional unity right, and that does happen between 2 and 40:39:09if you don't have your kids socialized by the time they are 4, you might as well just forget it and I know that sounds terribly pessimistic and all of that but I know the literature on0:39:18trying to rectify antisocial behaviour in children, and after the age of 4 it's virtually impossible no matter what you do. and the reason for that is that kids who are still acting like two year old's when they are four0:39:30you know, they are twice as old, eh, as a two year old that's a lot of difference, like a four year old is an adult as far as a two year old is concerned0:39:39and so if the four year old is still acting like a two year old, that's really not good! and other four year old's will come up and, you know do a little play invitation, like a dog, and you know, the kid, the two year old four year old has no idea how to react to that and so the more mature kid thinks0:39:55"Oh, well.. how about I play with you?" [motions to another student] and then that kid is isolated from the peers and after four you mostly socialized by your peers0:40:05and so you just fall farther and farther and farther behind you are more and more alienated, you are more bitter and angry and no wonder and it's just not, you can't rectify it0:40:15so, so, so that's useful to know, it's like your job from two to four is to turn your child, help turn your child into a functional unity, and by three they should be0:40:28functional enough as a unity within themselves so that they can concentrate on a voluntary goal for some reasonable length of time0:40:37which is also why it's useful to let them spend some time alone, so that they can learn to amuse themselves because if they can't amuse themselves they are not going to play with other kids0:40:46and then by three they are sorted together enough so if another three year old comes along they can at least play in parallel and may also start, maybe able to start playing0:40:59a cooperative game and so, that's often a fantasy game, you know, pretend and so what the kids will do, sometimes they mediate it verbally0:41:08but sometimes it's more acted out it's a combination of the two they will assign each other roles they will do this with you too, well let's have a tea party well, what does that mean?0:41:18well it means let's sit down and act out the act of sharing food and see if we can get that right that's what the kids saying we will have a little tea party0:41:27you know, it's very important, because human beings share food, like this is a major thing to get right, man. And so, the kid will say well you be the Mom and I will be the Dad and, you know,0:41:37we will make little fort and that will be our house and we will go in there and run our roles and you know, we are acting out we are acting out family and if we are both reasonably civilized as three year old's we can concentrate on that goal0:41:51we can establish that little fictional world we can negotiate a mutual goal and then we can run the simulation and that is what kids are doing when they are pretending0:42:02it's bloody brilliant, that's play man, it's like It's brilliant! It's absolutely unbelievable because you know, if you are going to play Mom, let's say0:42:12It isn't like you it isn't exactly like you imitate your Mom because imitation would be you know how annoying it is when someone copies you0:42:21so, you know you are sitting like that and then and I do the same thing, that's really annoying and that isn't what kids do they don't0:42:30act out the precise actions that they have seen the target of their fantasy display, they're way more sophisticated than that, they watch0:42:40they're mother, let's say, like hawks and then they start to extract out the regularities in their behaviour, which is Mom behaviour, let's say that's what makes you Mom0:42:49whatever that is, and then so it's like they look at you across time and they extract out the regularity that makes you Mother and then they try to embody that regularity in their pretend play and then they sort of encapsulate or0:43:03incorporate the spirit of being a mother, or being a father or whatever or an animal because they'll play at that and so that is what they are doing, they are using their body as, and their mind as dramatic forums0:43:14it's really amazing, you know it's so sophisticated and no other animal does that as far as we know and it's the platform on which language is based, first of all we imitate0:43:24and language is imitation, right, because we use the same words, right, so it's imitation it's a big deal so you can act out someone else0:43:33and then you can conceptualize them in fantasy and it is only way after that that you could maybe articulate it, what does it mean to be a mother so I could have you write an essay about that0:43:42well you would have to think about it right? you wouldn't just automatically know, but if someone hands you a baby, you know, you are not completely socially blind, you roughly know what to do after you are done with your initial nervousness0:43:56you roughly know what to do don't drop it, that's a good rule you have probably figured that one out at least you know, don't yell at it, don't startle it, give it a little pat maybe, try hugging it0:44:07maybe you go like this, you know, you make eyes at it, you know what to do! It's built into you, you know, it's built into you, but that doesn't mean you could lay it out as a series of rules about how to be a mother0:44:18it's like you could right a whole damn book about that, so alright, so anyways, you live in this story and first of all you get your own story together0:44:27and that's by integrating your motivations and emotions together under social influence you know, Piaget kind of states that0:44:37before the age of three kids can't really play they are egocentric, and it's not exactly right because you are actually playing with you mother0:44:46from the time you are born, so even with breast feeding that's a social interaction and it's a complex cooperative endeavour and it's often hard for a mother and the infant0:44:56to get that right because it's complicated and it requires a lot of social interaction, like the child has to learn not to bite for example you know and a mother has to learn not to be too nervous and0:45:06and there is a lot of social bonding, it's a really complicated social interaction so the child, the infant even at the earliest stages is already engaged in a complex social dynamic0:45:17that is essentially play oriented but it's you know pretty primordial , it has to do mostly with the mouth, and a child's mouth and tongue are already hardwired at birth so0:45:29you child is most, this is a Freudian observation as well, your child is almost all mouth and tongue when it's born, the rest of it's body, well you watch infants , it's like0:45:39even when they are How old? Seven months? Six months? Four months? I can't even remember now, you know, they will move their arm and they kind of go like this0:45:48it's like they have no fine control, they're it's more like they have you know clubs on the ends of sticks, it's like that their nervous system isn't0:45:57thoroughly myleinated, then don't have control over themseleves but their mouth and tongue are already wired up and so, otherwise they wouldn't be able to swallow or nurse, so0:46:07the oral element is extraordinarily important for a young child that's why kids put everything in their mouth you know, even when they are a bit older it's like they see with their tongue0:46:17which of course everyone can do you know if you put a block in your mouth you can tell that it's a cube, you can tell that it is a cube without looking so you can with your tongue, you can see with your hands, you can even see to some degree with your ears0:46:31anyways, so they're a social interaction right from the beginning, but for the point of simplification you might say well first the child organizes themselves into a functional unity under the0:46:43pressure of social dynamics and then they get unified enough so that they can attain unity with another child by setting up a fictional world and cooperating and competing within that, because that's quite interesting to because0:46:56you know, people often juxtapose cooperation and competition as if they are opposites but they are not opposites at all another Piagetian observation0:47:05so you say, "Well is hockey a competitive game?" and people would say, "Well yeah!" but then you think, really! Really! No one brings a basketball0:47:15Right? So, we are going to play by the rules That's cooperation, well are teams competing against each other Well yes! But they agreed to compete within a particular landscape0:47:26and they all cooperate to maintain that landscape, and so you do the same thing when you are playing Monopoly It's like you are trying to win but at the same time you are cooperating0:47:35That's what, that's society man! That's society right there! You are cooperating That's the big enclosure, and within that there are regulated competitions0:47:47But, to separate those artificially and say one is competition and the other is cooperation is just It's just not. just not very smart, it's not observant, that's not how it workd0:48:01and games are intensely cooperative even if they are intensely competitive, I mean the hockey teams are playing in the same game, that's the cooperation, then each team0:48:11there is competition within the team to be the best player, let's say, but everyone wants that because everyone wants good players to emerge, but still cooperate like mad with your team mates and if you don't pass0:48:23and you know, play like a reasonable person then, they're going to not be happy with you and so, even within that competition, cooperation is regulating the interactions and then you can think0:48:35this is a really good thing to think too, it's like People often say to their kids, doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.0:48:45and the kid of course has no idea what that means, it's like what do you mean, I am trying to win and the parents says, "No, no, it matters how you play" and the kid pushes them and the parents really can't come up with a good explanation of why that is the case0:48:58They might say, "Well other kids won't play with you" There you go! Because you could say, this is something to think about, so0:49:09there is a game and there is a victory within the game but then there is the set of all games and there is victory across the set of all games0:49:18and the victory that you attain across the set of all games isn't winning all the games it's being invited to play all the games0:49:27and so if you play fair then you are playing a meta-game and the meta-game is how to win across the set of all games and so if you teach your child how to behave properly then they always get invited to play0:49:40and that makes them winners and that's that! and so if you understand that you understand something phenomenally important about the emergence of morality0:49:51you know because people, moral relativist in particular think that morality is relative and of course human beings are diverse, just like languages are diverse0:50:01and there is more than one playable game but there is not really more than one playable meta-game it's like you are either the kind of person that other people want to play with0:50:11or you are not. and it you are not the kind of person that people want to play with then you are a loser it's as simple as that, and that's true of all cultures, they might be playing different individual games0:50:22within their culture and undoubtedly they are, but the set of all games that they play is still common across cultures, that's part of what makes us human0:50:32and then you could say as well we are actually evolved to detect people who are good at playing the set of all possible games and we actually know that, that's not theoretical, we know for example0:50:44some things are easy to remember and some things are to remember, you know Here is something that is easy to remember, you play with someone and they cheat Man, you will remember that, that's like in your mind, that's not going anywhere0:50:57and so great are detecting cheaters and you remember and that's because you can't trust a cheater and you shouldn't invite a cheater to play a game with you because they might cheat!0:51:07and so, that's part of the innate morality system, you remember cheaters because they good at playing the meta-game and of course you're evolved of course you are adapted to the meta-game because0:51:19you are the product of this immense evolutionary history right and whoever your ancestors were which is an unbroken string of successful reproducers going back 3.5 billion years0:51:30you think about that, every single one of your ancestors successfully reproduced, it's mind boggling that you chances against that are so, it's billions to one and here you are the line of0:51:433.5 billion years of success, the whole world was trying to kill you, that whole time and here you are, it's like, and but0:51:52you know, you are still only going to last about 80 years so, but that, you know, is still, you know good for you, so anyways there were lots of games that your ancestors were playing across that immense span of time0:52:05many, many you know, lizard games and tree dweller games and crustacean games, you know the huge set of games0:52:17and you are adapted to win across those games, all of them and that's built into you, man, that's your central human nature, that's what makes you social0:52:26and it's not some mere cultural construct quite the contrary, it's so deeply embedded in you, it's what you are0:52:36Alright, so well this is a story, it's a game too, that's another way of thinking about it, you know, that's a Monopoly game, well0:52:45what's the frame well that's the rules of the game and are they, why do you accept them Well, it's kind of arbitrary right, it's like that happens to be the rules, hockey has different rules0:52:56basketball has different rules, but what they share is that they have rules OK, so there is a frame, that's the rules, and then within the frame there is a goal0:53:05and the goal is whatever the rules dictate, you know there is usually It's usually the construction of a heirarchy of success within a frame0:53:14and so that's what you play, and so you play Monopoly, and it's like, we'll accept the rules that's the social contract and then we will each try to win and that will be fun!0:53:23We find that amusing, and if you lose, what do you say? Well, you say there is always another game and so that's great,, so if you have that attitude and you play fair, then it doesn't matter whether you win or lose0:53:36although you still want to try to win because otherwise you are not a good player but you accept defeat gracefully because you can play again! and so, and you will win some and you will lose some and that's not so bad, you know and0:53:48even if you lose, well maybe you learned something, and and you're doing a lot more than one thing while you are playing Monopoly, you know, you are having a conversation and0:53:57learning how to interact with people, and learning how to regulate your emotions and so even if you lose if you have any sense you win and if your kids have any sense they know that0:54:06and so, that way you buffer then against defeat, it's like yeah, yeah, you know next time it's OK0:54:15You should try but it is OK and, and that's useful information for people to know so, alright, so you are always in one of these little frameworks and there is just no getting out of it, so0:54:27and that's because, you know at any given moment this is like field theory, there used to be psychological theories that talked about the field of human experiance0:54:36something like that, and this is kind of what that is, this is a field and basically what happens is that you parse out a little part of the world say0:54:45and an amount that you can handle so let's say it has some duration , you are not aiming at something 50 years in the future it's because how the hell are you going to to that?0:54:54there are too many variables, you know so, your aiming at some handleable amount of time and you posit a goal in there and you plot your route and then,0:55:04that tells you what is up and tells you what is down, because up moves you towards the goal and down moves you away from the goal and that's sets up your motivation framework so that0:55:13you have something worth attaining, you know that's a really interesting thing to know too, it's like Why have a goal? Well it's easy, no goal, no positive emotion.0:55:23Because you experience positive emotion by noticing that you are moving towards a goal and so if you don't have a goal well you can't have any positive emotion! So,0:55:34you better have a goal, and so you might say well what should the goal be? Well we could start by saying, well, any goal is better than none. And then we might say well it should be a goal that other people0:55:45will let you pursue, because otherwise it's going to be kind of difficult and maybe they will be even happy to help you pursue it, that would even be better and maybe it's a goal that would enable you to learn how to pursue other goals0:55:56while you pursue that goal, boy, that would really be good, And so, you can see that your goal was parameterized but that doesn't mean that any old goal works, it means there's some goals that work nicely0:56:09and some not so nicely, there are playable games and non-playable games, that's a good way of thinking about it and you want to have a playable game, and there is a lot of them0:56:18lawyer, plumber, you know actor, whatever, they are playable games and it's not obvious which one is better but0:56:27it's certainly obvious which ones are sustainable and which ones are worse and so they're is a set of playable games and you need to extract from that set of playable games0:56:36a game that suits you. and that would be partly due to your temperament, you know, because extroverted people want to play an extroverted game highly neurotic people want to play a safe game0:56:46agreeable people want to play generous game and disagreeable people want to play a game that highly competitive so they can win, and you know, fine!0:56:55but they're all within the realm of playable games and that means they are socially acceptable as well and so, that means, it isn't just0:57:05arbitrary , it isn't just relative what you decide to do, it is heavily parameterized, there is only there is a set of playable games, and it's large, the set is large but0:57:17there are commonalities within it, and that's why there are commonalties that is why morality has a common basis fundamentally, and so that's partly what we are trying to investigate, it's like0:57:28what's up, what is up mean? what does it mean, is there such a thing, now one thing to remember is that if you don't erect a hierarchical structure with something to aim at0:57:41you got no positive motivation because, you experience positive motivation in relationship to a goal, not from attaining the goal that's satisfaction, besides it's fleeting0:57:52you know perfectly well, you graduate from university, poof! Next day you have a problem which is what do you do next, and that's a tough problem0:58:01it's not like you solved your problems by winning that game you just introduced the problem of having to introduce another game! so it's unreliable as a source of positive emotion, but what's reliable is, you set a goal.0:58:14and you try to attain it and then that gives your life, literally provides your life with meaning that's what meaning is, now it's more than that, but that's what it is0:58:25and so then you might ask yourself, well What's a really good goal? Well, that's what we are trying to figure out, what's a really good goal? And now,0:58:34OK, so you got that, so now I am going to walk through, at least partly through we will see how far we get, I am going to walk through Pinocchio with you because that is what the movie is about, and0:58:44it's a it's hard to say how it come about, like it was written, the story, by a guy named Collodi, [spells it]0:58:53it's quite a bit different, the story, that story, the written one from the Disney version the Disney version was a product of the collaboration of geniuses of animation, essentially, so they were artistic geniuses0:59:05great at capturing motion and emotion and all of that they were stellar at that and imaginative, tremendously imaginative, but collectively imaginative0:59:16and so they put together a collective product and you might say well how did they do that exactly, it's like well they were good storytellers, and what does that mean, well0:59:27it means you know the story that works and the story that doesn't and maybe partly what you do is you kind of think out a story, and you think, well what is this happened?0:59:36Well, maybe this should happen? Oh! That's the thing! That would work! It's like a little flash of inspiration, right it's like you got a piece of the puzzle that fits, you think, That will work there!0:59:47and then you talk to the other people and you generate ideas and someone says, What if? What if they do this? And then everyone goes, No, no that's just not believable, no ones going to buy that.0:59:56and someone else has a little revelation, they say, Well, you know, it makes some sense somehow if, if they do this! And then everybody goes, Oh yeah! That really1:00:05that really works! It's like, why? Why? why? Well you don't know, you don't know why it works but it works because1:00:15It works because it's the right story and so what does that mean? well it's kind of associated with this meta-game idea1:00:24you know, there is a story that you should be acting out that works across games and you have an inkling of it, you have notion of it, you have a vague apprehension of it it's sort of built into you, that's an archetype, that's an archetype1:00:35and so when you read a story that works you are just entranced by it, and you all know that You go to a movie and it's a great movie and you are just blown away, you know it's1:00:45a movie can pull you in and turn you into one of the screen characters and, like, run you through a huge set of emotions. I saw this movie once about1:00:54South America, it started with this guy running out of a subway, naked, and he didn't know where he was and it turned out that he had been absconded by the totalitarian death squads and he couldn't remember anything about himself, and1:01:07he went back to his village and basically what happened was that, he ended up back in the totalitarian death grip.1:01:17and it showed how the fascist state had saturated the village completely, and, so it was a tragedy and you could see with every action that1:01:27this amnestic guy as he recreated himself and remembered his identity was going to travel down exactly the same road because nothing had changed1:01:36and by the time, I wish, I have looked what that movie was for years, I've never been able to find it again but, when the movie was over every single person in the theater was crying1:01:48and not just a little bit, they were just out of it, it was brilliant terrifying movie and that meant that was something right about it, man1:01:57and it got people, and you you might say you know you have dim apprehensions about the world and some of those are instinctual, and some of those are a consequence of your1:02:07of your experience, and it's like the pieces are fragmented, but, if you get away from them, a long ways, you can see how they fit together1:02:16but they are fragmented and then you go see a story and those pieces go click, click, click, click and then you think, Wow! That's what, that's how that works out, that's what that means1:02:25and that produces that overwhelming emotion, and then, and that partly how you make yourself transparent to yourself You go and experience a story and watch a story and you tell a story and you start to find out who you are by doing that1:02:40My nephew, had a dream at one point someone made a little animated thing out of it and put it on the Internet which is quite cool1:02:50So anyways, he was having night terrors and he ran around like a little knight you know, k-n-i-g-h-t, knight and he had a little1:03:00you know, armor and a sword and he would run around the house with a little knight hat on, being a knight and he was only like four or something and he had watched a lot of Disney movies1:03:10a lot of movies, so he kind of got the knight idea, it was He was acting that out and he was having terrors at night, right and so he would go to bed with his little knight hat and his sword and he would put them on his bed, and then1:03:23at night he would wake up screaming, and that happened for a very long time, and so when I went to visit, you know, I found out that this was happening and he had night terror, so the kid wakes up with night terrors1:03:34screaming but can't remember anything generally speaking, so anyways, this was happening and so it happened one day and I was sitting with him and his family at the breakfast table and I,1:03:45said, "Did you have a dream?" and he said "Oh yes, I had a dream" I said, "Well, what was your dream?" and he said, "Well I was out in this field, I was surrounded by the dwarves and they came up to my knees and1:03:59they were, they didn't have any arms they had big feet and they were covered with hair and there was a cross shaved at the top of their head and they were all greasy and they had huge beaks1:04:08and every where I went they jumped at me with their beaks and there was lots of them!" and every body was very quiet after he said this because it was like1:04:17Oh, that's why you were screaming at night, it's like yeah, OK! and so so then he said "But at the background there was a dragon, and the dragon would1:04:28blow out smoke and fire and then it would turn into these dwarves!" so it's like, man, that kid had a problem, right, it was like Well, what are you going to do, fight off a dwarf, who cares! Puff!1:04:39Ten more, that's life man, that's life! Really! That's the Hydra you cut off one head and seven more grow, that's life, snakes everywhere1:04:49and you get rid of one and there will be more and so, he figured that out! It's a hell of an existential shock when you are four and so he is like, he is a knight, he's thinking, what do I do about these dwarves1:05:00well their are too many of them, but there is a dragon well so I said, "Well, what could you do about that?" Right, loaded question, it implies that you could do something about that!1:05:12Well he kind of knew that, which he was running around like a knight and he kind of figured that out and he said, "Well I'll get my dad, and I jump up on the dragon and I poke out both of his eyes with my sword and then I go right down its stomach1:05:25to the place where the fire came out, the firebox, and then I'd carve a piece of the firebox out and make a shield, and that would be the end of that!" And I thought, Wow! Good work kid! Like1:05:37you really got it, right, it's the central human story. There's the terrible unknown, right, fire breathing generating trouble1:05:46and what do you do, you confront that, you confront that and by confronting it you get stronger, that's the shield, and that's that's what a human being is1:05:55and that's right, it's exactly right and that was the end of his night terrors, by the way which seems to good to be true, but it is actually true because I followed up with his mother for a long time, and that was that!1:06:06He catalyzed that part of his identity he adopted the role of the mythological hero and that's what he needed to do, because, like there was a dragon and a bunch of dwarves1:06:16like what the hell are you going to do about that? Run? That's not going to help. You know, if you run in a dream like that the dwarves multiply and the get bigger and you get smaller as you run1:06:27It's like, that no a good, that is not a good solution and people do that in their life all the time, and so the dwarves get bigger until they are giants1:06:36and they get smaller until there is nothing left of them, and then then there is no recovery, that is not good1:06:46Now, OK, so now I also proposed to you that there is a symbolic structure to the world It's a meta-structure I would say, I think these categories are truly real1:06:57and their basically this! There's unexplored territory and explored territory and there is you!1:07:06and unexplored territory is the source of great riches and probably will kill you and explored territory is you culture and it crunches you into submission and conformity1:07:17and turns you into a civilized being, and you are stuck with both of those and then there is you, you know you are kind of admirable and cool and you do a lot of decent wonderful amazing things and there are things about you that are just horrible1:07:30and you know about them, and you are stuck with them and that's the world and that's the the landscape of the world and what you will see1:07:39if you pay attention is that people who are ideologues like Rousseau or say, like Hobbes but it doesn't matter, ideologues will tell you part of that story1:07:48so environmentalists for example will say Nature, that's pristine beauty natural harmony1:07:58French landscape it's a paradise especially if there are no people, it's a paradise and then, culture is a rapacious monster1:08:08and human beings driving that culture against nature are monsters of a sort that, and perhaps there should be fewer of then, it's like, yeah, yeah that's all true1:08:19it's exactly dead on, right on, exactly right Was that movie called Avatar? Yes, that's James Cameron's movie right?1:08:30That's that story, yeah, and Hey, it's a good story It's even a mythological story but it is only half the story The other story you could think about it as a frontier myth, that's Star Trek1:08:42or Star Wars for that matter, mostly Star Trek, it's like but we will put it into the context of the frontier myth, the myth that drew settlers into America, say. It's, well1:08:56there is a wild savage landscape out there that can be conquered by and settled and stabilized by civilization and it will be the heroic pioneer who does it1:09:06It's exactly the opposite story of the environmental story, which is why I think that the environmental story emerged. It was you know the frontier story1:09:16had a lack in it, it missed half of the world and so the other story had to come up and it did and if you take both of those stories, even though they are exactly the opposite to one another1:09:26if you know both those stories, then you know the whole story and it's really weird, you know, because one of the propositions of formal logic1:09:35is, it's a fundamental proposition is that something can't be itself and it's opposite at the same time, it's like that's true for some sorts of things, it's true for logical claims1:09:48but it is completely wrong in this particular situation because things are, what they are and their opposites at the same time and that makes it very very difficult to1:09:58that's why a dragon hoards gold, it's like What's up with that? Well it will eat you! And it will, but it has gold!1:10:08So what do you do about that? Because it's paradoxical demands well, what you want to do is face the dragon and get the damn gold, that's what you want to do1:10:18well you have to be a paradoxical being even to do that, so, in "The Hobbit" for example, when, what's his name1:10:28Frodo, right? It's not, it's Bilbo in "The Hobbit" You know he is kind of this little underdeveloped over protected Shire dweller, and,1:10:40he is called on a great adventure to go and find the dragon, and he has to become a thief in order to manage it1:10:49Well that's pretty weird, you know, it's like, it's because as a good citizen he is just not enough to conquer a dragon1:10:58He also has to become a bad citizen in some sense, he has to incorporate the part of himself that is monstrous let's say, and develop that and hone it1:11:07and that's to say that, if you are harmless you are not virtuous you are just harmless you are like a rabbit1:11:16a rabbit isn't virtuous, it's just can't do anything except get eaten it's not virtuous If you are a monster, and you don't act monstrously1:11:27then you are virtuous, but you also have to be a monster Well you see this all the time, Harry Potter is like that too, it's like he is flawed he's hurt, he has go evil in him, he can talk to snakes, man1:11:37He breaks rules all the time All the time, he is not obedient at all, but, you know, he has a good reason for breaking the rules and if he couldn't break the rules1:11:48him and his little clique of rule breaking troublemakers, if they didn't break the rules they wouldn't attain the highest goal so it is very peculiar, but it's very, it's a very very very very common mythological notion1:12:03You know, the hero has to be the hero has to be a monster but a controlled monster, Batman is like that, you know, I mean it's everywhere, it's the story you always hear1:12:15[Student] Is this where morals become ethics? [JBP] Meaning? You have to be more precise. [Student] I feel like, because every one is moral, but, in order to become ethics you have to refine the morals, you have to kind of go into....1:12:27[JBP] Well that's a good question, you know, because one question is you know you are kind of implicitly moral in so far as you are socialized1:12:36but that is sort of procedural, it's just built into you this is different, this is also becoming conscious of it and expanding out your personality into dimensions that it wouldn't normally occupy, so1:12:46this happens to people all the time So, for example, lots of my clients, my clinical clients are too agreeable and, they are generally women because women are more agreeable than men1:12:57but not always, because I have had agreeable men as clients as well and what happens is, they're resentful and they don't how to stand up for themselves and it's because they're1:13:06very compassionate by nature, and so, if you entering into a negotiation with them, they will let you win Well that's not so good, because you need to win to,1:13:15Especially if you are in an organisation of adults where there is a struggle, right, When you have kids you can let them win especially infants, like you have to let them win and that's partly1:13:28why compassion is so necessary, but as a basis for negotiation between adults, it's like Sorry, it's insufficient, you have to be a bit of a monster so that you can say no.1:13:41And so a lot of what you do in psychotherapy is treat peoples anxiety and depression, that's a huge chunk of it help them straighten out the way they think, that's a huge chunk of it, but another chuck of it is1:13:52well let's toughen you up, you know, let's put you in a position where you can bargain, let's teach you how to assert yourself and stand up for yourself, and that's assertiveness training and it's a huge chunk of psychotherapy1:14:03and you need to learn it, because part of how you regulate your interactions with other people is to negotiate1:14:12and you cannot negotiate unless you can say no you can't do it and it cause conflict to say no, and if you don't like conflict which is basically the definition of being agreeable1:14:23then you cannot tolerate the conflict and so then you can't negotiate on your own behalf and so then you keep losing! And you are bullied, and you know it's not good, then you get resentful and1:14:33and it's really not good, so you have to develop your inner monster a little bit and, and then that makes you a better person, not a worse person1:14:43It's weird! It's weird, but, but that's just how it is.1:14:54Outside of that diagram is chaos itself and that's the chaos from which things emerge, now, I can't tell you much about that yet because it's do damn complicated1:15:04but I think the best way to think about chaos is as potential That's one way of thinking about it. It's also that place you end up when you don't know what to do.1:15:16It's the source of all things, but it is also the terrible predator, the terrible eternal predator that lurks beyond the explored domain. It's a winged dragon1:15:26and it's winged, who knows why, matter and spirit, that's partly what it is and I will explain that later It's also potentially the predatory beast that's been after us for, forever1:15:38And the winged predator that picked us off from the sky, so primates for example, monkeys have some monkeys have three specialized alarm crys, one is for snakes, and that usually means1:15:50Hit the trees! And then one is for leopards, and that means, hit the trees and go out on a skinny branch because the leopard can't get to you and then there is one for like birds of pray which means hide somewhere on the ground so that you don't get picked off, and it's like, well1:16:05That's what that is, that's what that is and that's chaos and it's expanded into much more than that and then I showed you, I don't remember if I showed you this, but, this is a symbolic representation of1:16:19Mother Nature, Father Culture and the suffering of the individual, but it is all, that's all positive There's no negative elements there1:16:28but, that's OK that's a partial representation and those things are sacred in some sense because they are representative of an ultimate reality, of an ultimate reality, the sacrificial individual here, the suffering individual, well that's pretty straight forward, it's like1:16:45that's what, that's life that's suffering, that's life that's what happens to the individual, so, and everyone is looking at that.1:16:55It has power that idea Well it's because, you know culture supports the suffering individual, and culture is nested inside benevolent nature and that's1:17:06part of the story of the world, and it's the part of the story we are trying to figure out and make articulate, we have been doing that for thousands of years, trying to make this story articulate1:17:17and it's not yet articulated, it's only, we are only getting it, we are getting it and we basically do that now with movies and stories and fiction and that sort of thing1:17:27We still don't have it articulated I think Jung went close, came closer than anyone else Jung and Erich Neumann who was one of his students came closer than anyone else ever has to actually articulating that, and that's what Jung was trying to do1:17:40Is to take all these images, archetypal images Instinctual images and say, well, what do they mean? What do they mean? What do they mean? And he got a long ways on that, although his writing is quite obscure, and it's obscure because1:17:52How the hell are you going to explain an image like that, without being obscure? It's like it's insanely complicated, and it's not linear1:18:01It's not a linear thing, that's why it's in a picture Because a picture presents everything at once and you want to take that apart linearly. Jesus! It's just, it's just impossible.1:18:12But we have been struggling to do that, really we have been struggling From the time that we became self-conscious You know, what is the world about? How should we live in it?1:18:22Well that's a partial answer, and it's a culture bound answer, obviously But you see archetypal representations like this in many cultures, so for example1:18:32the image of the Virgin and Child, that way predates Christianity like the Egyptians, that was Isis and Horus, that goes back, hoh, we have no idea how far1:18:42thousands and thousands of years before the emergence of Judaism and Christianity Way back before that, and no doubt back into prehistory itself! Because1:18:53a culture that doesn't hold the mother and child as sacred, dies! Obviously! Because, obviously!1:19:04So, it has to be held, it has to be held as something that you revere, which at least means that, you don't kill mothers and children, it at least means that!1:19:17And that's an instinct, you know,, it's an instinct, it violates you to to that and thank God! Alright,1:19:26Let's take 15 minutes So, I told you about this a little bit last week, but, you know, one of the motivations I had for1:19:37thinking about the things that I have thought through the motivation I had for thinking them through was because Well, I1:19:48It seemed self-evident to me, let's say and I think that it was partly from reading Jung, but that just helped me clarify it, was that1:19:57You know it was sort of Jung's contention that We had an organic development of a metaphysical ethic1:20:07that was embedded in, in religious tradition and that basically unfolded let's say in the West until about 1600, 1500, something like that, and then1:20:16science emerged and we got unbelievably technologically powerful using a certain view of the world you know, we are so technologically powerful1:20:26but, we are still not very wise and that just seem to me to be a bad combination and, I thought about that a lot, it's like, OK, how do you handle the combination of1:20:37exceptional technological power and and an impaired ethic, let's say something like that, underdeveloped ethic or one in even which you have no faith, because1:20:46you know, it seems, the foundational elements of it are irrational, they're in mythology they're in religion, they don't fit well with the scientific world view1:20:56How do you rectify that problem? And Well that's a tough problem, you know, it's a crazy problem and certainly it was the problem that Jung was trying to address, there is no doubt about it1:21:06Along with that went an associated problem which was, you know, what happened in the 20th century which was so awful and in so many places, it was just so unbelievably brutal and terrible and it was perpetrated by1:21:20millions of people, and they were individual people and they weren't that much different from normal people and in fact they were normal people. So, the other thing that struck me was that it would be better if that sort of thing didn't happen anymore1:21:33and so I was trying to figure what the hell could possibly be done about that, and you know, part of Jung's contention was, well you had to understand yourself as a monster if you were ever going to1:21:43maintain some control over the fact that you are in fact a monster and that that could come forth if the situation is correct Ok, that seems reasonable, and so,1:21:55Well it seemed to me that , you know, people had to become wiser and, of course, that's a very difficult things to figure out, because you could even question1:22:04whether there is such a thing as wisdom, you know, and and then I thought well that's what the universities are supposed to do, especially the humanities mostly, in particular1:22:13it is supposed to make you wise, that's what it's for and it's a doing a terrible job of that in my estimation it's more decimating people as far as I can tell, and undermining whatever ethic that they have1:22:25rather than making people wise and, but I think that we have to become wise, I don't think that there is a choice, I think it's a matter of survival, and1:22:35it's more than that, because if you're wise in your own life, you are going to have a way better life like incomparably better because you are going to sleep soundly with a good conscience at night, and you know people say that's worth more than money1:22:49that's worth more than money. I know lots of people who have lots of money and let me tell you money protects you, you are as well as protected from the world by money right now as you ever will be for the rest of your life1:23:00because most of life's fundamental problems can't be solved with money! you know, like, rich people get divorced, they have affairs, their children get sick1:23:10they have all the problem you have, and that's partly because you are already rich And so, you might think that if you had a bunch more money things would be better1:23:20but it's just not true, in fact in some ways they might be worse because money can open up can open up the possibility of all sorts of temptations to you that you just can't afford at the moment1:23:33So, well so, economics, we have already solved that problem fundamentally and we are rapidly solving it everywhere in the world, right. The world economy is growing so damn fast that you can't even imagine how you could possibly make it grow any faster1:23:47It's crazy, we have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last 15 years, you know The U.N. set a goal, by 2015, I think it was to cut poverty by half1:23:58if I remember correctly, and they reached it two years early, you know, it's like It's unbelievable! So,1:24:09Well, so then I started to try to understand what it might be to to live and really what I was looking for, and was not so much to live a life that was wise1:24:19but at least to live a life that wasn't pathologically unwise you know, I thought of the sorts of things that people were doing to one another in the1:24:28Auschwitz camps, and in the Gulag Archipelago and all of that horror that was perpetrated on on people as definitely unwise, whatever else you might say about it,1:24:39it was unwise, so then I though maybe there is a way to figure out how you could not do that! And so, that's and I think that that's,1:24:48my sense is that when you come to university to learn how to be a civilized person which is what is supposed to happen at university1:24:57otherwise it is just a trade school, and you might as well go to trade school as far as I am concerned if you want to learn, something that will get you a job, it's like, it's a lot1:25:06faster, and it's more certain and it's useful if you are not taught to be a citizen at university, then1:25:17Why bother with it? So, well so that's what we are trying to figure out! and, and that's part of that cloud of mythological fantasy that surrounds our culture, that's1:25:28it's part of its deep history that we are trying to, you know, if you grapple with the humanities and with art and all of that that you are trying, you are trying to master and incorporate and,1:25:39pull in to you so that you're situated properly in history, and and you are not just floating in the void of, you know, this1:25:50tiny individuality that is divorced from everything else, you are weak in that circumstance Alright, so1:26:01that's more of an explanation of why I try to puzzle through these things, and try to puzzle through them with you So anyways, we talked about this song last week, and1:26:14you know, I made a hypothesis to you, we'll go through this quickly It's doggerel, it's not great poetry but it is irrelevant1:26:24It was a very popular son, it's quite beautiful In the movie it actually sung by like a heavenly choir, that's what it sounds like, so Its got this cathedral, you can imagine people singing it in a cathedral essentially,1:26:36and so that's not accidental, it's purposeful you know, it partakes of that what would you call it, it partakes of that esthetic, that's. that's it1:26:48So the film makers are, are implying that what is about to be shown to you has this1:26:58divine element, essentially and that that's signified by the choir of voices that sings this song1:27:07and the song says, fundamentally something like this is that if you lift up our eyes above the temporal, into the transcendent, and so that's1:27:17what exists in the heavenly world, in the stars if you pick an ultimate goal, if you pick the right ultimate goal1:27:27then, and anyone can do this, that's the other thing it's democratic it's anyone can do this, so that's the second proposition, "It doesn't matter who you are"1:27:36You can do this. And so, I think that's a reflection of the idea of the divinity of the individual, it's like there is something about each individual that's valuable, regardless of their idiosyncrasies , and1:27:46and so they have this potential that they can manifest, and how you manifest it? Well, you pick the right goal, and, what's the right goal, well it's high1:27:55it's elevated, it's above the mundane Now what does that mean? Well you don't really know, you don't really know? That's why it is signified by a star, and the star is something that glimmers in the night, right1:28:05so it's a source of light in the darkness And so, there is a metaphor in there, obviously, there is a metaphor there. And, the star is the star that that's the star of Hollywood1:28:16you know, the person that you emulate, that's part of it because an ideal is, it's going to be a human ideal of some sort that you are going to be aiming at and so the ideal human being is the star that you are aiming at, maybe it's something like that.1:28:28If that's what you are aiming at, well you might say, well, "What should you aim at in life?" And one answer is, well, Why don't you aim at being1:28:37whatever you could be that would be the best! Now, you don't know what that is, exactly, because how do you know you know, what, you could think "Well that would be really good if I could have it" And then you could say, "Well,1:28:49can I think of anything better than that?" and if the answer is no, then well, why not go for that? You know, well you might say, "Well, it's too ambitious, it takes too much responsibility."1:29:00It's like, yeah yeah, those are definitely problems and, one of the things that I have figured out over the years is that if you offered the person the opportunity, you know because people say, "Well, life doesn't really have any ultimate meaning". It's like1:29:12yeah, OK, fine, let's say that it has an ultimate meaning but that in order to experience that ultimate meaning you have to take on ultimate responsibility for what you do.1:29:25That's a heavy price to pay to have a meaningful life. You know, and you might say "Well, there's no damn way I going to do that, I'll just go for the, you know, pointless,1:29:37I'll go for the trivial pointless perspective, which is kind of hard on me existentially, but it frees me up, I can do whatever the hell I want, moment to moment, I don't have any ultimate responsibility."1:29:48and so then, you think "That's kind of a good deal". And then, but that raises this weird spectre of doubt, which is, well, when you hear people talk about the ultimate futility of life1:29:58is it because life is ultimately futile, or is it because they have decided that they would just as soon not adopt the responsibility, and they use that real decision, which is to not adopt the responsibility1:30:11they rationalize that by proposing that life is ultimately meaningful (sic), meaningless and like, you know I kind of buy that, I really do think that's what is going on.1:30:21So, but maybe not but it could be that if you want to have an ultimately meaningful life that you have to adopt ultimate responsibility1:30:32Makes sense, and what might that mean? Well one thing it might mean is that And I do think it means this, is that1:30:41I think that it was Alexander Pope, but I might be wrong about that who said, "Nothing human is foreign to me" [transcibers note] Publius Terentius Afer, Terence, "I am a man: nothing human is foreign to me." and that's a hell of a statement, right, because if you think about all the things that human beings are capable of1:30:54and they are capable of some like if you really want to know what people are capable of, you should read about Unit 731 but I would not recommend it, because if you read it, you will never forget it, and you will be sorry that you read it1:31:08but, you'll know Anyways, to say that human is foreign to you, that's a hell of a thing to say, because that means that what other people have done, you could do1:31:19and that also means you need to take responsibility for that that's no joke, you know, it's a big deal to do that in even a trivial manner1:31:30Anyways, so the idea is you can elevate, if you elevate you viewpoint to some transcendent ethic, that you want what is ultimately good, you really want that, whatever that is!1:31:42You don't know, that's what you are aiming at Well then it says this strange thing, well what you want will all of a sudden come to you well that's a proposition, and it's the proposition that basically played out in the movie.1:31:54It's a hypothesis, the hypothesis is, the best way to orient yourself in life is to orient yourself towards the highest good that you are capable of imagining and then aim at that, and then things will work the best way they can for you.1:32:07And I think, I believe that that is correct, it's my observation of life has lead me to see that that seems to be correct So for example,1:32:16you don't get something that you don't aim at, that just doesn't work out, and so lots of people aim at nothing and that's what they get. So, if you aim at something you have a reasonable crack at getting it, you know1:32:26you tend to change what you are aiming at along the way because like what do you know, you know You aim there, you are wrong but you get a little closer, and then you aim there and you are still wrong, you get a little closer and you aim there, and, you know1:32:37As you move towards what you are aiming at, you are characterization of what to aim at becomes more and more sophisticated And so it doesn't really matter if you are wrong to begin with, as long as you are smart enough to learn on the way1:32:48and as long as you specify a goal, so specify a vague one "I want things to be the best they could be, and I am willing to learn what best means as I go along"1:32:58Ok, ok, so fine, and then you get what you truly need we'll say, well maybe not [reading] "Know that if your heart is in your dream" What does that mean?1:33:07Well, that to me reflects this idea of a kind of integrated viewpoint. One of the things Jung proposed, was that as you integrate yourself psychologically what happens is that1:33:19Your rationality integrates with you emotions they stop being opposed forces, like the Enlightenment ideas that rationality and and desire are opposites and enemies in a sense1:33:30The Jungian notion, and the psychoanalytic notion I would say, in general and the humanist notion even, perhaps, is that no, that's not right what you want to do is you want to integrate your rationality with your emotions and your motivations1:33:43They're not separable, even technically, they have to work together, and that all has to be integrated with you body not only do you have to take your1:33:53heart into account and notice what is is that you want and don't want but you also have to embody that, you have to act that out in the world1:34:02So, fine, that's what that means, and if you do that then Well then your horizons will open up, and I also believe that's true, you know, I have known people in my life who are insanely successful, like1:34:15insanely successful and those people are, like they're They're pretty damn together, man, you know, like they are tough, smart1:34:25strategic, generous, you know they are always giving people opportunities, honest like, they have got it all and you know, and sometimes, now I am not saying that everyone who is wildly successful1:34:36Is wildly successful because they have got themselves together, but you know, because there are people who are crooks and, you know there are people who gain status1:34:48one way or another by nefarious means but that's a lot more unstable than you might think and I can't say exactly if that, if you pursue that route1:34:58you are going to pay for it, you will have your money or whatever it is but it's not going to do much good for you, so, And so it does seem to me that people that have integrated themselves, and that1:35:11and that are pursuing a noble goal, a high goal, who actually are able to do remarkable things, and remarkable things can be done at every level1:35:21you know, it isn't like you have to change the world as a whole, it could be that you do something remarkable within your family you know, that can be tremendously admirable, you know, someones got to take care of a family member if they are sick1:35:33you know, there are heroic acts that you can undertake in the local environment and maybe that will go unheralded let's say, but1:35:42that doesn't mean that it isn't remarkable, I mean I have met people who are so damaged you just can't imagine it, and yet1:35:51Well one person I met when I was in Montreal was this women, and she was just ruined, man, she looked like a street person, and she was so shy, she couldn't even look at you, like1:36:00she basically looked at the ground because it was like there was light emanating from everyone else and she was way too timid and humble to even to bear it. And you know, partly what I was doing was trying to get her to straighten up and not look so street personish1:36:14because it wasn't going very well for her in social interactions, you know but it turned out that isn't what she came to the behavioural therapy unit for and she had her aunt, I think she lived with her aunt who was like, schizophrenic and then1:36:28her aunt's boyfriend was an alcoholic who like went on long harangues about the devil, and it's like, really, man, and she wasn't bright this women, she really wasn't and1:36:37You know she really didn't have a job and it was just like, it was just not good in every way and then she also had this unbelievable humility and1:36:48But then it turned out what she wanted, I just couldn't bloody well believe this that she had this dog and she used to walk it around, she took care of the dog, and, you know, that was a good thing, and1:36:58and she had actually been an inpatient at the Douglas hospital, which is where I was working, and they're were inpatients in the Douglas hospital, and this was back in the 80's, and those people were, like she was like Superwomen compared to the inpatients at the Douglas hospital1:37:11those people looked like they were from a Hieronymus Bosch painting because they had deinstitutionalized everyone that could possibly be deinstitutionalized1:37:21and so the only people that were left were people who couldn't be deinstitutionalized and so those were the people who were in the psyche wards for like 30 years, and all of the hospitals were connected by tunnels underground and the patients used to hang out1:37:33down there by the Coke machine and so forth and one day I took my brother down there, he was visiting, and like it was just like, he just turned white, you know, because it was just... really, I don't know if you know Hieronymus Bosch, he is a very interesting painter to say the least, but1:37:47that's what it was like, and so So here was here idea! She had come to the behavioural therapy unit because she had been she had been in the inpatient ward for a while, and she met some of these ruined people1:37:57and she tried to get the hospital, she thought "While I am walking my dog, you know, well maybe I could take one of these patients out for a walk" you know, and she had been talking to the hospital administrators trying to get her,1:38:07allow her to go, you know, take out one of these patients and go for a walk with her dog. and basically she had come to the behaviour therapy unit because that's what she wanted to do, it's like1:38:16Man, that person, she just blew me away, like, it's like I just couldn't believe it, like, she had nothing going for her like nothing1:38:25and yet, she wanted to, you know help some people that were worse off, and like there just weren't that many people that were worse off than her Mind boggling, mind boggling!1:38:36I never forgot it. and it really, really blew me away you know there are opportunities for elevating your sights1:38:46within your realm of capability wherever you happen to be, and and that's interesting, it's strange that that is the case1:38:58[reading] "She brings those who love", that's what that's should say, " the sweet fulfillment of their longing" "Like a bolt out of the blue, Fate" characterized here as feminine1:39:09and that's what happens in the movie, the movie has got a Christian underbelly, like it's quite pronounced but it's really a pagan movie in many ways, so for example1:39:18there is no blue fairy and the reason I am speaking of Christianity of course is because this movie was created in a culture where Christianity was still reasonably intact1:39:28and of course it was fully informed by that, but the underlying mythos is not precisely Christian even though it is informed by Christian imagery1:39:37There is this old idea, I think it's an Gnostic idea that the wisdom of God is feminine, something like that, an anima, which means soul is feminine1:39:46and so there is an idea like that lurking here and anyways, that's fate, and that's the blue fairy in this particular movie, you know she comes down from this star, which is1:39:55kind of makes her a avatar of God, that's the idea and she's the transformative agent, she's really Mother Nature you know in her positive guise, and1:40:04that's why she can animate to animate something means to infuse it with soul, that's what it means and she animates Pinocchio, right, she is the force that frees him from his strings1:40:15and so that's her, Fate, [reading] "Like a bolt out of the blue, Fate steps in and sees you through" Well what that means, it means something like1:40:24It means something like this, is that if you orient properly in the world, and we will say that you do that by trying to attain the ultimate goal whatever that happens to be, then it is as if the world is on your side1:40:37and, and, and things go well for you and I also believe that that is true because certainly one of the things that more or less self evident is that generally speaking, if you tell the truth1:40:47things go a lot better for you, and, the reason for that is, well, heh you want to be, do you want to have reality opposed to you? Or do you want to have reality backing you up? It's like it's a pretty straight forward question1:40:59If you are truthful to the degree that you can be truthful, then reality is on your side That's a good thing because there is a lot of it and there isn't much of you Whereas if you take a deceitful approach to things, well, then you're challenging reality1:41:15It's like, good luck with that, man! It's like you are holding a plastic ruler in front your face and bending it, you know, and at some point you are going to let go and it's going to, all that force that you have1:41:27stored up, and it's going to snap back and nail you and that happens Like, I have just never seen anyone, in my clinical practice, ever get away with anything1:41:38Nothing! And it's not surprising, it's like, if you are going to mess with the structure of reality Like it's going to mess back, and it does, and it might not happen for years, and you might not even notice the connection1:41:50I mean part of what you do in psychotherapy, is actually make those connections, it's like why did this horrible thing happen to me Well, Who knows?1:41:59It's like let's take it apart, well who knows how far back we have to go It might even have things to do not even with you, it might have things to do with the errors in parents relationship1:42:10Like, you just can't mess with the structure of reality, it It stays warped until you straighten it out, and1:42:20it's not good. So, so there and injunction here which is that, you know, if you follow this path, you pick a high goal and, and you put your heart in it, you know you commit to it1:42:34believe in it, believe means to love, believe and belove, it's the same thing, it's means to act out and that's what the belief means, like we think that belief means to accept a set of propositions as true1:42:47Well that is one form of belief, but that's more like factual knowledge, right, belief is more like you decide that you are going to act something out you make a decision and then you act it out and that is a reflection of you belief1:43:00You know, you are staking yourself on something, do you know? Well no! Because you can't, you can't know, you are bounded by ignorance, you can make your best guess and move forward1:43:11and you can do that with commitment, but you have to believe in order to do that I guess that's why it's a wish1:43:20Ok, so fine Well then we have Jiminy Cricket, Southern U.S. slang for Jesus Christ, by the way and the initial overlap isn't1:43:31a fluke, I mean I am sure that the animators thought that that was funny, and of course it is funny and it you know in the Lion King, you know that, that baboon1:43:40whose the shaman, basically, well to begin with he was kind of just a comic relief character, like a fool, you know, but One of the things that Jung mentioned about the fool is that, the fool tends to turn into the saviour and it's an archetypal reality1:43:53Bugs Bunny is sort of like that, you know, he is a trickster and, as the movie developed the character of the fool baboon took on the full fledged1:44:03you know , shaman priest element, and and, you know, OK, Jiminy Cricket he is this little cricket and, and he turns out to be the conscience which is pretty damn weird, it's like a bug is your conscience1:44:15and the bug is J.C. and, that a very strange juxtaposition of ideas, conscience, insect1:44:24saviour, it's like what's up with that and so, well, what bugs you, that's part of it Well, your conscience certainly bugs you1:44:34and you should pay attention to it's, it's just niggling little annoying thing that you can't quite, you can override it, right, obviously but, it's this, well, he says when he talks to Pinocchio later, it's that still small voice, you know1:44:49and, I have asked people before, like in my personality class, like because conscience is a weird thing, and it and like , if I said to you if you are about to do something that you know you shouldn't do.1:45:01Do you have a voice in your head that tells you that you shouldn't do it? So how many people have had that experience? OK, OK, good, now so other people have a feeling instead of a voice, and so, is there anybody here1:45:14who's willing to admit it, who has neither the feeling, neither the voice? OK, so, you know it's a very understudied phenomena in psychology, this conscience,1:45:24I mean people can be conscientious, and maybe those are people who listen to their conscience more I don't know, but nobody has ever investigated it, and the fact that do this little voice, whatever it is inside your head, it's like, what the hell is up with that?1:45:37You know, it doesn't tell you what you want to hear. At least as far as I can tell, now you could say, "Well that's the internal representation of society operating within you."1:45:47That would be a Freudian view, that's the superego and certainly there is something to that but, I don't think that it is necessary to presume that that's all there is to it and even if it is1:45:57you still wouldn't have the voice, if you didn't have the biological potential to have that voice embed itself in you. So even if it is socioculturally constructed, which it is in part,1:46:08It's like language, it's like your language is socioculturally constructed but the reason you can speak is because human beings can speak and if you have a conscience, it's because human beings have a conscience,1:46:19and the contents of that conscience might differ, but the fact that it exists seem to me to be universal. OK, well, so that's the conscience1:46:30and, that's Jiminy Cricket and then the cricket opens this book, then you look at the book and you think, "Well what kind of book is that?" Well it's got a spot light on it,1:46:40so, it's being highlighted, this is an important book, and what kind of book is it? Well, it's leather bound, it has a lock on it, you know, it's not some cheap book, it's kind of like a1:46:49you might think about it , it looks like something from an old library, or maybe it looks biblical Whatever! It's a major league book, and this bug is the introduction to the book So does that mean your conscience is the introduction to the book?1:47:01Well? Maybe that is what it means, it's certainly what's being played out in the movie. Well then, the cricket opens the book and so then what do you see? Well, what does that look like?1:47:12What does it look like? What does it remind you of? OK, so that's the Van Gogh painting.1:47:22It's the Nativity scene. It's the Christmas star! And you know that because what's going to happen? Well the hero is going to be born That's what happens and so a star signifies that1:47:34Why does a star signify the birth of an infant? Let's say. Well because there is something miraculous about the birth of an infant, and1:47:43why would the infant be a saviour? Which is the Christian notion, say. Well because that's the infant is, potentially Every infant.1:47:52and so that's how you should act about them and you know one of the things that really is interesting about having little kids And I loved having little kids, is that, You have this opportunity, to have this pristine relationship with someone, like1:48:05Like a relationship you have never had with anyone, because the kid really is just there to love you If you don't screw it up, you've got that and then you can keep that going, you know, and you can try keep that relationship1:48:18like, pristine, and that's so fun, it's so fun to try to do that, it's It's really, it's amazing, it's an amazing thing, and1:48:27you know kids get a bad rap in our society, but it's an amazing thing to have little kids and they are remarkable and they give you back far more than they require from you, and1:48:39partly because they treat you like, you're valuable beyond belief, that's what the kid think about you, it's like1:48:48That's pretty good. So, yeah, it's like something divine is going to happen and so, OK fine, you know, fair enough!1:48:57Well there is the star signifying that, and that's associated with in some way with this star that you are supposed to wish upon Well that's kind of odd, there's this1:49:06There is this relationship that is implicit, the star that signifies the birth of the hero is the same star that you wish upon Well,1:49:15perhaps the star that you are wishing upon is the wish that the hero will be born in your soul It's something like that, you are aiming at an ideal, it's the ideal you, whatever that would be, well?1:49:27You can certainly figure out what it isn't. That's where you start, as far as I can tell You know what you shouldn't be doing, and you could at least stop doing those things, and then see what happens, you know1:49:39If you ask yourself, it's a meditative exercise, you know And you do this with the autobiography to some degree, it's like, OK Sit down for ten minutes and have a little dialogue with yourself1:49:48Like you actually wanted to know the answer, you know So, you ask! "Well I am probably doing something stupid that if I could quit doing my life would be better, that I could quit doing, that I would quit doing."1:50:00And maybe it's not a very big thing, because you are not very disciplined, but maybe there is something? Ask yourself that question, man, you will have an answer in no time flat. Like, "I should stop doing this, well yeah, yeah, I know, and I could, and I won't, or maybe I would but if I did, I know my life would be better"1:50:19It's like, you could figure that out immediately, and if you do that a hundred times Well, you will be in way better shape. So if you don't know what to do that is good, you could at least figure out what you shouldn't do that's just moronically1:50:31you know, pathetic, and you can be sure you're doing at least a dozen of thoee things at least You know, procrastinating or, you know you know, that's what the conscience tells you, and if you ask it, it will just tell you why you are, you know, are stupid and insufficient.1:50:46And so, who wants to hear that? But but, maybe you could do something about it. Ok, so the cricket comes into the village there and he sees this little house, and1:50:58there is a little fire in it, and so, it's kind of got, it's a welcoming place, it's a light in the darkness this house, just like the star, and so, he hops towards it, and then he ends up inside it, and1:51:07you know, there is a nice fire, you get to see the inside, and the inside is cozy, you know, it's welcoming, and then when you look around you see that everything is kind of1:51:16in it's place, it's not hyper-organized or any thing like that, it's it's friendly and welcoming and it's, there is a lot of wood and there is a nice fire and then there are toys everywhere, and they are well constructed, so you know that whoever lives there likes children1:51:28and so, if someone likes children, well, someone that doesn't like children, it's like, you should run away from them very rapidly but if they like children, well then that's a good sign that, you know1:51:37Jesus, they are a least human, it's a start you know, and then these things are all high quality, they are made very well, and, then there's, and he is looking around to see all of this and there's1:51:49there's toys and clocks, and they are all hand made, and so he is sort of infers that maybe there is a wood carver who lives there, and a wood carver is someone who can build things, and1:51:59and it you build things that work and that are beautiful, that's a kind of truth, right? It's like it's built right into the object, that's what quality is, quality is the building into an object of truth1:52:11the thing works, it does what it is supposed to, it has integrity, and so you see that everywhere in here, and So you are getting the sense of, that the film makers are setting the stage1:52:21and so, well so they set the stage by showing you the stage and the cricket tells you what he sees, and he's pretty happy to be there, because and this is also someone who is concerned about time, right, because there are a lot of clocks, there are a lot of clocks1:52:34And so, time turns out to be an important sub-element of this story And then he sees the puppet, he's a marionette, and so, what's a marionette? Well a marionette, and he's sitting on the shelf.1:52:45A marionette is something that is quasi-animated, because it can move It doesn't really have a soul, but sort of acts like it has a soul1:52:54In the sense of anima and soul and animated, and, but a marionette is something that is being manipulated by something else behind the scenes1:53:03Right, it doesn't have it's own volition It's dependent on the will of something behind the scenes And so, there is a strong implication that whatever this thing is, it's half formed1:53:15and that it's, being manipulated by unseen forces behind unseen forces behind the facade1:53:25Well that is a Freudian idea, that's you, that's all of you, you know, you're pulled hither and fro by unconscious forces, and some of those are biological1:53:34and some of them are cultural, you know, and you think about people who are swept up in great ideological movements, like the communists or the fascists, those people are marionettes1:53:44That's exactly what they are, they all say the same thing, they all mouth the same words they all act the same way, and something is behind it1:53:53and the question is, what? Well that is the question and that's partly what this movie tries to figure out. So, you see this marionette, he's a half formed wooden headed puppet1:54:03and he has a little bit of potential, you know, and the cricket goes up and interacts with him and sees that he is made out of pretty good wood, and makes a little joke about having a wooden head1:54:12and you know, that's kind of obvious what that means, and you notice that the cricket is dressed like a tramp and when you first saw him, he wasn't, he was dressed like a 1920's millionaire1:54:23So, but here he is a tramp, and this is so interesting, it's like So this bug, that's a messiah, that's the introduction to the book1:54:33that's the conscience, is also a tramp with no home, it's like, what does that mean? And it took me a long time to sort that out, and it's like He has been everywhere, this tramp he has been everywhere, and1:54:45and he know, he's traveled the world, and, but he doesn't have a place, he doesn't have a home He hasn't made a relationship with anything real yet, he is kind of a potential1:54:57And this is one of the things that is really interesting about this movie because if you think about the cricket as a fragment of the hero and say, a reflection of the saviour, which is his relationship with J.C., of course1:55:10and the person who introduces the book then the story gets strange, because if it was merely a representation of the perfect person, the archetype of the hero1:55:20then the conscience would know everything, right? And it would just tell the puppet what to do, and that would be the end of it But that's a dull story, it's like, perfect conscience comes along, puppet does everything it says1:55:34Bingo! Perfection. But that isn't what happens, there is this weird idea that this thing that has got all these attributes Needs a home, and has to enter into a learning relationship with the thing that it's trying to transform1:55:49It's so sophisticated, because I could say, "You should do what your conscience tells you." It's like, well maybe not, maybe that's not exactly how it works1:55:58maybe your conscience isn't omniscient and omnipotent, maybe it's not God, right? It's a guide, but it's maybe smarter than you sometimes1:56:08Maybe because it's society in your head and obviously it's smarter than you sometimes because it tells you not to do something and you go do it and then You get into trouble and you think, "Well if I would have just listened."1:56:19but you don't, and that is interesting too, it's something that you don't have to listen to which is, seems to be associated with free will, it's weird, if your conscience knows what to do1:56:29why aren't you just a deterministic puppet of your conscience Christ! That would work a lot better, you wouldn't have to torture yourself, and you wouldn't make any mistakes, so1:56:38why the separation? Well maybe it's because the conscience is generic and so it has to be taught, it has to learn too, and so what you do is you have a dialogue with your conscience1:56:50it's something like that, and you expose yourself, to more and more of the world, and you get wiser and your conscience gets wiser and you mature together1:56:59and that's what happens in this story because the cricket starts out as a, this tramp you know, that is smarter than the puppet, but not as smart as he thinks he is, that's for sure1:57:08and, when he first starts to operate as a conscience he is a completely useless at it, he babbles of a lot of cliches about morality and then, he's late the first day for his job, and1:57:18he's just not very good at it, and so there is this weird idea that the conscience which is part of which puts you towards redemption is something that you actually have to interact with1:57:28over the course of your life in order for it to develop as you develop and, so then I would also say that the cricket represents at least in part what Jung described as the self1:57:38which is like the potential fully developed human being that sort of exists within you as a possibility, but it has to be It has to be manifested in the actual conditions of your life1:57:49and the conscience has to learn how to position itself here and now and it's got generic advice, and that's not good enough and so that's why the cricket is looking for a home, and so, he needs a home.1:58:00Even though he is all these other things we already says he was, he has to find a specific home before he can become who he could be1:58:09Well so, then Geppeto shows up, and he is kindly old guy, which is pretty much exactly what you would expect, and you know, he's a careful craftsman and he likes kittens, and you know, that's always a good thing1:58:21and he has some fish, and you know he's good at making things, and he has got a sense of humour and he is kind of playful and so he is the good father1:58:31fundamentally, he's the wise king, he's the positive archetype of the masculine, and that's what he is and so he is culture in it's positive manifestation, and he gives rise to this creation which is his puppet1:58:43which is what culture does, because you are a puppet of your culture, a marionette of your culture and so maybe you could be more than that and that's the other thing that is strange about this movie and it's strange about the mythological way of looking at the world1:58:57because scientifically deterministically, there is nature and there is culture and you are the deterministic product of the interaction between nauture and culture1:59:07there is nothing else to you than that, that's that! But the mythological world doesn't say that, it says something different It says that there is nature and culture, and then there is you!1:59:19And the you that's in there has choices and a destiny and that you actually affect the interplay of nature and culture in determining your own character1:59:29and it insists upon that, the oldest stories we have, there is always the hero and the archetypal mother and the archetypal father there is always those three things, there is never just two1:59:39So, from the narrative perspective, there is always implication that there is something autonomous about the hero of the story, and, you know, you can't account for that, we don't have a good way accounting that1:59:53for that from a scientific perspective, I was having a discussion with Sam Harris the other day which, was very2:00:03what would you say, he said we got wrapped around an axle, which is pretty much, Sam Harris is one of the four famous, you know atheists along with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennet, yeah2:00:16and so we were having a discussion and, he is a determinist just right down to the bottom it's like you are determined, you are determined, there is no free will2:00:26You're a deterministic machine and, you know, if you are a coherent scientist and you are a Newtonian, roughly speaking, you don't really have much choice other than to think that way, but that isn't how it seems to people!2:00:36And we don't treat each other that way, and our entire legal system is predicated on the idea that you do in fact have free will! So, well, can we account for it? Well no, and do we have a scientific model for it? No.2:00:50But then I would also say that we do not have a scientific model for consciousness, we don't know a damn thing about conciousness Which is why Dan Dennet's book, which was called "Consciousness Explained"2:01:01was referred to by its critics as "Consciousness Explained Away" Which is exactly right as far as I am concerned, because he took a mechanistic approach and I just don't think you get to do that, because2:01:12there is something really weird about consciousness, I mean the phenomanologists like Heidegger, who tried to radically transform Western philosophy, right from the bottom up2:01:22He basically said, "Well, you know, you can treat the world as if consciousness is primary and that human experience is reality, that's reality2:01:31and that it down't exist independently of consciousness in any explicable way" It's like, well, what's out there if there is nothing to experience it.2:01:40Well everything at once, it is something like that, it's not really comprehensible, as without a subject, the subject defines it and makes it real. Now you don't have to believe that but2:01:51at least I am telling you that there are thoroughly coherent philosophical positions that make that case very strongly, and that allow consciousness to exist as a phenomena and to take it seriously, and2:02:04you certainly act like you take it seriously, you act like there is a you and you make choices and you certainly treat other people that way2:02:13deterministic or not, you are still going to get angry when, you know, rude to you, and you are going to act as if they had some choice in the matter. Now maybe that's an illusion, possibly, but maybe it's not. And I would say the oldest stories that we have2:02:26always include that as not only the a fundamental element, but even as the fundemental element So, well so, you can think about that how ever you want, but2:02:37Anyways, so Geppetto, comes along and he is going to finish off the puppet And so what does he do to finish off the puppet, he gives it a voice!2:02:46He gives it a mouth! Well that's really really interesting, so In Genesis, in Genesis this is a very very complex idea, and it took people thousands of years to figure this idea out2:02:59and it's something like this, so At the beginning of everything there was chaos, and that was like potential, it was something like potential2:03:08the potential for being, and God who is God the Father in the Genesis account uses a faculty that he has, which is the word, to call being from chaos.2:03:22And that's the creation of being, right, it's the manifestation order from chaos and it's the word, the Logos, that, it's the Logos that's the tool that God uses to do that and that Logos2:03:36in Christianity is associated with Christ, which is a very weird thing, but the reason for that is that there is an idea that the divine element of the individual2:03:47is the thing that uses language, communicative language to call the world into being And that is what we do, as far we can tell, you make a decision, you think it through, you talk it over with your friends2:04:00you plot a course and the world manifests itself in relationship to you choice and it's for that reason, and it is for that reason that in Genesis and many other accounts2:04:10that Logos capacity is identified with human beings, it's like you have a small bit of that in you whatever that means and you participate in the process of2:04:20continually generating order out of chaos, and sometimes the reverse, you mediate between them And so, that in our, in Western culture, and it is certainly the case in other cultures as well, that2:04:34that's why you have rights! Fundamentally, that's why the law has to respect you is because you have got this spark of divinity in you, that's transcendent, that nobody gets to transgress against2:04:47And you say, "Well, do you believe that?" It's like, well, you act like you believe it! You treat other people like you believe it, or they are not very happy with you2:04:56So, it depends on what you mean, by believe, well you act it out. Well, do you accept it as a proposition? Well, I don't care if you accept it as a proposition frankly, because I think the best indicator of what you believe2:05:09is how you act, not what you say. Because what do you know about what you know, hardly anything. And so, actions speak louder than words and if you want to be treated properly by someone is that you want to treat them2:05:23You want them to treat you as a valuable autonomous entity, that's what you want And, so maybe you're not that, maybe you are a deterministic puppet2:05:32and what this strange movie suggests is that you are a kind of deterministic puppet but you don't have to be Alright, well the mouth goes on, and then Geppetto is happy about that and then they have a little dance, you know, they2:05:46They turn the music on and all these little music boxes, and they all play together and it's like harmony of some sort has been established, because that's what the music represents, and2:05:57there are layers of reality that are communicating with one another because that's what the music represents and then they have a little dance and the idea is that, well it's a good thing to let this puppet have it's own voice2:06:09Well that's an interesting idea because what the hell does it know, it's a wooden headed marionette Why the hell would you want something like that to talk? Well it's the same question you have in relationship to you children2:06:21It's like what do they know, they are two, or three, you know, they don't know anything Well so should you just tyrannize them, and make them do everything that you want, or are you going to let them have a bit of a voice?2:06:33And the question is whether you want them to be a puppet, or not. And if you don't want them to be a puppet, if you want them to grow up autonomous, then then you let them have a voice.2:06:43And you facilitate the development of that voice, and so and that's, and that's what you do if you don't want a marionette So, and Geppetto doesn't want a marionette, so he gives the puppet a voice, even though he knows it's just a puppet2:06:58and that it doesn't know anything And then, this is fantastic, the cricket is sitting up there watching that, he is pretty happy with it that's the first little scene you see there, and he is sitting by this other thing that is just not happy at all2:07:11And that's the terrible father, and you see it's a character that repeats throughout the entire movie, you see manifestations of the tyrannical father continually through the movie2:07:21in different characters, it's like he is played out by different roles And so, first of all the cricket is so thrilled about this, and then he looks at the frowning king there2:07:30Who is not happy that the puppet has been given a voice, he is a tyrant, right, he is the representation of a tyrant and a tyrant does not want you to have a voice And so, the cricket looks at him and says2:07:40"Well, you can't please everybody all the time" and it's just a tiny little fragment of a joke, you know, but it's. There is this old idea2:07:49I think that it comes from Chekov, and the idea is that, if you set a play up, and there is a gun, a rifle or a pistol on a table in the first act, it had better been used by the third act or it shouldn't have been there at all2:08:02And the idea is, you don't put anything in you play that's random, you never do that, it' like because this isn't life, this isn't life this is a work of art and everything2:08:14is connected and it is there by intent And so, this isn't accidental that this little king character doesn't like what is going on, or that he shows up.2:08:26So anyways, all the clocks go off and the music boxes go, and the have a little dance and everybody is happy about it And then, Geppetto notices what time it is, and there is a tremendous emphasis on time in this part of the movie2:08:39Because there are all these clocks going off, and they are all telling him what time it is, like 30 clocks go off, and then he takes watch out that and notices what time it is, it's like the idea that there is something about time2:08:51going on, is like whacked at you, you know dozens of times, so that you get it And it's a little joke that he pulls out his watch and he figures out that it is time from bed2:09:01Well, so now we are making the transition between the conscious world and the unconscious world OK, so there is an intimation in the movie that everything that happens now is in the unconscious world2:09:14and the way you know that is that, it's strange, because the movie moves in and out this underworld but at the very end when Pinocchio is transformed into a real boy2:09:24the last thing that Geppetto does is, I think that it's Geppetto, hit one of the pendulums and start all the clocks again2:09:33So it's as if, what happens from here onwards is part of a dream Now it's murky because, Pinocchio goes to school, and you know, there is the next day and all of that, but2:09:44and so those are sort of realistic elements, but then there is the whole going down into the ocean to find the whale thing that seems completely dreamlike But there is an intimation that we are in a different kind of world, and so2:09:56They all go to sleep, including the cricket. And so, then Geppetto notices the star! And, because he is a good guy he makes a wish on the star and we have already2:10:06explained why you might wish on a star, and what that might mean, and he makes a very interesting wish. It's not a self-serving wish, in fact it's quite the contrary, he doesn't wish that Pinocchio is an obediant son.2:10:21He doesn't wish that he produced someone who will work for him. He doesn't wish any of that, he wishes for what a good father would wish. Which is that the creation that he has brought forth2:10:33would develop it's capacity for autonomy. He wants him to become real, he wants him to become an actual living creature and not and not a wooden headed marionette2:10:43And so you would say that is what your father should wish for you, you know, and I have clients frequently whose father's weren't like that at all, they were tyrannical or they were negelectful or2:10:53or the punished the person every time they did something good, that's a real fun game. They competed with them and undermined them at every opportunity, they didn't want to produce someone strong and autonomous2:11:07They wanted to give birth to a slave and then diminish it as much as possible And so, that's bad, it's not good, and so Geppetto is not like that, so he says, "Well, I am going to wish for2:11:20something completely unreasonable", which is part of that ideal idea, right? And the unreasonable thing is that this puppet2:11:29could become real! Could actually take on it's autonomy and move forward. And so that's what he wishes.2:11:39And then they go to sleep And then the cricket starts to become driven mad by the noises of the clock, so it's like he is going into this state of hyper-alertness2:11:50And the clocks are clanging at him and Geppetto is snoring and he can even hear the little grains of sand falling out of the hourglass, he is becoming hyper-alert2:12:03And then he yells, "Stop!", and all the clocks stop Which is a pretty good trick for a cricket, you know, he is the master of time but also we are in a place where time has2:12:13come to a stop, we are outside of time. And one of the things that Freud pointed out about dreams is that, dreams are kind of outside of time. Now, here is what that means, is first of all they draw on eternal themes, that's part of it2:12:26but you know, you must had had this experience, Freud noted this carefully in the "Interpretation of Dreams" where you know you are sleeping and the alarm will go off, and the alarm noise is incorporated into the dream2:12:38and it's like, the dream has been going on for an hour in subjective time, and you wake up and you realize that it is the alarm clock It's like, and there is no reason why your dream time should be the same as real time because it is all going on in your imagination, but2:12:51It's amazing in some sense, how much can happen in such a short period of time in your imagination, and so it's outside of time, the world of fantasy is in some sense outside of time, and so, the cricket2:13:04tells time to stop, and it does. And then, the star, enlarges2:13:13and it turns into this blue fairy, whose got a celestial gown covered with stars and who has got wings, so she is some kind of ethereal being and, like, you don't have a problem with that2:13:28in the movie, it's like, "Yeah, sure, I mean you know, it's a fairy that came from a star, that makes perfect sense.", which of course it's makes no sense whatsoever right, it makes no sense, but you are willing to go along with it because,2:13:39on the one hand it makes no sense, and on the other hand it makes perfect sense It's like the fairy godmother idea, it's like, "Yeah, yeah fairy godmother, no problem, we got that."2:13:49And the idea there is that well, Nature comes to your aid, it's something like that, It's the benevolent force of Nature is on you side, now, not obviously, only on your side2:14:00because it opposes you as well, but And there is your own mother as well, who is also Nature whose on your side, and so2:14:09but there is an idea here and the idea is that if the father gets the wish right the aim right for the child then Nature will cooperate2:14:19Right, and that is true, I believe that that's true, is that if you set up your relationship, your cultural relationship with your child properly then they are far more likely to flourish, and so, you get the magic of Nature on your side, by2:14:33establishing the proper aim. And so that's what happens, Geppetto says, well this is what I am aiming at and because he is aiming at it, and because it is in the realm of possibility, maybe Nature comes to his service, and2:14:47that is how it works, that's exactly how it works because when you aim at something then, you muster your biological forces towards that goal, and, if the goal is2:14:59feasible, and attainable, then you will cooperate with yourself And so that's quite cool, Carl Rogers would call that2:15:09What's the word for that? I think he called it genuineness which is kind of weak but I think that is still what he called it, he sort of meant that, that's sort of what happens when your2:15:21goals and your physiological and biological being are alined well, and you're and you can communicate both, you are not full of internal contradictions And so, your conscious aims and your biological possibilities are manifesting themselves in the same direction2:15:38and so, that would be good! So anyways, the fairy shows up and she is quite sexually attractive, she is quite provocative and she charms the cricket who gets all, blushes and like, is all, you know embarrased and2:15:52overwhelmed by this like figure of celestial beauty and decides to cooperate, the conscience decides to cooperate and gets some responsibility, and so2:16:03the fairy allows the puppet to move without strings So that's kind of interesting, it's the intervention of Nature. Culture focuses the aim,2:16:13and then it's the intervention of Nature that produces the autonomy and that seems to be right, I mean even though it's not that understandable, it seems to be right. And then, so, she2:16:24takes the strings off Pinocchio, and you might say well that's partly because your child is not certainly not just a creature of culture, by no means, your child has a temperament, you'll see that right away2:16:35and that temperament will unfold and hopefully it will unfold in a cultural context that's amenable to it, and that the combination of those two produce something new.2:16:47He can talk, he can walk and so the good fairy basically tells him that he has got a bit of autonomy and now it is up to him to2:16:58like clue in a bit, and act properly, and learn the difference between good and evil, and to speak truthfully and all of that, it's a bit propagandistic that part of the movie, I would say, but it doesn't really matter it is kind of the inculcation of conventional morality2:17:11and, there's a fair bit to it, especially that he is supposed to tell the truth and, you know, he says he will, and the cricket is listening, and then2:17:21the puppet asks, "Well what does conscience mean?" because the fairy says always let your conscience be your guide and he says, "Well what does conscience mean?" and the bug, whose like all puffed up because he wants to impress the fairy2:17:33pops down and gets on his little matchbox and gives this like horrible little lecture about how to behave properly, that's just like ideological chatter, you can hardly even stand listening to it, and2:17:44it's supposed to be like that, it's generic moral advice that anyone could give that is kind of dull and also puffed up and grandiose, he's just not very good at it2:17:56So that's why he is on his little matchbox there, with his chest puffed out, and so he says, "That's just the trouble with the world today." [sarcastic falsetto] and I think that's his opening line, you know2:18:06He's diagnosing the whole world, and, you know, the fairy, she thinks he is kind of funny because he is And you know , it's sort of, there is a real interesting thing here going on because he's male, and he's2:18:18he's all puffed up with his knowledge, which is completely shallow and, he is put in contact with this like celestial feminine ideal and he just turns into a complete moron, and that's exactly what happens to men, it happens to them all the time2:18:30So, anyways, she decides to give him a chance and turns him into this conscience, and all of a sudden he's this 1920's millionaire, so he's, he has been ennobled, but then she tells him, that, you know2:18:44he has to journey along with Pinocchio in order for things to go properly, and he promises that he'll be a good conscience and do it and he already thinks that he can do it,2:18:53and that's why he is on the matchbox, podium, you know, espousing his morality, but the reality turns out to be much more complex2:19:02So! The bug has a little talk with the cricket [sic], the bug has a little talk with the puppet the bug tries to tell Pinocchio explicitly what it means to be good.2:19:14And, he gets completely tangles up in the explanation because what the hell does he know and the puppet doesn't understand anything says anyways, so there is message there, and the message is2:19:26the kind of knowledge that the conscience and the puppet are supposed to co-create, is not something that you can articulate easily as a table of rules, it's not like that2:19:37because life is too complicated, to just have five rules that you live by and that will solve every problem partly because the rules will conflict, that's a huge part of the problem, right2:19:48One moral guideline contradicts another in a situation, it's like you don't know what to do So anyways they decide that they're... They decide that they are just going to...2:19:59He says, Pinocchio says, "Well, I will be a god boy." and the cricket says, "Well that's the spirit!", and then, well then Geppetto gets wind of it, and they have a little, like, horror episode2:20:10and then, he finds out that the puppet can... he is autonomous and they have a little party, which tells you, exactly what Geppetto is up to, is, the autonomy emerges and he is happy about it it2:20:21So it's stamping home the notion that Geppetto is, in fact, a good guy and that is, in fact, what he wants So, it's like, the encouragement of your father is the precondition for the emergence of your individuality2:20:34And it also allows the feminine to play a role, both as Nature and perhaps as mother and so, the combination of those two things produces the autonomous individual, it's like that seems perfectly reasonable2:20:47So, off they go to sleep, the next day they wake up and it's a new day, and Pinocchio is off to school, and that's a good thing too, because2:20:57Geppetto isn't, and he is really excited about it, and so what that means is that He's been parented properly, he is going to go out in the world of his peers, which is where he belongs2:21:08and Geppetto isn't to worried about it, in fact, he is pushing him out the door, you know It's like, go, you can do it, this is the next thing! The kid isn't cowering in the corner and cowering in terror, with the parents freaking out about all the things that are going to go wrong, it's...2:21:23There is some faith in his ability, so he sees all the kids wandering by and Geppetto dresses him up, and sends him off to school.2:21:33And so, and so that's good, that's a happy family story, it's like, Mom and Dad got together, they decided that the kid was going to, you know, be competent and autonomous and ready to face the world, and so2:21:46out he goes, and so he's like five years old at this point and that is where we get that's were we are at in the story. And I think that that is a good place to stop, because the next thing that happens is,2:22:00anomaly essentially, Pinocchio goes off to be a good boy but it turns out that is a hell of a lot more complicated than he might think because there are actually, complications in the world, but also malevolence2:22:13Right, the desire for things not to go right, there are people who are not oriented towards the ideal, in any way at all, and Pinocchio is young and naive,2:22:25and so he has no defense what whatsoever against this malevolance, and that's, you know2:22:35That's not unexpected, and it also turns out that the conscience, the cricket, who is still not very clued in, oversleeps2:22:44And so he's just not there at a critical moment But I think that we will pick that up next week, because this is a good point in the plot to stop2:22:53The child has entered the broader world and has to cope with it And so, he's prepared because he had a wonderful father and he had a magical mother2:23:02and so he is prepared as you can be, he is even not completely a marionette anymore but, now it's up to him, that's the thing, now it's up to him, his parents have done basically what they could2:23:15And that's really about right, you know It's wise, I would say, psychologically Alright, so, that's that!0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 03: Marionettes and Individuals (Part 2)
0:00:000:00:11OK, so the last time we were here we got maybe a third of the way through this story0:00:23the story of Pinokio and the transformation of a marionette into something hypothetically real I'm gonna backtrack a few slides and it'll get us into it again0:00:35so you remember that the blue fairy, so I would say that the benevolent element of mother nature in the schemata that we are going to use to investigate mythology0:00:47was more or less allowed her entrance because Gepetto was a good guy and he wished for the right thing and so in some sense... here's a way of thinking about that... you know0:00:59genetic / environmental studies on children's temperament have revealed something quite interesting which is that the shared environment that children have within a family0:01:12so that would be what's the same about your environment and your brother's environment, the same doesn't have that much effect on your temperament or his temperament 'cause the presumption always was that within a family there is a shared environment, right?0:01:25and something was common about the environment to every child within that environment but there isn't much of a shared environmental effect on temperament0:01:34so then you can say, well that makes it appear as though isn't that relevant in relationship to the development of temperament but you could also suggest something else0:01:43you could suggest that if parenting is occurring properly, the effect of the shared environment should be very close to zero and the reason for that is that you establish an individual relationship with each child0:01:58and the environment is actually a microenvironment that's composed of your observations of this child and that specific child's interaction with you like to some degree, if there is a shared environment, that means that you're forcing the same principles on every child0:02:12so my suspicions are, although I don't know this, and the research hasn't been done that in bad families there's a shared environmental effect, but in good families that minimizes0:02:23so that lets the child's biological predisposition, roughly, manifest itself with support and in some positive manner0:02:32well, I don't want to extend the analogy too far, but you can imagine that, and this is what this film proposes, if you aim properly in relationship to your child0:02:44what you're trying to do is to establish an individual relationship and to allow them to move towards whatever their particular expression of individuality happens to be0:02:54and that's... that would be the same as allowing nature to take its course in some sense at least nature in its positive guise, and that's exactly what happens here the other thing that happens, of course, is that the cricket, for reasons that aren't clear, precisely0:03:09is knighted by the blue fairy and serves as Pinokio's conscience although he isn't very good at it, which is a very peculiar thing, and quite a marked point that the film is making0:03:22that that conscience actually has something to learn, too and there's actually a Freudian element to that, you know, because Freud thought of the superego as the internalization, roughly speaking, of the father,0:03:34and it could be very severe, the superego, so like a really strict father, really tyrannical father inside your head although I think it's better to think about the superego as the internalized representation of society at large0:03:47mediated to some degree through your parents, 'cause it's not as if your father, even assuming he's tyrannical is the inventor of all those tyrannical rules, he's the propagator of them0:03:58but he's actually a proxy voice, even if it's just for the harsh side of society, he's the proxy voice for society and because we're social creatures, the utility of having an internal social voice to guide you0:04:12although, again, you seem to be able to follow it or not follow it, which I also find spectacularly interesting because, obviously if it was an unerring guide, you could just follow it0:04:22and if it was an unerring guide, you wouldn't need free will either, because you could just act out the dictates of this internal representation that isn't what you do0:04:32so anyways, the proposition here is that the conscience exists, but it's a relatively flawed entity it needs to be modified as well by nature0:04:42which is quite interesting, 'cause the blue fairy knights him, 'cause you also might think of the conscience as only something that's socially constructed right, which is the more typical viewpoint, but I don't buy that for a second0:04:53because I believe firmly, and I believe the Piagetian interpretation of child development more or less bears this out, is that there are parameters within which conscience has to operate0:05:07and it's sort of like this, it's like, it's the same parameters that govern fair play, we'll say that and so you can say there's fair play within a game, and there's fair play across sets of games0:05:20and the set of games is pretty much indistinguishable from the actual environment if you think all the things you do as nested games, at some point the spread of that is large enough so that it encompasses everything you do0:05:34which includes the environment, and so I believe that you're adapted to the set of all possible games, roughly speaking all possible playable games, something like that0:05:45and that you know the rules for that, which is why, we talked about this a little bit, why you're so good at identifying cheaters we have a module for that, according to the evolutionary psychologists0:05:54and not only you identify them, but you remember them, it really sticks in your mind and there's other evidence, too, one piece of evidence that I love, well, there's a couple0:06:06one I would derive from Frans de Waal, who's a famous primatologis, and he studied the prototype morality that emerges in chimpanzees and it's very much nested in their dominance structures0:06:18you know, because you could think of morality in some sense as the understanding of the rules by which the dominance hierarchy operates, right and so you could say, well, the biggest, ugliest, meanest chimp...0:06:29and the male dominance hierarchies in chimps seem to be the predominant ones, although the females also have a dominance hierarchy it's not quite so clear in bonobos, which seem to be more female-dominated0:06:39but in any case, the primary chimp dominance structure is male and you could think, well it's like the caveman chimp who's biggest and toughest who necessarily rules, and who rules longest0:06:52but that isn't what de Waal found; see, the problem with being... mean, lets say and not negotiating your social landscape, and not trading reciprocal favors0:07:04is that no matter how powerful you are as an individual, two individuals three quarters your power could do you in and that happens with the chimps fairly regularly; if the guy on top is too tyrannical0:07:18and doesn't make social connections, then weaker chimps, males, make good social connections and when he's not in such good shape, they take him down, and viciously too0:07:27de Waal has documented some unbelievably horrendous acts of, let's call it, regicide among the chimpanzee troupes that he studied, mostly in the Arnhem zoo0:07:37the big troupe there, that's been there a long time but he's very interested in prototypical morality, and here's some other examples of prototypical morality0:07:47emerging among animals, there's many of them, but one is you know, if two wolves have a dominance dispute, again that would be more likely among the male wolves but it doesn't really matter, they basically display their size, and they growl ferociously0:08:00and they puff up their hair so they look bigger, and you can see cats do that when they go into fight or flight not only do they puff up, including their tail, but they stand sideways0:08:10and the reason they do that is because they look bigger right, 'cause they're trying to put up the most intimidating possible front so anyways, if two wolves are going at it, what they're really trying to do is to size each other up0:08:22and they're trying to scare each other into backing off, fundamentally because, see, the worst-case scenario is like, you're wolf number one, and I'm wolf number two0:08:31and we tear each other to shreds, but I win, but I'm so damaged after that wolf number three comes in and takes me out so, like, there's a big cost to be paid even for victory in a dominance dispute, if it degenerates into violence0:08:43and animals, and human beings, but animals in particular, have evolved very, very specific mechanisms to escalate dominance disputes towards violence step by step0:08:56so that they don't... so that the victor doesn't risk incapacitating himself by winning so what happens with the wolves is that, you know, they growl at each other and posture display, and maybe they even snap at each other0:09:09but the probability that they're gonna get into a full-fledged fight is pretty low and what happens is, one of the wolves backs off, and flips over and shows his neck and that basically means: "all right, tear it out," and the other wolf says:0:09:22though of course he doesn't, "well, you're kind of an idiot, and you're not that strong, but we might need you to take down a moose in the future and, you know, despite your patheticness, I won't tear out your throat"0:09:32and then they've established their dominance position, and then, from then on, at least for some substantial period of time the subordinate wolf gives way to the dominant wolf0:09:41but at least the subordinate wolf is alive, and, you know, he might be dominant over other wolves and so, everyone in the whole hierarchy has sorted that out either through mock combat or through combat itself0:09:52and, you know, the low-ranking members aren't in the best possible position, but at least they're not getting their heads torn off every second of their existence0:10:01so there's even some utility in the stability of the dominance hierarchy for the low-ranking members 'cause at least they're not getting pounded, getting threatened, which is way better0:10:11I mean it's not good, but it's way better than actual combat and then there's the example of rats, which I love, this is Jaak Panksepp's work and he wrote a book called affective neuroscience, which I highly, highly recommend0:10:23I have a list of readings, recommended readings on my website it's a brilliant book, and he's a brilliant psychologist, really, one of the top psychologists as far as I'm concerned0:10:33both theoretically and experimentally, a real genius, he's the guy who discovered that rats laugh when you tickle them they laugh ultrasonically, so you can't actually hear them, but if you record it and slow it down0:10:45then you can hear them giggling away when you tickle them with an erase, which is sort of like their mother's tongue it's often what lab people use as a substitute for the licking of the little rat by the mother0:10:55so, and he discovered the paly circuit in mammals, which is like a major deal, right he should get a Nobel prize for that, that's a big deal to discover an entire motivational circuit0:11:05whose existence no one had really predicted, you know, apart from the fact that obviously mammals play and even lizards maybe, some of them are social lizards, seem to play0:11:15so, anyhow, what Panksepp observed, and I think this is a brilliant piece of science is that, first of all, juvenile male rats in particular like to rough and tubmle play0:11:28like to wrestle, and they actually pin each other like little kids do, or like adult wrestlers do they pin their shoulders down, and that basically means you win, and so, OK, so that's pretty cool0:11:38but what's even cooler, I think, well there's three things, one is: the rats will work for an opportunity to get into an arena where they know that play might occur0:11:47and so that's one of the scientific ways of testing an animal's motivation, right so imagine you have a starving rat and it knows that it's got food down in the end of a corridoor0:11:57you can put a little spring on its tail and measure how hard it pulls, and that gives you and idication of its motivational force now, imagine the starving rat that's trying to get to some food, and you have a little spring on its tail, and you waft in some cat odor0:12:11so now that rat is starving and wants to get out of there, he's going to pull even farther towards the food so getting away plus getting forward are separate motivational systems, and if you can add them together it's real potent0:12:23and part of the reason why in the future authoring exercise that you guys are gonna do as the class progresses you're asked to outline the place you'd like to end up, which is your desired future0:12:33and also the place that you could end up if you let everything fall apart so that your anxiety chases you and your approach systems pull you forward0:12:43you're maximally motivated then, and it's important, because otherwise you can be afraid of pursuing the things you wanna pursue right, and that's very common, and so then the fear inhibits you as the promise pulls you forward0:12:56but it makes you weak, because you're afraid; you wanna get your fear behind you, pushing you and so what you wanna be is more afraid of not pursuing your goals than you are of pursuing them0:13:07it's very, very helpful; and lots of times in life, and this is something really worth knowing you know, and this is one of the advantages to being an autonomous adult0:13:16you don't get to pick the best thing, you get to pick your poison you have two bad choices, and you get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through and every choice has a bit of that element in it, and so, if you know that it's really freeing0:13:30because otherwise you torture yourself by thinking: "well, maybe there's a good solution to this, compared to the bad solution" it's like, no, no, sometime's there's just risky solution 1, and risky solution 20:13:41and sometimes both of them are really bad, but you at least get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through and that's... that actually makes quite a bit of difference, because you're also facing it voluntarily then0:13:53instead of it chasing you, and that is an entirely different psychophysiological response challenge vs threat, it's not the same, even if the magnitude of the problem is the same0:14:05and so putting yourself in a challenging, let's call it, mindframe, you can't just do that by magic putting yourself in a challenging mindframe is much easier on you psychophysiologically0:14:15'cause you don't produce... you don't go into the generalized stress response to the same degree and you're activating your exploratory and seeking systems, which are dopaminergically mediated, and that involve positive emotion0:14:26so if you can face something voluntarily, rather than having it chase you, it's way better for you psychophysiologically so, that's partly why, well, it's worthwhile to go find the dragon in its lair instead of waiting for it to come and eat you0:14:42so, and especially if you also add the idea that if you go find the dragon in its lair you might find it when it's a baby, instead of a full-fledged bloody monster that is definitely gonna take you down0:14:53and so that's part of the reason why... well there's a whole bunch of things that emerge out of that observation like: don't avoid small problems that you know are there0:15:04face them, because they'll grow into big problems all by themselves and you can think about... imagine the tax department sends you a notification, you owe them, like, 300 dollars0:15:15well it's, you know, that's annoying, maybe you don't even wanna open the letter or maybe if you do, you just put it on the shelf, but that damn thing doesn't just sit there like a piece of paper on the shelf0:15:25right, you ignore that for 5 or 6 years, it's gonna become attached to all sorts of horrible things and if you ignore it long enough... you get the idea, it's gonna turn into something that's completely unlike the little piece of paper that it's written on0:15:39and many, many problems in life are like that, you'll see that they pop their ugly little head up, and you know and you might wanna turn away, you might not want to think about it0:15:51which is the easiest way of turning away, right, you just don't attend to it it's not like you repress it or anything like that, you just fail to attend to it and that's a... really, as a long-term strategy it's dismal0:16:03it's also something, I think, that's more characteristic of people who are high in neuroticism and high in agreeableness 'cause agreeable people don't like conflict and people who are high in neuroticism, or high in negative emotion, are hit harder per unit of uncertainty or threat0:16:18and so, you know, and that's partly why in psychotherapy a lot of times the people you see need assertiveness training so that would be the opposite of agreeableness, or they need help to get their anxiety and emotional pain under control0:16:30those are not the only reasons, there's antisocial behavior, but you can't fix that in therapy in all likelyhood there's alcoholism, there's lotsa, lotsa other reasons, but those are two major reasons0:16:39so anyways, there is a... that was all to telly you that... oh yes, back to the rats so okay, the rats are pulling on... you can measure rat motivation by how hard they pull on the spring, let's say0:16:52and they're more motivated if they're running away and they're running towards, but let's go back to play so, you can take juvenile rats who haven't been able to play for a while, maybe they've been isolated0:17:02or maybe they just haven't been able to engage in physical activity, like many schoolchildren that you might be thinking about neither allowed to play nor engage in physical activity, and there's a reason I'm telling you that0:17:15so anyways, you get one of these little rats, and you can measure how hard he'll pull to go out and play or how many buttons he'll push, you know, and that gives you an indication of his motivation0:17:24so anyways, you can see that the play-deprived juvenile rat will fight harder to play than a non-play deprived juvenile rat and so you can infer that the rat wants to go play0:17:37and, you know, you do that... you do the same measurement with everyone around you if they wanna do something, you're gonna poke and prod at them to see what sort of things they're willing to overcome0:17:47in order to go and do that, you'll object even if you don't really object it's like... it's a measurement device, and if they're willing to overcome a bunch of your objections0:17:56then you think: "oh, well, maybe they really want to" and that's another thing to really know: if there's something you want, you need about five arguments about why you want it0:18:06because the probability that the person who's opposing you will have five arguments about why you should't have it is very low they just won't have thought it through enough; so the other thing that happens in the future authoring exercise0:18:18is that you're asked to articulate the reasons for all the goals that come out of your vision of the future so you're asked like: "why would it be good for you? why would it be good for your family? why would it be good for broader society?"0:18:30so that gives you three levels of argumentation right there and if you have it articulated down into detail, and it's related to other important goals they you're a hell of a thing to argue with, because people just aren't that deep0:18:43by which I mean that they just don't have that many levels of explanation or objection and it's also really useful in relationship to your own mind, because if you want to do something that's difficult0:18:53and that requires energy, a lot of different subsystems in your mind are gonna throw up objections it's like, "well, maybe that isn't what you should be doing right now, maybe you should be doing the dishes0:19:03or vacuuming, or watching TV, or looking at YouTube" if you're really sneaky, when you're trying to do something hard, what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that 's not quite as hard, so that you can feel justified in not doing the thing you're supposed to0:19:16'cause you're doing somethig else useful, and if you give in to that temptation, which you often will then it wins, and because it wins, it gets a little dopamine kick, and it grows stronger0:19:26anything you let win the internal argument, grows and anything you let be defeated, shrinks 'cause it's punished, it doesn't get to have its way0:19:37so that's another thing really to remember, don't practice what you do not wanna become and because those are... they're neurological circuits, you build those thing in there man, and they're not going anywhere0:19:49you can build another little machine to inhibit them, that's the best you can do once they're in there, you can't get them out, so... and then the one's you built to inhibit can be taken out by stress0:19:59and the old habits will come back up, so you gotta be careful what you say and what you do because you build yourself that way; so anyways, back to the rats0:20:09okay, so the little rat gets to go out there and play, now imagine one little rat is paired with another rat but the other little rat is 10% bigger, 10% in juvenile rats is enough to attain permanent dominance0:20:21so the 10% bigger rat will win the first wrestling, and so that's what happens and then... so the little rat gets pinned, and maybe they play a bit, and then they're done with it0:20:33and so you separate them, then you let them play again, and the next time what happens is that the subordinate rat does the invitation to play and that's like, you know, like a dog does when he wants to play0:20:44you can recognize that, it kind of splays its feet apart, and looks up and looks interested and then it sort of dances around; you can do it with any kid that has a clue, you know0:20:53that hasn't been destroyed by adults, if your little 3-year-old, or 4-year-olds are better for this if you go like this, like, they know exactly what's gonna happen, you know, they're ready to dart back and forth0:21:02and they'll usually smile, and kids love rough and tumble play, which is now basically illegal in all daycare seriously, it's seriously is, kids need it so desperately, 'cause it teaches them the limits of their body0:21:16and your body, and it teaches them what's painful and what isn't and it teaches them the dance of play, and without that they're just little disembodied blobs0:21:26like, they have no finesse, that's what you're checking out when you dance with someone, you know you're seeing if they have that fluency and facility for mutual reciprocal action0:21:36embodied in them; and if they're kinda like this, you know, and don't have any sense of rhythm and don't pay any attention to you and all of that, you have reason to question whether they actually inhabit their body0:21:48and whether they can engage in a mutual interaction, physical interaction that's going to be reciprocal and mutually satisfying it's really important to check out; and a lot of that rough and tubmle play, even interactions between a child and its mother0:22:02if you have a happy mother and a happy infant, and you videotape them, and you speed up the video tape, you'll see that they're dancing so one responds, then the other responds, then the other responds, it might be just with eye gaze, and movement, and all of that0:22:16but there's a dynamic interplay, which you don't see with depressed mothers and their infants so, okay, so back to play, so the little rat, who is the subordinate one, he has to do the invitation0:22:28and then the big rat can agree to play, 'cause he's in the dominant position but if you pair them repeatedly, and this is really worth thinking about0:22:38because, you see, morality emerges out of repeated interactions because, you might say, if you only interact with someone once, you might as well just take advantage of them and run off0:22:48that's what a psychopath does, by the way, and there is room in the environmental niche for psychopaths but they have to keep moving around, 'cause otherwise people figure out who they are0:22:58so they just move around, and they can take advantage of one person, you know, maybe five times, or ten times, or something and then the reputation spreads, and they gotta get the hell out of there0:23:08but... so it's not a good long-term strategy, unless you can't think of a better one so anyways, if you repeatedly pair these rats, unless the big rat lets the little rat win at least 30% of the time0:23:20the little rat will not ask the big rat to play and that is... it's a staggering discovery, it's a staggering discovery because you've got the emergence there of an implicit morality, essentially0:23:33that's even incarnated in rats, that emerges across multiple play sessions it's like, yes, exaclty, that's exactly what Piaget said about the emergence of morality0:23:42it's exactly the same idea, at the rat level, so it's a massively... and the fact that there's a circuit, a separate neurophysiological circuit0:23:51that's actually specialized for that sort of thing is also a big deal now the other thing Panksepp figured out is that if you deprive juvenile rats of the opportunity to engage in rough and tumble play0:24:02their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly and they become impulsive and restless, and then you can fix them with methylphenidate or ritalin0:24:11and those are the drugs that are used to fix hyperactive kids, most of who are male and that's because, well, really, you're gonna take your six-year-old, your five-year-old0:24:22you're gonna put them in a desk, you're gonna get them to sit there for six hours, that's your plan, right? that's a stupid plan; and they're denied the opportunity to engage in play0:24:34and that means that their ability to become social is being impaired it may cause neurological impairment, that's what the rat evidence suggests0:24:43and then you suppress that with amphetamines, 'cause amphetamines actually activate the play circuit they activate a different circuit, which will suppress the play circuit0:24:53so it's very, very... it's not very wise, and I'm not gonna go off on that tangent because I could tell you why the school systems were set up that way, which I probably will at some point0:25:04because it's quite and interesting story in and of itself, and it's the reason all you guys are sitting in desks right now somebody laughingly referred to this once as grade 15, that was pretty funny, given the look of the bloody place, you know0:25:17hideous... okay so, now, this is an interesting thig, so you got the emergence of morality in, say chimps0:25:27you got the emergence of morality in wolves, you got the emergence of morality in rats and the morality governs sequential interactions or group interactions, they have to repeat0:25:37because, because it's an emerging property of social or repetitive interactions that's why, you can't just localize it in one instance, it's repeated0:25:47and there's been computer simulations of this they help you figure out how you might attain victory across games, across time maybe you need a strategy, and there's a very simple strategy, which, I believe is called "modified tit for tat"0:26:01so if you're nice to me, I'm nice back, and if you do something bad to me, I do something bad back but imagine you run that out in sequences of behavior, and see who does with what strategy across time0:26:13or an alternative strategy... [?] here's the best strategy: I trust you, you trust me, we start interacting you screw up, I whack you, and then I forgive you, and we start again0:26:23that's modified tit for tat, and so... it's a very simple algorithm; no one has come up with a better algorithm in a computerized simulation of game space than that particular strategy0:26:36so it's like: trust but don't be a pushover, if someone violates the rules, you gotta nail them but then you don't hold a grudge, you open the door to further interactions0:26:46so, pretty smart, pretty smart and, okay, so anyways... so what this means, 'cause rats can't talk, and wolves can't talk, and chimpanzees can't talk0:26:55and what that means, just as Piaget suggested, was that the morality, the development of the morality precedes the development of the linguistic ability to describe the rules for the morality0:27:06he said exactly the same thing about kids, right, is that they learn to play games before they know what the rules are to the games and so, you see that when you're playing peek-a-boo with a kid, they can pick that up really young0:27:18they get that right away, and there's... you can play with kids almost immediately after they're born, if you play simple enough games so they've got that deep, and they're unbelievably playful0:27:28so, they've got that circuitry ready to go right off the bat, and it's one of the things that makes kids so much fun because they just like to play all the time, and so if you... if the play circuit in you hasn't died0:27:42which is a bad thing, then you can use that a lot with your kids, and it's one of the things that helps you love them so that's a good thing, so, okay0:27:51so, the point is that the damn morality emerges before the representation of the morality it's a big deal to know that, and that it emerges as a consequence of repeated social interaction0:28:03so it's not a top-down thing, it's a bottom-up thing now, Piaget says: well, it's not just bottom-up, because what happens with human beings is that they learn to play the games...0:28:13one of his experiments was: watch seven-year-olds, I think that's the right age, play marbles and then he noticed that they can play with each other, and that they can follow the rules0:28:25but that if you take the individual seven-year-old out of the game, and you say: what are the rules? they give incoherent and incomplete explanations of the rules so what that means is they don't really represent the rules, but they can act them out0:28:38and have a partial representation of what they're acting out now, when they get older, the rule representation starts to fall into alignment with the actual rules of the game0:28:47and you can imagine that's why [?], because when they're playing something like marbles, they're gonna have discussions like: you're cheating or: you're not allowed to do that, 'cause they're always gonna be pushing the envelope a little bit0:28:58and then the group is gonna render a judgment on whether or not that's appropriate and out of that the rules are going emerge, but they're not rules to begin with, they're patterns of behavior0:29:07it's not the same thing as a rule, a rule describes a pattern of behavior but a pattern of behavior is a pattern of behavior, it's something that's acted out0:29:16so, there's the individual within the group and then the interactions of the individuals within the group produce a hierarchical arrangement or multiple hierarchical arrangements, those are games, roughly speaking, or stories0:29:29nested iside an overarching story, which is the fundamental culture right, and that's nested within a whole bunch of competing cultures that have some commonalities0:29:38or they would just be at war all the time, which, you know, to some degree they are so, okay, now, you see that... back to the movie, you see that happening in the movie0:29:51I mean it's very, very quick, but the blue fairy turns the bug into the conscience and then the bug tries to explain to Pinokio what the rules of morality are0:30:02but the thing is the bug doesn't know, because he's just a bug, and you know, he's just not omniscient, so the best he can do is to come up with, like, a propagandistic semantic, verbal representation0:30:15that's internally contradictory, and when he tells Pinokio, Pinokio has no idea what he's talking about and neither does the bug, that's the thing; and so...0:30:24so what happens is this, the cricket says: well Pinok, maybe you and I had better have a little heart-to-heart talk and the puppet says: why? and the cricket says: well, you wanna be a real boy, don't you?0:30:36alright, sit down son, now you see the world as full of temptations - temptations? - yes, temptations, they're the wrong things that seem right at the time0:30:47but even though the right things may seem wrong sometimes, sometimes the wrong things may be right at the wrong time or vice versa, understand? - no!0:31:00no, and neither did the cricket, and that's actually very nicely done in that piece of the movie because you just wanna slap him as soon as he starts talking like that0:31:11because he gets up on his little matchbox and lectures, and he's dull and tyrannical, both at the same time and so there's nothing genuine about what he's saying, he's imitating something that isn't him0:31:22so he's really acting like a puppet at that point, too, and it doesn't work at all and so Pinokio says: I'm going to try to be a good boy; and the cricket says: well that's the spirit, son0:31:33and then away they go, so... alright, so then we're at the next day, 'cause this all happens in one night we're at the next day, and you know, it's a nice day, and there's these birds flying around0:31:44that's actually, that's a bit of foreshadowing there, you know so, um, you have to remember, when you watch something like this movie0:31:53not a single bit of it is random or accidental, none of it because, you know, they had to draw I don't remember how many frames per second these things are0:32:04thirty, maybe, if it's high-quality animation; so someone had to paint thirty pictures to get a second of this you're not doing that accidentally, it's really expensive, and everyone has to agree on exactly what's going to happen0:32:16and you might say: well, do the people who are doing this consciously know what they're doing? and the answer to that is: well, sort of, just like you do, it's yes, they know, and no, they don't0:32:27and they know because they're really smart and gifted, and all that, but they don't know, because it's not all articulated plus they're working in a group, so they know and don't know, just like you do when you're watching it0:32:38and so... and when you do anything else... now, they're also guided by what you might call... they're guided by their unconscious in the Freudian, and in the cognitive way, partly because0:32:50your unconscious value structures determine the direction and content of your perceptions so it's built right into the way you move your eyes, 'cause you tend to look at things you value0:33:00right, or at things you're afraid of, like you look at things with valence and part of the decision about what has value is dependent on the implicit structure of your moral system0:33:11because morality is about what's good, and what isn't and that's been partly a conscious construction of you, but it's partly partly something you've been... you've picked up by interacting with people like mad since you were born0:33:21you don't know all the rules anymore than the damn cricked did you just don't, and you can't, 'cause you're too complicated, but you act them out0:33:31and then you also have representations of how people act, in your imagination that's what a dream is, that's what a fantasy is, that's what that little movie that plays inside your head when you remember what you did is0:33:43and you only remember the gist, you know, so even the imagistic representation of your behavior in your past, which is basically your episodic memory0:33:52it's already selecting, and molding, and turning it into a relatable story it can't help but do that, it's the only way you can represent it0:34:01and so you don't know how you do that or why you do that, but part of it's governed by this implicit morality it's part of your procedural memory, part of the way you act, part of the way you move your eyes, and listen to things, and focus on them0:34:14that's all been instantiated inside of you because of your biology, but also this immense social project that you're continually engaged in0:34:23and so, that informs what you remember, it informs what you imagine, it informs what we collectively imagine it informs what we can collectively understand0:34:32and partly what you're doing while you become conscious of yourself is to map the implicit structures that already constitute you0:34:41from society into explicit representation that's what self-understanding means; and you know, when you have that moment of insight about something you've done0:34:51it's like you're watching this repetitive behavior that you've manifested, probably that got you in trouble you know, it's your characteristic way of falling accidentally into chaos0:35:00and you talk about it, your problems, you talk about them with your friends, you talk about them and maybe you have dreams about them, and you're trying to relate them and you have memories about them that you can't get rid of, 'cause they're negatively toned0:35:11so you talk about them, and then someone comes up with a little statement that links them together causally and you thing: aha! that's what I'm doing; and then maybe you can stop doing it0:35:21or at least maybe then you can thing of some strategies for not doing it anymore but it's not like you know, it's like you're acting it out, you know it that way0:35:32but until the representation matches that pattern, that click of insight doesn't occur and that's like a revelation, it's a really good way of thinking about it0:35:43because the knowledge is there in its implicit form, and all of a sudden, bang! it's been made explicit as a fantasy maybe, or also as a set of semantic statements0:35:53you know, maybe you have a crush on someone and you don't notice it and maybe you find yourself having a fantasy about them, you think: oh! that means something!0:36:03maybe you don't want to know that that's what you want, but the fantasy will tell you and one of the things Jung suggested, and this is sort of out of the freudian tradition of free association0:36:15is: watch yourself, watch your fantasies, because they're always happening, and they'll tell you something and so, one of the things I do when I'm interacting with my clients is we'll have a discussion, and then their eyes will drift a little bit0:36:29and I'll know that something's flitted through their mind, you know and that means we've touched on something that has a multiplicity of elements0:36:38and so I'll stop and say: look, I noticed that you... maybe you teared up, that's another thing to really watch or maybe you laughed, or you drifted at least, it's like... it's because some other thought has entered your field of consciousness0:36:49and if you can get the person to grab those thoughts, to notice them then you can often figure out the avenues along which that particular conversation might unfold0:36:59that's a complex, that's a Jungian complex or a psychoanalytic complex it's like, there's an emotional core that produces a whole range of associated ideas0:37:08and that thing's got a life, it's like a micropersonality, and it might have resentment in it, might have anger it's often negative emotion-tinged, because negative emotion-tinged episodes are still problems0:37:22and they will emerge automatically, 'cause you're threat detection systems force them onto your consciousness, essentially so you watch, and when you drift... you'll drift, and the fantasy is partly a representation of of the problem space0:37:36you know, that happens when you wake up at three in the morning and you're worried about things right, 'cause actually what happens is you wake up during threat processing and if you're depressed, actually that gets so intense, you can't sleep, so then you just lay there all night, worrying0:37:49not fun, and those are fantasies about the negative elements of your past, present and future and the fantasies can also breed solutions, and that's partly why Freud regarded dreams as wish-fulfillments0:38:02it's partly... and he wasn't... that was where he stopped; it's not correct it's partially correct, it's like the fantasy will provide you with a problem and a potential solution0:38:15but they're more like problem-identification mechanisms, the fantasies, with the possibility of a solution built in0:38:24and so, a way of thinking about that is that you can generate potential futures so they're like each segregateable environments, according to the rules of your fantasy0:38:36then you can generate little avatars of yourself that inhabit each of those little universes, and you can run them as simulations and then you can watch what happens in the simulation, and if it's a catastrophy, then you don't have to act it out0:38:47and that's exactly, not exactly, that's akin to what you're doing when you go watch a movie except that is much more coherent and well thought-through, than just a dream, which is often quite fragmentary0:39:00that's partly 'cause the dream is willing to sacrifice coherence to play with category structures you know, and that's why in dreams things can change one thing into another really weirdly0:39:12or scenes can change from one scene into another without a logic, the logic gets loosened so that the expanse of your thinking can widen and it's dangerous to do that, and that's partly why you do it while you're asleep and paralyzed0:39:26you know, you don't run around and act out your pseudopodal fantasies, where you're stretching yourself out into the world there's no risk, exactly, although it can be bad enough so you'll wake up in terror0:39:39but that's better than being in a crocodile's mouth by a large margin anyways, back to these birds, these are used later in the movie as manifestations of the Holy Spirit, roughly speaking0:39:50and of course that's a standard Christian symbol, although, as I mentioned the dove often represents the Holy Spirit, and we'll talk about that later0:39:59but this movie has very strong pagan elements in it, as I mentioned before as opposed to strictly Christian symbolism0:40:08but that's foreshadowing, and what it foreshadows is that, well, a new day has dawned it's the emergence of new consciousness, and everything last night went well, really well0:40:19everything in the... let's call it the unconscious, say, after time stops, that all went well, and so the new day is full of promise and so, the birds are singing, and the sun is shining, and, like, hurray0:40:30this is the next scene, right, so it sets the tenor for that scene just like the introductory song does so anyways, then you see all these kids playing and enthusiastic, so they're off to school0:40:44which is presented in a positive light, and so that's where you get socialized so Pinokio's ready to go beyond the boundaries of the familial home0:40:53and he's ready because his father prepared him, and his mother prepared him and so he goes off, and he's not going off alone, he's going with his conscience you can think about it, again, as the internalized representation of nature and society0:41:07and so he's not going out there alone, even though he's not very good at it he's pretty excited about it, and so is Gepetto; see, Gepetto isn't standing there paralyzed with terror0:41:17and the kid isn't phobic of the outside world, and so he's treating it as an adventure even though, well, it's an adventure, but adventures can be dangerous0:41:29you can imagine a kid, especially one who's, like, high in neuroticism, who hasn't been encouraged sufficiently to overcome that, let's say0:41:39their primary idea might be: well, what if the other kids don't like me that's a big one; what if the teachers don't like me, what if the other kids won't play with me it's like, yeah, what if, that's rough, man, and if you're not a playful kid, it could easily be the case0:41:55so... but that's not Pinokio, he's like, spinning out, ready to go and so... good, good, he's got... naive, but enthusiastic, ok, well at least that gets the ball rolling0:42:06now, you've got these two evil creatures here, the fox and the cat I think this one's based on one of the Marx brothers, actually, Harpo Marx, who, I believe, never said anything0:42:17but, be that as it may, they're these ne'er-do-well characters, the fox in particular now fox is standard trickster animal, right, it's a... classic animal, maybe because it's good at hiding, and it's good at hunting0:42:33I don't know exactly why, but coyotes are like that, too they're classic trickster animals, he's kinda like Wile E. Coyote, in fact0:42:43you know, the Warner Brothers character who's genius at large, and whose arrogance continually gets him wallopped and this character has a lot of features like that, but he feigns being an English gentleman of the 1890s0:42:59and pretends to be educated, and has a kinda high-blown way of talking, and he's a fraud through and through and he's got this sidekick who's barely there at all, and he doesn't treat him that well0:43:15but he's got someone to lord it over, so that keeps his dominance hierarchy thing going well and the fact that he's like a second-rate companion, well, he never really notices that0:43:25although he'll treat him contemptuously whenever he gets a chance so anyways, they're walking down the street, and the fox is bragging away about some crooked thing that he's done0:43:35how he pulled the wool over someone's eyes, and he confuses that with wisdom and intelligence and one of the things that you see, this is worth knowing too, because0:43:44if you're preyed upon by a psychopath, which you will be to some degree at some point in your life the psychopath, who will be narcissistic, will presume that you're stupid0:43:56and that you deserve to be taken advantage of, because you're naive and stupid, so it's actually a good thing that he's doing it and his proof... and I'm saying "he," because there are more male psychopaths0:44:08the proof that you're stupid and naive is that he can take advantage of you and so, like, if you were wiser, you'd be a, you know, you'd know his tricks0:44:18then it wouldn't be morally necessary for him to show you just exactly who knows what about what and so, the psychopath will use his ability to fool you as proof of his own grandiose omnipotence, omniscience, and narcissism0:44:36and the problem with that is that you can be fooled by a psychopath, and virtually anybody can so that Robert Hare, for example, who's studied psychopaths for a long time0:44:45and interviewed a lot of them, like hundreds of them, and videotaped many of the interviews he said when he was talking to the psychopath he always believed what they were saying and then he's watch the video afterwards, and see where the conversation went off the rails0:44:58but, you know, the proclivity to be polite in a conversation is very strong and if you're polite, you don't object to the way that the person unfolds their strategy, you know0:45:12and psychopaths are pretty good at figuring out how to manipulate, obviously, how to manipulate people and the probability that you will be immune to that is extraordinarily low0:45:21go watch Paul Bernardo being interviewed by policemen on the Youtube that's bloody... that's enlightening, man, Paul Bernardo, he's like the CEO of a meeting in that video0:45:33he gives the cops hell, he gives the lawyers hell, he protests his innocence, he basically tells them that they're rude and untrustworthy because they don't trust him, because he did a few little things seventeen years ago0:45:45and he gets away with the few little things, right, I mean he killed a bunch of people, including the sister of his girlfriend at the time and you know, he was a repeat sexual offender, and murderer0:45:55but he basically goes: you know, that's a long time ago, it's like, we're past that, aren't we? I mean, I'm having a discussion with you, I'm trying to help you solve some crimes, which, by the way, I committed, but we won't bring that up0:46:08you know, and you're accusing me of being a liar, you're not playing fair, what's up with you? and then when they answer, he looks at his fingernails, which is, like, that's a lovely little manipulative thing0:46:18'cause it basically means: whatever happens to be under my fingernail at the moment is much higher priority than your foolish story and you watch, you'll see people do that to you, and then you get a little insight into what they're up to0:46:30he's very good at that; or he looks outside, or he just looks at his hands, or he looks out the window immediately dismissive in his nonverbal behavior, it's brilliant0:46:41the courts were forced to release that, by the way, look it up, Paul Bernardo on Youtube wow, it's jus mind-boggling, he's so good at what he does0:46:52and he's good-looking, and he's charismatic, and, you know, he can really pull it off and you can't tell what's happening with the cops and the lawyers, whether they're just letting him play his routine to get some information from him0:47:02or whether he's actually setting them back on his heels, and I suspect it's a bit of both but it's a masterful performance; if you didn't know who he was, and you were watching it without the audio0:47:14you'd think he's the CEO of some company giving his employees hell for not being up to scratch that's all his body language, his eye contact, everything, just speaks that, it's amazing0:47:25so anyways, you got these two-bit hoods here, who think they're really something and they also think they're tough and dangerous, and they're not, they're just, you know, cowardly corner dwellers0:47:36and they confuse their unwillingness to abide by reasonable rules with an indication of their heroic courage which is something else that low-rent hoods like to do, you know0:47:47and it's partly because lots of people who just attend to the law do do that because they're cowardly which is a Nietzschean observation, are you good? or are you just afraid?0:47:56let's start with afraid first, before we proceed to good, and that the reason you follow the rules is that you're afraid of getting caught yeah, well, you know those kids who... often university kids who are in a hockey riot0:48:11and breaking windows, and stealing things, you know, they get nailed for it, and afterwards they're really blown away by their own behavior0:48:20it's like, well, they're in that camp, they think they are good people, but they're not, they're just never anywhere where you could be bad and as soon as you put them somewhere, where they could be bad, it's like, out it comes, just like that0:48:31and that's really worth thinking about, 'cause most of you, many of you, but not all of you, I suspect have never really been somewhere that you could be really bad and get away with it0:48:44and so you might think, well, you wouldn't do it, but people do it, all the time so anyways, they're talking about some exploits, and0:48:54then they see that this character named Stomboli, he has a puppet show, right and he's kind of a wheeler-dealer too0:49:03remember, I showed you that mas that was glaring at Pinokio when he got his voice? it's like, Stromboli is one of his manifestations, the fox here is another one of his manifestations0:49:15all the negative characters throughout the movie are manifestations of the same thing it's partly the adversarial individual, and it's partly the tyrrannical aspect of society0:49:25it's the negative masculine, that's one way of thinking about it so, and you know, when men go bad, they often go bad by being antisocial and tyrrannical there's way more antisocial men than there antisocial women, which is why there's twenty times as many men in jail as there are women0:49:40so each gender, let's say each sex has it's own characteristic pathologies and there are some antisocial women, you know, and there are some high-neuroticism guys0:49:51or some guys who are really agreeable as well, but they're rare so anyways, he sees this poster advertising Stromboli's puppet show0:50:05so Stromboli's a puppet master; now that's really worth thinking about, because that's an archetypal theme or it's at least attached to an archetypal theme: something's behind the scenes, pulling the strings0:50:19and everyone always wonders what that is, what's actually going on; what's actually going on with Trump? who's actually in control? is it Putin? I mean that's the fantasies of the left, it's Putin0:50:32it's like, well, the question always is, what's going on behind the scene right, and the question is... that's the case certainly on the political landscape, business landscape, interpersonal relations0:50:44what are you really up to, everyone's always wondering that, right, it's why they're watching you eyes 'cause your eyes point at things, and they can infer what you're interested in, and what you're up to by looking at what you look at0:50:57and that's why your eyes have whites, it's so that we can see where you're pointing them, 'cause gorillas don't and so what that means, roughly speaking, is that all of your ancestors whose eyes couldn't be reliably tracked0:51:10were either killed or didn't mate, it's a big deal for us to see where people's eyes are pointed and so we're always watching each other's eyes, constantly; what are you up to, what are you up to?0:51:21what are you looking at? what do you want? I wanna know, because if I know what you want, I can predict how you're gonna behave and that also means I can cooperate with you, or I can compete with you, or I can lie to you0:51:32but all the information is in the eyes, surrounded by the facial display, right, 'cause that's also an indication of motivation and emotion our eyes are so good at that, that for you guys sitting there in the back, I can tell if you're looking at my eyes or at my chin0:51:49and the deviation in your eyes is so tiny, that it's a kind of miracle that we're capable of making that perceptual observation it's really important to us, so and we have really good eyes, so that's another thing about us0:52:02so anyways, what's going on behind the scenes? well, if you look at Stromboli, you might be thinking: it's not clear he's someone you'd want to have pulling your strings0:52:14there's a little bit of, forced ethusiasm, let's say, there, and he's just not a very savory looking character so anyways, the fox knows him, and they start talking about Stromboli, that old joker0:52:28how they could possibly involve him in some sort of scam, because he's back in town and then they see the puppet, and the fox does his equivalent of thinking0:52:39which is, you know, pretty sad and nasty, but that's what he does and then they see this puppet with no strings, and they think: hey man a puppet master would pay a lot for something that is capable of semi-autonomous movement like that0:52:53it would be kind of a miracle; and so they decide that they would take him to Stromboli and so they grab him, and, hah, he's got an apple to take to the teacher, which, I think it's the cat, promptly eats0:53:06and the fox acts out this false enthusiasm about what Pinokio is up to, and pretends that he's his friend0:53:16which is of course what your typical pedophile will do, and so this is in the same kind of category and it truly is; one of the things that's interesting to know about pedophiles is that they're predatory, right0:53:29and so they don't go after kids that are assertive and likely to be noisy they watch, and they watch to see if they can find a kid who's defeated, and...0:53:42that's good enough, who's defeated, and who's gonna need a friend, and who's not going to object and so when they check out... these are the ones who do the stranger abductions, which are, by the way, extraordinarily rare0:53:54they look for a victim type, they look for a kid who's gonna be easy to take down and so, you know, that's one thing you don't want... so you might think, well...0:54:04one of the things that was really big, it's probably even worse now, when I was a parent of young children was to teach your kids how to be afraid of strangers, it's like, uh, no, wrong, that is not what you teach them0:54:19because all you do is teach them then to be timid and fearful, and the real predatory types, they're pretty much thrilled about that 'cause you'll also make them sheltered and naive0:54:31you make your kids courageous, and you get their damn eyes open, and that's the best thing you can do against people who are truly dangerous so, none of that terrifying... it's not a good idea0:54:44anyways, the fox befriends the puppet, and then they come up with this evil scheme to get him off to Stromboli, the puppet master and away they go, and they sing a little song about being an actor, "an actor's life for me"0:54:58this took me along time to figure out, I thought: they're taking Pinokio away to be an actor now why in the world are actors getting such a rough time in this movie?0:55:09it's like, it's a Hollywood movie, you know, it's acting, obviously, the voiceovers and all of that are acting it's... why is this thing about being an actor? and then I thought: oh, I get it, I see what's going on0:55:23they sing to Pinokio about the delights of unearned celebrity so he doesn't have to go and get an education, he doesn't have to take the difficult route0:55:33he can take the easy way to dominance... to success, to dominance success he can circumvent all the hard work and go right to the top, you know, and when you think about phenomena like the Kardashian family0:55:48and how popular they are, part of that is this desire that people have for unearned celebrity because you can ge to the top without any sacrifices and without any work, and if you're really cynical0:56:00you know, you think that the people at the top are just there by accident anyways, and it might as well be you of course, there's a lot of naivety in that as well, and a fair bit of, you know... a fair lack of wisdom and all of that0:56:13but the actor idea here is that you can pretend to be something you're not and that that's the proper route of anyone wise to success, it's the ultimate in cynicism0:56:25and it's a nihilistic perspective as well, and that's how they entrap him they say: look, why are you bothering to go to school? that's gonna take 18 years0:56:34with all of your talents you could just go on the stage, your name will be up in lights, you'll be at the top in no time and what does the puppet know? plust he does have some talents, he is, after all, a semi-autonomous puppet0:56:46now, he doesn't exactly know how special that makes him, but the fox can obviously see something in him and he's good at playing that naivety off, and then offering these false promises0:56:57but, see, the thing is... one of the things that Carl Jung said, that I thought was really interesting when he was talking about the Edipal situation in families, I never forgot this0:57:07so the Edipal situation, roughly speaking, is when - I'll lay out the classic story - is when a child is seriously overprotected, usually a male child by his mother0:57:18now, the reverse can be the case, and it can be a female child by the mother, and all of that but I'll just talk about the classic case to begin with now, what Freud observed was that there were usually not very good boundaries in families like that0:57:30and so, the relationship between the husband and the wife was either strained or nonexistent and the wife would often turn to the child to be what she isn't getting from the husband0:57:40and so, there's a great South Park episode about this, a wonderful South Park episode where... I don't remember that horrible little guy [student: Cartman] yeah, that's him0:57:52his mother brings in the dog whisperer to train him, and it's a brilliant episode if you want to learn about the freudian edipal situation, you watch that, you've got it down cold0:58:04because she brings in this expert, who then she wants to have an affair with, so that's a boundary issue and he basically separates her son from him [sic], and imposes the same discipline on him, that he would impose on a bad dog0:58:18although he also trains the dog's owners all the time, because maybe it's not the dog, maybe it's the owner there's a horse whisperer movie, too, about the original horse whisperer that does a beautiful job of laying that out, too0:58:30'cause he's very good at fixing problem horses, and unbelivably good at diagnosing psychopathology on the part of the owner he's got a gift for it, but...0:58:40anyways, what happens in the South Park episode is that the dog whisperer gets Cartman straightened out and he starts, like, dressing properly, and doing his homework, and...0:58:51and the mother is pursuing an affair with the dog whisperer, but he's professional he keeps his distance, he keeps boundaries around him and then he leaves, and then the first thing that she does when he leaves0:59:03is bribe Cartman, basically, out of doing his homework, so that he can accompany her to, I don't know, a fast food restaurant or something like that and so, the reason she does that is 'cause she's lonesome, and doesn't have anybody else around0:59:15and, you know, maybe she's also deeply, deeply, deeply terrified that if she helps that boy grow up, he will leave and she'll have nothing0:59:24you know, and so, mothers who don't have something, say, outside their infants not merely their children, are more likely to fall into that, and it's no wonder0:59:33you know, you gotta think that through; and lots of women, most women, really fall in love with their babies and so, even if they start growing into larger children that can be threatening0:59:45because when the child... when the infant turns into a toddler, the infant is dead the toddler is there now; and you can radically interfere with that process, that happens all the time1:00:00that's the classic Freudian oedipal nightmare and that episode is brilliant, it's bloody brilliant, it just nails it some of you've been in my personality class and watched "Crumb", the documentary "Crumb"1:00:12and that's another staggering exposition of exactly that kind of pathology anyways, one of the things Jung pointed out... so I knew this guys once, who had a mother who basically was trying that trick1:00:25and she was very smart, and had lots of tricks up her sleeves, and there was just no way he was gonna go for it he rebelled at every possible moment, and he basically became, I would say, somewhat hypermasculine in response1:00:37which is an interesting lesson with regards to the hypermasculinity that boys often develop when they're raised by single mothers 'cause they tend to go one of two ways1:00:46and he just fought her at every step of the way, and it didn't happen but one of the things Jung said, which I loved, and you can really see this in the "Crumb" documentary1:00:55is that the oedipal mother basically entices the child, she says: look here's the deal, you don't have to do anything, but you don't get to leave1:01:05and if you don't leave, and you don't to these difficult things, then I'll take care of you and the child has a choice, all the way along there, I mean, obviously he's outclassed in some sense, but it's not as obvious as you'd think1:01:17little kids are tough, and they make decisions all the time and so Jung thought about it more as a conspiracy than as something imposed on the child by the mother1:01:26and I really like that, it's actually a conspiracy between mother, father, and child, actually and I think that's a good way of looking at it, even though it's really rough, 'cause well, should you hold the child responsible? well, yes, but judiciously, and not completely1:01:40'cause then if you deal with someone like that as an adult, and they're trying to escape from it you have to go all the way back and figure out how the hell it happened1:01:49they have to figure out where they opened the door, like inviting a vampire in 'cause they can't come in unless you invite them in, so don't invite them in1:01:58'cause once they're in they're really hard to get rid of, and they'll take all your blood so that's a cautionary tale so anyways, Pinokio doesn't know any better, and he's got the egotism of youth1:02:11he's offered the easy way to success, which is exactly what the fox tells him, and off they go to see Stromboli so this is this song, I'm not gonna read it all1:02:22it's great to be a celebrity, an actor's life for me you sleep till after two you promenade a big cigar you tour the world in a private car1:02:34you dine on chicken and caviar an actor's life for me! it's all this idea of wealth and public exposure and zero attention whatsoever to anything regarding responsibility or discipline or learning1:02:47and so it's a dual attraction, right, you get everything you want, and you don't have to do anything geez, what a deal; and so that's what the actor represents, it's a liar, fundamentally1:02:58it's someone who's acting out a deception, they're a persona in the Jungian sense so the persona is the mask you wear in public that you might even think you are. but you're not1:03:11it's this mask, and that's the actor, that's the persona so the fox and the cat are inviting the puppet to only become a persona1:03:20see, for Jung, you start as a persona, and then, when you start to investigate the parts of you that don't really fit in that persona1:03:30and that would be the shadow, then you start understanding who you really are and that's shocking, because the persona contains everything, roughly speaking, that you think is good1:03:40and maybe even that your immediate culture thinks is good and then the shadow contains everything's that's not part of that and some of that's really bad, but some of it is good disguised as bad1:03:52and you can't break out of the persona and transcend it until you incorporate a lot of what's in the shadow and so, for example, it you're and extrordinarily compassionate person, let's say 98th percentile1:04:04you're going to be sacrificing yourself to other people all the time and there are people who will find that extraordinarily endearing and it will be, under some circumstances, but the problem is that you will sacrifice yourself1:04:17and that's a really bad attitude to have, for example, towards adult males it's a great thing for infants, but for adult males it is *the* wrong approach you will get taken advantage of continually by people who are looking for someone like you, until you grow some teeth1:04:33and you'll think: no, no, that's the opposite of compassion, being able to bite hard is the opposite of compassion which it is; and so you'll have that pushed into the predator category1:04:45"I'm not doing that, I'm not getting angry, I don't like conflict" until you bring that out of the depths and put it on, so you can use it, you're gonna be in trouble1:04:55and that's kinda Nietzsche's idea of the revaluation of good and evil you have a sense of what's good, and a sense of what isn't with your conscience, but it's not very smart1:05:04it's got things in the wrong boxes, even nature itself a lot of the things that you accept as untrammeled goods, like compassion, let's say1:05:14have a very dark side, first of all, and second, are not enough to get you through life you need the opposite virtues, too, and so you have to develop them1:05:23you get outside the persona to do that but anyways, Pinokio's invited to be a false persona to take the gains of celebrity1:05:34without having to do anything to be educated, he's just gonna go right to the top from right where he is and you know, people are kinda fascinated by that idea, that's why you watch America's Got Talent1:05:45or the X-Factor, which shows I actually love, by the way you never see narcissism in its purer forms than you see it when you watch people who display an absolute lack of talent1:05:57and become homicidal when someone dares point it out accusatory and homicidal, instantly, it's really something1:06:06and then, now and then, you do see one of these people who's so introverted, and so out of society and have this unbelievable gift, which is also something really remarkable to see1:06:17and it's no wonder these things are so popular, they're psychologically extraordinarily interesting so that's the actor, first of Pinokio's temptations, and of course it's the first one, because he's entering the social world1:06:30and the temptation in the social world is to be exactly what other people want you to be and the thing that's cool about that is that is what you should be doing1:06:39when you go out in your peers, you should be not subjugating your individuality to your peers, 'cause that's not exactly right that's kinda based on an inhibition model, you've got aggression, you've got bad habits, they have to be inhibited1:06:52you learn that by interacting with your peers; it's not the right model, that's a Freudian model Piaget was correct about that, he basically pointed out that what should happen is1:07:03let's say, with your aggression, and hopefully you have some, is that it gets socialized you learn how to play games, but you don't drop your drive to win, you integrate that in the games1:07:14you try to win, you try to play hard, but if you're defeated or you hit something negative, you don't respond negatively and you can keep that all bounded within being a good player, a fair player1:07:26and that means what's happened is you learned how to play a game or a set of games that also includes the darker parts of you, and they actually become part of your force of character1:07:37it's way better if you can pull that off, and that's what you definitely wanna do as an adult all you people are gonna have to learn to negotiate on your own behalf, and that's really hard1:07:47it means that you have to know what you want, you have to be able to communicate it, and you have to be able to say "no" and to say "no" you have to be built on a solid foundation, you have to have options1:07:59so you gotta remember that as you go through your life if you don't have options, you can't negotiate with someone, and if you're not willing to use them, they win, period1:08:08because if you're asking your boss for more money, say, the answer is no because he doesn't have any spare money lying around that he can just give to you, and lots of other people are asking1:08:20so some of that zero-sum stuff, not all of it, because often you cooperate with people, and the whole pot can grow but some of it's zero-sum, and so you better have a case made1:08:31"here's how much money I should have, here's why, here's the benefit to you if you do it here's the consequences if you don't, they're actually real, they will cost you, and I will do them"1:08:45then you can negotiate, and you don't do that rudely, but those arguments, you better have them in order for example, if you're gonna negotiate for a raise or a status shift1:08:56you better have your resume at hand, all polished up, and know where else you're gonna look for a job, and you better be able to get one 'cause otherwise you're weak, and you will not win the negotiation1:09:07and if you're too agreeable, so your conflict-avoidant, you will make less money across time that's already been well established, and that's because you don't have teeth, not enough1:09:20and so, in the little micro-contest that you're going to have every day you're going to incrementally lose to people who are more aggressive1:09:29who have bigger teeth, and that's what happens, so don't let that happen you place yourselves so you can negotiate, 'cause otherwise you're just a facade1:09:43and in a real battle a facade is just torn down right away1:09:52well, the cricket, he's supposed to be helping the puppet out, but he overslept that's just another indication that he's not everything he could be yet, and that's really...1:10:05that took me a long time to puzzle out with regards to interpreting this movie I could not figure out, I told you this, if the bug is the person who opens the hero narrative1:10:15and who can guide the transformations of time and who has the same initials as Jesus Chris and is knighted by nature herself, why is he such an idiot?1:10:24it's a very difficult thing to figure out, but the idea that the conscience isn't omniscient even though it has that voice of, let's say, common sense1:10:35and that fits very nicely in with the Freudian idea of the superego, again, because the superego can be flawed it can be too harsh, it can not be properly developed1:10:45you see that often with people who are orderly, so they're high in conscientiousness, conscientiousness fragments into industriousness and orderliness orderly people like willpower, they're very judgmental, and they like things to be exactly where they're supposed to be1:10:59but they're also very self-punitive; conservatives are much more likely to be orderly, by the way it's one of the best predictors of conservatism; low openness is the best predictor, but right after that is high orderliness1:11:12and it's associated with disgust sensitivity, which is really an amazing thing, we'll talk about that later anyways, the cricket, he falls down his first day on the job1:11:26he's not as conscientious a conscience as he should be so he's feeling pretty stupid, he's got his little millionaire clothes on, but he's really not living up to them1:11:39he does catch up to the fox and the puppet, however, and tries to dissuade Pinokio from going down this road1:11:48and of course, the cat, well, you can see what the cat's doing there, he's got a big hammer big mallet, and he's... it also shows you just exactly how much of a clue he has1:11:59he's gonna wallop the bug who's sitting on the fox's hat, which I think he actually does then the fox can't get out of his hat, and has to talk through his hat, which basically he's doing all the time anyways1:12:10so, this I really like, you see on the left here that the cricket is speaking inside this flower1:12:19and like I said, there's nothing accidental in these representations these are artists who were coming up with these compositions, and their fantasy has a structure1:12:30so the cricket is speaking out of this flower that has, well, you could think about it as... it has a sexualized element so you could think about that as a phallic part, and that part of the feminine part of it, they are flowers, after all1:12:43they are the sex organs of plants, and that's very much the same over here, this is the yoni and lingam this is from Hindu culture, and you see there's a snake wrapped around that, so that's masculine and feminine1:12:58with a snake wrapped around it, and that's a holy representation, a sacred representation and it represents the deepst reality, that's one way of thinking about it1:13:09like chaos and order, surrounded by the snake, it's exactly the same idea so the cricket speaks out of that; well we already know that, 'cause it is the conscience1:13:18and he's been awakened in part by Gepetto and the good father, and awakened in part by the good fairy and nature so he speaks with those voices, and he's also a manifestation of the underlying chaos itself1:13:33because nature and culture spring out of chaos I already showed you that schematic representation I'll just end this scene, and then we'll have a 15-minute break, okay?1:13:48anyways, the cricket tires to make a case for why Pinokio shouldn't go off to be a celebrity but, you know, it's a hard case to make, because the fox is very manipulative, and Pinokio is naive1:14:02and it sounds like a good offer, and also the fox is actually quite forceful, he basically takes him by the hand so the temptation is, and this is something else I like about the movie1:14:13you can't just say: "well, the puppet gets what he deserves" 'cause he's little and naive, and what he's facing is really malevolent, truly malevolent1:14:23and physically overpowering, and so the movie does a nice job of not minimizing the threat that's posed by this particular temptation and that's part of what makes it art1:14:34so we'll stop there, we'll have a break for 15 minutes, and then we'll start with the stage alright, so here we are, at the big event, and Pinokio is off to be a celebrity1:14:47and the cricket is watching, and Pinokio basically... well, he's got some natural talent, because he's a puppet, but he doesn't have strings1:15:00he goes on stage with strings, and then he drops his strings, and the whole crowd is amazed and the crowd should be amazed when that happens; you can imagine when a kid goes to school1:15:10and shows some independence, that that's actually gonna... people are gonna notice that1:15:19his peers are gonna notice that, the teachers are gonna notice that maybe it's too much independence even, but it's still a... it is a remarkable thing, too it's so interesting, you can see marked signs of independence in children, well, right from the time they're born, basically1:15:35because one of the things that's really funny about the infants, is when they're crying, you always think: "oh, the baby's sad", it's like, no, a lot of the time that baby is angry1:15:47and the way that we know that is because you can do facial expression coding on infants, just like on adults1:15:56and you can tell what emotion they're expressing, and very frequently... like when a kid starts to recognize his mom explicitly 'cause he or she knows the smell right away, pretty much, and the sound of the voice, but visually1:16:08if someone comes in and it isn't who the baby wants, so generally it isn't mom the baby will start to cry, but it's not 'cause the baby's sad, generally, it's because it's angry that mom didn't show up1:16:21and that's an early sign of will, it's like this kid wants things and it's perfectly willing to tell you about and of course a two-year-old who's having a temper tantrum is in some sense doing the same thing1:16:34it's poorly integrated will and independence, obviously, but it certainly runs contrary to what you want you don't want your two-year-old having a temper tantrum in the middle of the toy store1:16:43it's extraordinarily embarrassing for you and... well, for you, but it's also embarrassing for the two-year-old this is one of the reasons I think that that sort of thing should be carefully socialized rapidly1:16:56because it's actually humiliating for the kid, 'cause other people don't like that and they're very judgmental about it, they won't say anything, usually, but sometimes they will but they're not happy about the fact that that's happening, and they will judge the child negatively1:17:09so you don't want your child to be behaving in a way in public that makes other people think badly of them it's really, really not good, and so part of your job as a parent is to not expose your child to that sort of experience1:17:25especially not repeatedly, it's really hard on them or they get narcissistic, which is also rally hard on them it just takes a lot longer to manifest itself1:17:35so anyways, he's off on stage and Stromboli introduces him and talks about how wonderful this is going to be and Pinokio comes out on stage with the strings on, and drops them1:17:45and then he falls down the steps and puts his nose into a hole, makes a fool out of himself and that's the first time Stromboli shows his true character, 'cause he just really yells and screams at him1:17:56and he has his back to the audience, Stromboli, while he's doing this, so he's not noticing how the audience is reacting typical tyrannical parent, right, who's not noticing that society is reacting a different way than him1:18:09he's not happy about it, and Pinokio of course is dazed and feels like a fool, and he is a fool so that's appropriate; but then Stromboli hears the crowd laughing, and as soon as he turns around he's all smiles again1:18:23so that's the first time you get insight into what sort of puppet master he is he's there to please the crowd and that's all, and he's there to look good in public, but fundamentally he's a tyrant1:18:33and I guess that's the problem with false celebrity, that the negative spirit of the crowd becomes your master because to be a celebrity, you have to be a crowd pleaser, and if you're pleasing the kind of crowd who likes a celebrity like you1:18:47which is... and there's not much reason for that, then it's not exactly like you're appealing to the proper side of the crowd1:18:56and you've become its puppet one way or another, and maybe it's rewarding you with wealth, perhaps and with attention, but fundamentally it's not something I would recommend1:19:08if you want to stay reasonably psychologically healthy for any reasonable amount of time; you're gonna sell yourself out and I don't mean that in any casual way, you know1:19:19all right, so anyways, Stromboli changes from the tyrant to the good father in half a second he gives Pinokio a pat on the head despite the fact that he's made a mistake, looks all kind1:19:30and the show continues; now, the cricket is not very happy about this he's sitting in the stage, watching, he's very angry and, let's say, disgusted by what's happening1:19:40partly because Pinokio is making a fool of himself; now that's an interesting thing human beings blush, in fact, if I remember correctly, the name Adam, you know, like Adam and Eve1:19:54is related to the capacity to blush; now that comes from something I read a long time ago, and that might be wrong but Adam does manifest shame in the sight of God, so there is a relationship there1:20:06but anyways, people do make foold of themselves for public display and you can tell you've done that in some sense, not always, if you blush1:20:16because you've either said something you shoulnd't've and you realize that which is more like you've tried to be funny and gone a little bit too far, and sometimes that can be really funny1:20:27or you've said something you know to be false, manipulative, deceitful, beneath you any of those things, and you'll have an automatic response to it, you'll be ashamed and blush1:20:39one theory about that is you can trust people who blush, because you know that their conscience will betray them and so that even if they are lying, they tell you; it's an interesting theory1:20:51because blush is definitely... like it's a facial display, it's right out there, where people can see it you know, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but it's kind of an interesting idea1:21:02anyways, the cricket is not happy with what's going on, he's not happy about Stromboli and he's not happy about the willingness of Pinokio to make a fool of himself to support this false celebrity1:21:12I actually think that's why celebrity types like that often get narcissistic and arrogant it's because they aren't paying attention really to what's happening inside them, they drown it out1:21:29because the glory and the money, and all that is so attractive and enticing they refuse to notice what price they're paying for it1:21:38and they magnify up their grandiosity and their arrogance to keep that stuff all under control and then of course they get surrounded by sycophants, which is a really bad thing1:21:47they get surrounded by people who will tell them exactly what they wanna hear and that's really bad if what you wanna hear from other people is not good for you1:21:56to surround yourself with people who won't offer you genuine criticism, or even genuine reward, it's the same thing you want from me that I differentially reward and punish you in approximately the way that the good part of the crowd will1:22:11that's what you want from all your friends because then your interactions with them can generalize out to the broader community in a productive way and so a good friend... your friends tend to be on the supportive side, and perhaps that's appropriate1:22:25assuming there's reciprocity; but a good friend will also tell you when one way or another when your behavior is starting to tilt in a direction that's going to make you unpopular with them1:22:35and likely unpopular with other people; and that's the prime job of a parent, in my estimation like: "don't do that, other people will hurt you if you do that1:22:48by exclusion, by threat, by failure to offer you an opportunity, bad things will happen to you" so you can't do that; and then you're a representative of the social situation1:23:00which is exactly what you should be, not a friend or at least not precisely a friend, that doesn't make you an enemy, it makes you better than a friend1:23:12so Pinokio's on stage making a fool out of himself, and then he gets all tangled up in other puppets' strings that's what happens to him, and then it all ends rather badly with everything being a tangled mess on stage1:23:26but it also turns out to be rather funny; it's funny, 'cause he's surrounded by angry Russians you could kind of view that as a potential lesson, that if you're a puppet on a stage, and you mess around too much1:23:39you just might get tangled up with a bunch of angry Russians, these are Cossacks, that's exactly what happens of course, no, that's not what's happening here, but it's still funny1:23:51so Stromboli is not happy with the tangled mess, but then the crowd reacts very positively and that confuses the conscience, because he thinks: "well, look, this is horrible, this guy's a tyrant, Pinokio's making a fool of himself1:24:05everything turns into a tangled mess, but the crowd goes crazy" being a fool, that can be entertaining, right?1:24:14so it's hard to tell when a crowd, especially at a spectacle, 'cause this crowd is at a spectacle you just don't know exactly why it is that they're responding positively, but you've definitely given them what they want1:24:26you can see this look on Stromboli's face, it's like this false false kindness and generosity, public facing anyways, the conscience is very confused, and I really think this is an important thing1:24:40'cause I've often thought... I spent a lot of time thinking about Hitler, and I was thinking: how do you get into a state like that? and you think: he's a dictator, and he led his people down a bad path1:24:52that's not right, that is not what happened; they had a conspiracy together, and went down a bad path think about it this way: if one person thinks something about you, it's like whatever, right?1:25:08but if 5 people tell you that, then to start not taking that seriously is kind of narcissistic and if it isn't 5, let's say it's 15 people tell you the same thing or act the same way towards you1:25:22it's like probably you should clue in; well, what if you're a politician and you're trying out a bunch of different ideas, and you're good at interacting with a crowd1:25:33you're charismatic, you watch the crowd, but you're not necessarily all that articulate you don't have your values all straightened out, but you're kinda angry, too and maybe that's 'cause you spent a bunch of time in World War I in the trenches, which was like no joke1:25:47and all your friends got blown up; and then you were unemployed and then you tried to be an artist, and that didn't work out, even though you were moderately talented and then maybe the economy fell apart completely on you, hyperinflation1:25:59and then maybe there was a communist menace coming in from the east, and there genuinely was so you're not the world's happiest clam at that point, and you're talking to people who aren't that happy either1:26:11'cause they were also badly defeated in World War I, and they had a terrible treaty they had to sign, and they lost part of their territory and so the crowd's not happy, and neither are you, and there's reason for it; and so you start talking to them1:26:23and you don't know what you're upset about, and neither does the crowd so you start to articulate some things about why you might be upset, and some of them fall flat but you're paying attention to the crowd, so you stop saying those things1:26:35and some of the things make the crowd really wake up and listen, and so you start saying more of those things it's an unconscious dialectic between you and the crowd; it's mediated by consciousness1:26:48but it's not like you're sitting there, saying, although you might be: "I'm gonna tell this crowd more of what it wants to hear" it's more sophisticated than that; and so you do that a thousand times, and you do that to ever-increasing crowds1:27:01and the crowd really starts to go mad, and they basically tell you that you're the savior of the nation how many bloody people have to tell you that before you start to believe it?1:27:13I would say, with a typical person, a hundred would do it that'll get you going, man, if a hundred people tell you specifically why you're special, you're gonna be thinkin'...1:27:25even if you're humble to begin with, you're gonna be thinking: "geez, there's gotta be something to this, man" but if it's a million people, and they're roaring their approval, well...1:27:34and then when it's a whole nation, good luck withstanding that there's just not a chance, how are you going to withstand that?1:27:43now, you could be like Ghandi, and you could've taken that into account beforehand, because he did he read Tolstoy, by the way, he was a student of Tolstoy, and that's very interesting1:27:53because Tolstoy developed the techniques of non-violence that Ghandi used; and Tolstoy was also a deeply religious writer apart from his novels, which are not, I wouldn't say, really in the religious category, although they're profound1:28:09Tolstoy stressed humility with non-violence, he really stressed it, and that's what Ghandi took to heart1:28:18so he lived a very, very, very simple, bare-bones, ascetic life and that was to kinda see if he could keep his damn ego tapped down while the groundswell was building behind him1:28:30you know, and he dressed really simply, and he didn't own much, and he ate very simply and he just tried to stay away from the whole materialistic success element that would be an element of what would turn him into an actor, and also inflate his ego1:28:42he seemed to do that pretty well, he certainly... well, he led a non-violent revolution that resulted in the independence of India1:28:52it also produced a terrible civil war in the separation of the Muslim Indians from the Hindu Indians but I don't think you can precisely lay that at the feet of Ghandi1:29:03but what I'm saying is that you have to be an extraordinary person, you have to be extraordinarily wise and you have to take ridiculous precautions if you're gonna put yourself in the public sphere like that1:29:14and expose yourself to that kind of adulation without becoming a puppet of the crowd and that's what happened to Hitler; I mean it's not like he wasn't also a conscious manipulator1:29:23and surrounded himself by people who were propagandists, and all of that so there was a conscious element, but... you gotta think these things through, and see how that dialectic develops1:29:34he learned how to appeal to the darkest fantasies of the crowd, he was really, really good at it and that was a dialectic process, right, the crowd told him what they wanted to hear...1:29:44and the crowd's a mob at that point, so I don't have to take responsibility for the fact that I'm screaming my approval when I'm surrounded by a million people1:29:54so I can scream my approval for whatever I want, for whatever dark, revengeful fantasy might be playing out in my imagination because I'm not gonna be held accountable for it1:30:06anyways, the cricket's confused, and it's no wonder, it's like the public has rendered its judgment and the judgment is positive; so when I wrote the book on which this course is based1:30:19I was thinking: "how am I gonna judge success?" and I thought: "well, there's sort of four... there's a two by two matrix of success" you could say: it's a great book, no one reads it; that happens, what do you do about that?1:30:33Nietzsche sold virtually nothing in his life time, and you know that's happened to lots of artists then: it's a terrible book, and everyone loves it; that happens too1:30:43and then: it's a great book, and everyone loves it; and then: it's a terrible book, and everyone hates it that's probably a better category, actually, than "it's a terrible book and everyone loves it"1:30:53I mean, you wouldn't pick "a terrible book that everyone hates" if you had a choice but at least the quality and the response match, at least it's truthful, like: "great book, good response"1:31:04but the problem with those four categories is you can't really tell which category your production falls into because how do you know?1:31:14I think you should assume "horrible book, bad response," because that's the most likely of all four of those categories, that's the most likely to be true, purely on actuarial grounds, let's say1:31:26so, all right, so anyways, the cricket wanders away, because he obviously... not only was he late for work that day, but he turned out to be wrong about everything1:31:35so he lets Pinokio go off on his adventure; and Stromboli puts him in this little touring wagon1:31:44and away they go; and the cricket thinks: "well, the consciensce isn't needed anymore on this journey towards unearned celebrity"1:31:54well, meanwhile, back at the ranch, as they say, the puppet is supposed to come home after school1:32:04but he doesn't, he doesn't show up and the kitten, and the fish, and Gepetto are all waiting there for him, ready to eat1:32:20but he doesn't show up and so Gepetto goes out into the rain to look for him1:32:32and he can't find him; and then we see the inside of the traveling show cart and Stromboli is having a snack, and counting all the money that he's made from tonight's performance1:32:47and hypothetically dividing it out with the puppet, so we've got this little stack of gold, and some of it's false somebody paid with a... looks like a little washer, mechanical washer, and it's bent1:32:59and so he curses about that for a while, even though, it's interesting, eh, because he's made all this money he's been really successful, but this one little error is enough to enrage him, which is very ungrateful and tyrannical1:33:13look, you got a hundred gold pieces, someone's slipped you a fake one you could've had 101, it's still a pretty good day, all things considered1:33:25you know, you gotta make a bit of allowance for error, which is something a tyrant does not do and that's perfect, because if you don't make allowance for error at all, then people are always guilty of something1:33:38and if you're a tyrant, that's exactly what you want; and people *are* always guilty of something so the tyrant who is willing to exploit that is always on solid ground1:33:49anyways, he doesn't share with Pinokio and he puts him in a bird cage, a jail, and he also shows him this other puppet that has an axe through him1:34:02that was the previous puppet, who didn't precisely perform as he was supposed to so there's a big threat there, it's like: "you stay in that jail, you do exactly what I want1:34:14or it's off to the wood pile for you, to be burned" well, that's just worth thinking about, 'cause that's kind of what happens with tyrants1:34:26and literally, not just metaphorically so the cricket is basically wondering what in the world he should do1:34:40and then the cart rolls by, and he gets an inking or hears, I don't quite remember this that Pinokio is in there, and might be in trouble, or he thinks that up, I'm sorry, I can't remember that1:34:50but he ends up inside the cart, he finds that traveling cart, and he goes inside and then he tries to pick the lock, 'cause he's a bug, he can climb inside1:34:59he tries to pick the lock, he tries to get Pinokio out of the jail that he sort of collaborated himself into it's interesting, because if you read, for example, if you read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago1:35:12which I would highly recommend, one of the things you find is that if you were arrested by the KGB1:35:22the secret police in the Soviet Union, and you were hauled off to a... like a tribunal, before a judge1:35:33they wanted you to admit that you were guilty, you had to, they'd torture you until you confessed or you could just confess, and I always found that so mysterious1:35:46they kick down your door, they know perfectly well that they haven't got anymore on you than they've got on anyone else and yet you have to go through the damn trial, and you have to admit that they're right1:35:57why do they even bother with that? why don't they just throw your sorry ass into the camp? which is essentially what's gonna happen anyway; why do they need your collaboration?1:36:07you know, I never quite figured that out, I think it's partly because they're not willing to let you stand in opposition to the rules1:36:17because the mere fact that you'll do that means that you exist as something that is allowed to exist outside the rules and they're not having any of that, so that's part of it1:36:30but there's more to it, there's more to it than that, it's like the drama of collaboration one of the things I learned about societies like the Soviet Union, and this is true of all tyrannical societies1:36:41is that the idea that that's top-down, and that people are just following orders, they're good people, but they're just following orders you can forget about that, that's a stupid theory1:36:50when a society becomes tyrannical like that, the tyranny exists at every single level of the society you tyrannize your own conscience; so let's say you're a true believer in Marxist utopia, let's say1:37:03or a national socialist Third Reich, that's gonna last a thousand years and be racially pure, and you really believe that and that's supposed to be a perfect state, and that's already been delivered to you1:37:14so what that means is that insofar as you're a true believer, your own suffering becomes heretical because to the degree that you're suffering, you're living proof of the fact that the system is not delivering what it promised to deliver1:37:26and so you have to suppress that, you have to become your own tyrant, you can't admit that anything's gone wrong and of course you can't talk about it to your family, because one out of three of them are government informers1:37:36just like one out of three of everyone, and you're certainly not going to mention it in the workplace because unless you're a devout communist party member, you're not going anywhere1:37:45and if any of your ancestors were land owners or bourgeoisie, you're done, you're done class guilt, man, you're not going anywhere1:37:54and then every single level of the bureaucracy is exactly the same as that, and on the top there's a tyrant but the tyrant is everywhere, everywhere from the peak to the soul1:38:04it's all tyranny, and everyone participates in that by lying about everything and that's why you see what happens next in the movie1:38:14Pinokio's in jail, and he's there because he was naive, and he allowed himself to be enticed and because he did something that would've run contrary to his conscience; but the movie does not put up straw men1:38:26the poor damn puppet got tangled into this, his conscience wasn't even around, so you have to have some sympathy for him but it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter1:38:35because he ends up in jail and he can't get out, and the fact that in some ways it wasn't his fault1:38:44doesn't change the fact that he's in jail, and he can't get out and then his... I was watching Louis CK the other night, and he was talking about children lying1:38:56he was talking about his 9-year-old daughter lying, and he said: "it's no wonder children lie no wonder it's impossible for you to stop them1:39:07because you're talking to someone whose head would scrape the roof, they weigh three times as much as you and they're capable of force, and they're intimidating; and they say to you something like:1:39:19"did you take that last cookie after I told you not to?" and you're thinking: "oh no, I took the cookie, what am I gonna do?"1:39:28and then you get a genius idea in your head; smarter children learn to lie earlier children with high IQs learn to lie younger; and CK says:1:39:39"well, it's like you've just been handed a magic get out of jail free card you can just say: "no, I didn't take that cookie"; and worse than that, it works in every single situation1:39:50if you get away with it; and now you're supposed to learn not to do that well, great, that's the thing about comedians, they tell you the underlying truth, which is why people think they're so funny1:40:04like the jester at the king's court, he's the only one who's allowed to tell the king the truth, 'cause he's beneath contempt that's what comedians do so what happens is Pinokio is not very happy about this, it's really breaking him up1:40:17and the blue fairy appears again from the star, same way so what this means is, and I think this is right, this is something Jung talked about, it's also extraordinarily brilliant1:40:30he said that it's one thing to break a rule when you don't really know the rule for whatever reason you seem to get a bit of a free pass for that1:40:41but if then you know the rule, and then you break it anyway, you get hit a lot harder and I know that's true, and I even think I figured out why it was true at one point, but I can't remember at the moment1:40:53but there's something about... it's like the severity of the moral error isn't quite as massive if you're genuinely ingorant and unconscious about the rule1:41:03and maybe it's because you're not violating your own belief system as much when you engage in the misactivity it's something like that1:41:13so Pinokio is in there, and he's partly at fault, at least because he's naive and he's very desperate about it; but it's also because his conscience isn't functioning very well1:41:25so he has his reasons, and so whatever, the blue fairy shows up again, mother nature steps in to aid him; and that is true, I would say, it's not like you get walloped1:41:39or killed every time you make a mistake, which is kinda interesting and especially that's the case with kids, we have more leeway for them1:41:50whether nature does, that's a different issue, but I would say yes, because kids are really cute and they're appealing, and they're naive, and they're kind of helpless, they have those motions even1:42:01that indicate helplessness, and that's associated with a natural apprehension of cuteness cuteness is basically: big eyes, small nose, symmetrical features, baby-like features1:42:11helpless movements; that elicits sympathy and compassion, and it does it cross-species and so does the cry; my roommate when I was in college had a niece who was quite young, about a year and a half old, I think1:42:27and we had a cat, a wild cat, it was a really fighty cat, partly because of me, because I would always play with it and I let it fight with me quite a lot, so it was a fighty cat1:42:40that little girl would come over, and you know, maybe she'd cry, and that cat was there right now, trying to figure out what was wrong the cat would use its claws on me, but it would never use its claws on the little kid1:42:52and I thought, that's an indication of that cross-species cuteness you're all attracted to that, more or less, and the more maternal you are, the more you're attracted to such things1:43:03but you know, you see something on YouTube, and you go "aww", and "that's so cute" yeah, it is, it appeals to exactly this concomitation [sic][possibly meant combination] of infantile features1:43:19and it brings out compassion unless you're psychopathic, so it's a good thing but it can be manipulated, that's for sure, women actually manipulate it with makeup1:43:32which is quite sneaky, and good of them anyways, the Blue Fairy shows up, so that's nature, so what I'm saying is nature will cut kids a break1:43:45if you think of nature in the guise of their mother, for example, but even the biology of other people 'cause we're wired to accept behavior from children that we wouldn't accept from other people1:43:56so nature will forgive; so she shows up in her heavenly guise, and says: "what's going on?" and Pinokio, again because he's naive, but also because he's not good1:44:09he's not evil either, he's neither or both, depends on how you look at it he also has no idea how smart he is, and how smart he isn't, or how smart the person he's talking to is1:44:20and instead of admitting what he's done, he lies about it, and that's interesting because it does suggest that he understands at some level that he set himself up for this1:44:34because he could have just told the truth, "this horrible fox kidnapped me, and sold me to this slave holder"1:44:43which is true, it's a lot more true than the story he tells, he tells a story about some monster a fictional monster; he could have told even three quarters of the truth and had it work, but he doesn't1:44:56he just obscures the story entirely; and this is the part of the movie that people remember and I edited this out for years when I was talking about this movie, I forgot why it was so significant1:45:07his nose grows, and it grows to ridiculous length and why is that?1:45:19I think it was Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, who said: "one of the advantages to telling the truth is that you don't have to remember what you said"1:45:28and that, God, that's worth listening to, because... there's a bunch of things that I learned as a clinician1:45:38and one of them is... 'cause you're often in really weird situations if you're a clinician 'cause things happen that don't happen normally, and you don't know what to do1:45:47so what I've learned is I just say what's happening, whatever it is regardless of what it is, I'll just try to describe it as accurately as I can and don't worry in some sense about the consequences1:45:59I'm not going to go out of my way to cause trouble, but if you're in a really... and I'm telling you, this could save your life at times, especially if you're dealing with someone's who's paranoid who's really paranoid; you do not lie to someone who's paranoid and violent1:46:11because as soon as you lie you're aligned with the forces that are persecuting him and they're gonna be watching, because paranoia makes people hyper-vigilant, like they're on amphetamines1:46:20in fact, you can make people paranoid by giving them enough amphetamines and you can make paranoid people more paranoid by giving them amphetamines so they're hyper-vigilant, because they feel that everything is predatory, and against them1:46:33and so they're watching you like you would not believe, way more than you're watching them and if you flicker a lie while you're talking to them, and they're really on the edge1:46:43you're done; so it's one thing to know if you're ever in a really bad situation and you don't know what to do: you tell the truth, minimally, don't disclose too much, that's just another lie1:46:56you tell the truth minimally and carefully, and hopefully and you might get out of it, you might get out of it1:47:05but if you falsify it, look the hell out so the truth is a real mechanism of protection in dangerous situations1:47:16if someone's trying to intimidate you, and you think they might be violent, and they ask you if you're afraid then you tell them that you're terrified and that you hope things will go okay1:47:27or you say... I'll give you an example one time I was in an airport, and we're in this lineup to fly back to Canada that said "international flights"1:47:41it's a long lineup, like 50 people, I got about 3 [people] from the front, there's still like 40 people behind me and the guy behind the counter decided that he was just gonna shut down the line1:47:52and we could all go to this other line, which was like 300 people long, and I suggested that he not do that because we'd been standing there for half and hour, and that he could just deal with the 20 of us that were left1:48:04and have a clue; and he called the sheriff, right away and this was down in Florida, and it wasn't that long after 9/11 and so these guys came up, and they were armed, and they came, and looked at me1:48:17because of course he told them that I was causing trouble, which I wasn't, I was just trying to not... let, what would you say, an arrogant bureaucratic scumrat [sic] take advantage of me1:48:30which is not the same as causing trouble; as soon as the cops came up, I said: "look I'm going to do exactly what you tell me to do right now, and I'm not gonna cause any trouble1:48:42but I would like you to hear what actually happened," that's a good example of a situation like that if someone's got you, no bravado, it's a very bad idea1:48:53and I was going to do exactly what they told me, because they didn't know who I was and I didn't know what they had been told1:49:03anyhow, the problem with lying is that it's a hydra, and kids find out this very early 'cause you tell one lie, and what happens is it has one of the consequences you'd expect, maybe you get away with it1:49:15but it has 3 or 4 others that you don't expect, and it's like it grows some complexity and then you have to tack a lie on each of those little complexity outcrops, and then they grow three more complexities1:49:27and soon this little lie turns into a great big ball of lies, and at some point it becomes painfully evident to everyone and by that time you're in such... you see this with politicians, like that guy who was sexting1:49:39Anthony Weiner, and perfect name for him, man, it's so funny I shouldn't make that comment 'cause it's so obvious, but it's still funny1:49:48but that's exactly what happened to him, it wasn't even so much the event because people are stupid, they make mistakes, and actually the public is somewhat forgiving1:50:00if you say: "yeah, geez, I'm a real moron, like really, seriously, how could I do that? but I did I'll try not to do it again"; but what happens with politicians is... and I'm not speaking specifically of politicians1:50:14they'll make an error and it gets exposed, and then they'll make three others, trying to cover it up it happened with Nixon, for example, and then the whole thing turns into a complete scandal1:50:23and maybe they could've got out of it at the beginning by just telling the truth "yes, I'm an idiot, I'll try not to do it again"1:50:34that isn't what happens in this case, and Pinokio grows this elaborate series of lies and the fairy is willing to be a little generous to him, because he's little and cute, and he's still a puppet1:50:47and she tells him not to do that and that she's gonna give him a pass this time, but that she isn't gonna be able to intervene on his behalf again1:50:59and that's partly... one of the things that's quite interesting about people who have Rousseauian ideas about children so: children are all good, and they get corrupted by society, which is half true1:51:10because they're also not good, and they get shaped and disciplined by society but the Rousseauian types often are very interesting when their kids hit teenage years1:51:21or when they're judging, say, criminal teenagers it's like the child is perfect until they hit like 11, then they turn into a teenager, and the they're like thugs1:51:31so they go from good to thug in one move; and you often see that in families, too that have treated especially their daughters like a princess, and then they hit puberty1:51:41and the parents who have princessed them to death have no idea what to do with them so then they become demonized, so the overly good child turn into the overly wicket teenager1:51:54and sometimes they'll act that out, too, one of the things I've seen with girls who are held in princess esteem when they're little1:52:03and their parents have to tight [sic] a grip on them, and too much of a demand for good behavior is they'll find some nasty character associate with, who will tear them out of the family, bikers are really good for that sort of thing1:52:14and especially if you have some vengeful thoughts towards your parents, a nice biker is your perfect solution to that problem okay, we'll go through this scene, and then I think we'll call it a day1:52:33so now Pinokio's gone free, he's been reunited with his conscience, he's learned a couple of lessons 1. don't be an actor, 2. and don't lie, and those things are quite similar1:52:44and especially once you're caught in your actor trap, don't lie to get out, 'cause that will just make it worse so that's the first of his trials, his moral trials on the road to becoming real1:52:56now here we're at a different place, we're at this... I think it's called the Red Lobster Inn and it's a shadowy place, kind of cave-like, it's an underground entrance to somewhere that's not good1:53:08and it's a foggy night, and you can't really see, so everything's murky and gloomy there inside we see the coachman and the fox and the cat1:53:23and the coachman's a bad guy, he's that mask that we saw first of all he's the archetype of that mask that was judgmental about Pinokio having a voice1:53:34one of the things Jung said about the shadow, and this is, I would say, one of the primary impediments to enlightenment is that if you start looking at your motives for misbehaving, and I mean by that something very specific1:53:49I don't mean that you're misbehaving by someone else's standards, I don't mean that I mean: when you know by your own standards that you're doing something that devious or malevolent or underhanded1:54:01you know it, and you still do it, so it's your own judgment you're bringing to bear on yourself if you look at why you're doing that, the longer you look at it, the deeper a hole you dig1:54:12this is the motif of Dante's Inferno, fundamentally Dante's Inferno is a story about, I can't remember his name, unfortunately; might be Dante, in fact1:54:25I don't remember; he's led into hell by Virgil, who is an ancient philosopher, thinker [he was a poet] and hell has levels, so the outer level is... and this is a christianised version of hell, because there's hells of all sorts1:54:42but this is a christianised version; on the outermost levels of hell, which is sort of like normal life are the ancient philosophers, and they're still in hell, because they weren't christian1:54:53but it's like cheap motel hell instead of the full pit thing so then Dante goes deeper and deeper into hell, until he gets right to the bottom of it1:55:06it's been a while since I read it, but if I remember correctly, Satan himself is encased in ice at the bottom of hell surrounded by people who betray others; so Dante's notion was that worst of all possible violations of moral behavior1:55:22was betrayal, they're in the deepest levels hell, and I really like that idea, I think it's true because if you trust me, then you're manifesting the necessary courage that puts someone through life1:55:34if you're smart, you don't trust me 'cause you're naive, you trust me knowing that I'm full of snakes, and so are you but maybe we can cooperate, and move things along nicely1:55:45we can reduce each other to our word, and we can cooperate but you're awake, and then I betray that, then I'm undermining your necessary faith in life and humanity1:55:58and you can really hurt someone that way; sometimes it's self-betrayal but you can really do someone in, you can really traumatize them, so that they can't recover1:56:09so it's a really terrible thing to do to someone, and maybe it's the worst thing, and that was Dante's idea and it's tied in... that makes very interesting reading, if you read it at the same time as Milton's Paradise Lost1:56:20because those metaphysical explorations, this is what they are, they're metaphysical explorations of the terrible places you can end up1:56:29and that people do end up, and also a metaphysical explanation of what spirit takes you there 'cause you might ask: "well, why do you betray someone?" and that is a deep question1:56:42so you'll have your specific reasons, but under that there'll be some other reasons and under that there'll be some other reasons, and under that there'll be some other reasons and if you all the way to the bottom, you come up with the ultimate reasons why you betrayed someone1:56:54and when you look at that, that will not be pretty that's when your proclivity for evil, let's say, unites with the general human proclivity for evil1:57:03and you discover just exactly what you're capable of Jung's notion was that that was a full encounter with the shadow, which is I suppose partly what this course is about1:57:14because one of the things I believe I told you at the beginning was that I was going to try and help you understand how it might be that you could be an Auschwitz guard1:57:24and to really understand that, that's a horrifying thing to understand but I'll tell you, if you wanna grow some teeth, that's a really good thing to understand1:57:34so we were talking about your capacity to negotiate before, if you aren't a monster, you cannot negotiate1:57:43but if you've got that under control, then you don't have to be a monster it's really paradoxical, so if you're just naive, well, you end up in jail, and a marionette master has control over you1:57:58that's not helpful, so that's not good, that just means you're useless, and you can be manipulated you won't go out of your way to be malevolent, but it's mostly because you just don't have the skills1:58:08the organizational skills, or even the depth to do that; you're good because you're harmless, that's not good that's easily manipulated, so you think, well, how do you get out of that?1:58:20partly, you watch people, because you know what they're like, because you know what you're like but you also know what you could do, and would do if you were pushed1:58:30you don't have to show much of that when you're negotiating with someone for them to take you really seriously it's a strange thing; but one of the things Jung pointed out, too, was that what you most need to know will be found where you least want to look1:58:46and that's 'cause you haven't already looked there it's a little different for everyone, right, 'cause your particular place you don't wanna look isn't gonna be the same as your place1:58:55but you're gonna have a place you don't wanna look, and what you haven't discovered, that's where it is that's partly going to be discovered by you looking at what you're capable of, what you're truly capable of1:59:07people, especially on the compassionate end, think: "I could never be brutal like that" and that could be true, but you can kill people with compassion, no problem, that's the Freudian oedipal situation1:59:20so think about working in a nursing home, there's actually a rule of thumb, which I also use to guide my interactions with children, and also with my clients, and I would say with people in general1:59:30*do not do anything for anyone that they can't do themselves,* you just steal it from them so imagine you're working with really elderly people, they have Alzheimer's, it's really easy to do things for them1:59:43because, well, "easy", 'cause it's really a hard job, but it might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it but you just speed their demise by taking away the last vestiges of their independence1:59:56you do the same thing with kids, it's like: "struggle through it, man"; did you ever see "My Left Foot?" that's a great movie, it's about this author whose name escapes me at the moment, brilliant movie2:00:09the person who played the part, Daniel Day-Lewis, I think he won an Academy Award for it it's about this author in Ireland, I think he had cerebral palsy, and he could really do was use his left foot2:00:24that was it, the rest of him was pretty spastic and not controllable but he was there, he was very intelligent, he was with it, and his dad would not help him2:00:34he had to drag himself um the damn stairs with his left foot, he just would not help him and what happened was, he learned how to live, he could function2:00:45the book and the movie is called "My Left Foot", and it does a lovely job of laying that out but you have to be one hard-hearted son of a bitch to let your son crawl up the stairs with his left foot over and over2:00:57think about that; but what's the alternative? if he would have been... and of course he lays this out in the book if he would have been catered to, he would have ended up just like you'd expect someone who was always catered to2:01:12so it's a very nice lesson in the triumph of fostering independence over too casual compassion2:01:24that's what I would say; so you look at the Coachman here, kind of looks like a demented Santa Claus doesn't have a beard, but... it's a nice touch on the animators' part, he's even got a pipe and the red suit2:01:36and so he's listening to the fox and the cat brag about how much money they made selling Pinokio to the Puppet Master and how evil and terrible they are, they're bragging away, and he's the real thing, eh2:01:47he's the real thing, and he can see through their little petty, narcissistic, grandiose tales of quasi-criminality and has nothing but contempt for, and you can see that in his facial expression, it's like he's sitting back a bit, thinking:2:02:02"keep talking, bucko, pretty soon I'm gonna have you right where I want you" the fox and the cat are drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, and talking about how evil they are and bragging about how they got one over on like a four-year-old; real impressive, guys, real impressive2:02:18and the Coachman is thinking up his own nefarious schemes right now, what he might do with that puppet if he got his hands on him so that's when he reveals himself, so what you see... the filmmakers just do it for a second2:02:32and that's an archetypal trip, you've got the fox and the cat, they're sort of petty examples of criminality and evil and then you've got the coachman, and he's the real thing, but he's not really showing anybody who he is2:02:43and then in one scene in the bar he lets his guard down, and he lets them see what he's really like and so you see this: all teeth and predatory eyes and glee all at the same time2:02:55that's a bad combination, "I'm going to eat you, and it's going to make me very happy" that's insanity, you do not wanna see that look on someone's face2:03:04so that's the look; and the fox is traumatized by that he thinks he's a bad guy, and he's not, he's just... he just can't be a good guy2:03:16he hasn't got the talent to be a bad guy; and then he's talking to the coachman and bragging and the Coachman's had enough of it, he shows his real face, and it's like that's not good, the Fox gets a real glimpse into hell2:03:28and that just terrifies him; and the other thing the Coachman does is revel his plans and his plans are to kidnap Pinokio along with a bunch of other boys, and to take them to this place called Pleasure Island2:03:42and the Fox knows what's going on there, it's the foreshadowing of the next stage of the adventure after the Fox and the Cat are terrified, the Coachman, who takes you along with him2:04:03has a little chat with them, and they describe exactly what they're going to do next and the Fox and the Cat know perfectly well that they're over their head but at this point in their misadventures there's no pulling back2:04:16and I think we'll stop there, even though it's a little early, because that was a lot of material, and this is a really good place to stop I'd be happy to take some questions if you guys have some questions2:04:29we could take questions for like 10 minutes, and then we'll call it a day and you can ask me a question about anything you want2:04:39[student] this goes back to the beginning of the lecture, but how does morality go from [student] who's stronger and who's weaker to what's good and what isn't?2:04:50we'll, I think it depends to some degree on what you mean by stronger so physical strength is one element, if you look at mythological heroes...2:04:59imagine that the stories of heroes are fragmented elements of the archetype2:05:08and so one kind of archetypal hero, obviously, is someone who's physically strong there's a great movie that you could watch about this, it's called Hitman Hart2:05:18it's one of the best documentaries I've ever seen, and it's about this guy named Brett Hart and Brett Hart was for a while the most famous Canadian on the planet and he was a World Wide Wrestling Foundation? what do the call it? WWF?2:05:31[WWE - World Wrestling Entertainment] yeah, he was their lead good guy ... I love the documentary, 'cause when I was a little kid, like 4 or 5, I used to to watch his father, whose name was Stu Hart2:05:43who ran this channel, this wrestling confederation in Alberta and Stu Hart had I think 8 boys, and he trained all of then to be pro wrestlers2:05:54and part of the movie is extraordinarily funny, 'cause Stu Hart is in it, and he's really old he's like 85, and he's just barely... can you imagine he was like a pro wrestler for 40 years? every joint is broken2:06:06and he's still big, but he's just barely moving, and this kid and another kid come over and Stu is telling the story about how he used to take his boys into the basement and toughen them up2:06:18I think Brett called that the journey to pain or something like that his father would take all these kids down there and wrestle with them, and push them right to the edge of their pain tolerance, constantly2:06:28and anyways, they grew up tough, there's no doubt about that, and all his daughters married pro wrestlers, too and I think he has 7 daughters, so he's quite the character2:06:39anyways, these two kids, they're late adolescents, early adulthood, come over and one of them is pretty damn cocky, and he's listening to Stu, and he says something smart2:06:48like "well, you know, you were pretty tough in the old days, eh?" and Stu looks at him and says: "why don't you come down to the basement with me?" and he says: "look, I don't wanna hurt you, old man"; so the filmmakers follow them into the basement2:07:02and they're kinda standing there, that old guy grabs him in a headlock, he's like a snake, eh? he's got him in a headlock so fast, the kid doesn't what to do, and then...2:07:14Stu, he knows how to put a headlock on someone; he's flexing his forearm, which is still not so bad a forearm2:07:24and this guy's face is just... it's like he's stepped in a bear trap, plus he's absolutely shocked that this old guy got him2:07:33so he's kind of gasping, and Stu says something like: "you watch, if I flex this muscle just right, you can see this vein on his forehead start to pop out" it's extraordinarily funny [Peterson misremembered the scene in some key points, watch it for yourself]2:07:45anyways, Brett Hart plays out the good guy archetype, and Brett's... he's a solid guy, but I would say he's not particularly sophisticated, and I'm not being cruel about that2:07:55I mean he had a great career, and he's tough as a boot, so good for him but he plays out this good guy archetype and he gets tangled up in it2:08:04now, I don't remember your damn question, but I am trying to answer it, tell me the question again [student] so I was wondering how in morality you go from to who's strongest and who's weakest to what's good and what's bad2:08:16oh yes, exactly; one of the things I really liked about this movie was it showed me why people watch wrestling and I couldn't... because certainly they're not appealing...2:08:26and I'm not being... there are different strata of conception of abstraction that any entertainment process has to appeal to2:08:35and most people don't go to movies, and that actually... it really is because movies operate at a level of sophistication that is too high for many people2:08:45just like novels, hardly anyone reads; 15% of the population, might be 20%, cannot read well enough to follow written instructions2:08:55and there are people, maybe it's 15% of the population or 10%, who have never finished a book, never2:09:04and it is that high; but the archetype still needs to manifest itself on different levels and so it manifests itself in wrestling; but even there, where it is physical force, it's not just physical force2:09:18it's a drama between good and evil, and you can see this so clearly in the Brett Hart documentary 'cause he's the good guy; the bad guys are really over-the-top bad, it's a real drama2:09:29it's good versus evil in the ring every time, and hopefully good wins, but good often gets... maybe the bad wrestler brings two of his friends in, and they bring in chairs, and they bash the hell out of the good guy2:09:41and the whole audience is just outraged by this, and the documentary does a lovely job of showing that so even at the level of physical combat, let's say, you can't reduce what's good to what's strong2:09:54it's just one element of it; better to be strong than to be weak and so you can have strong hero, because it's better to be strong than to be weak but it's better to be strong and kind than to be strong2:10:06and it's better to be strong and kind and wise than to be strong and kind and that's true not only in human beings, but it's even true, let's say, at the wolf or chimpanzee level2:10:17because one of the things you see with the chimp dominance hierarchies, and I think I mentioned this before is if the leader, the dominant male, is really good at fostering social relations and being reciprocal in acts like grooming2:10:30and also paying attention to the females and their offspring, his dynasty will be much more stable and so, strong might be good for one battle, it might be good for two battles, but for 50 battles it's not optimized2:10:44especially because no matter how strong you are, someone can take you out so what happens is the idea of what's ideal becomes increasingly complex across time, multifaceted2:10:58and so: strength, wisdom, intelligence, vision, all these things are amalgamated into a single being and we'll talk a lot about that, because I wanna show you how that happened in Mesopotamia2:11:09because that's one of the first places where we have documentation about how that ideal emerged they had a god called Marduk, and Marduk had 50 names and as far as I can tell, the reason for that was that Marduk was an amalgam of the tribal deities of at least 50 tribes2:11:24and when the tribes were brought together, and civilized, each of their gods, who were ideals- had to be amalgamated into something that was a single dramatized representation of value2:11:38or there was no way that all those people could have lived together their different value structures would have fragmented them, and they would have stayed in a state of war so the question is... it's the question you're asking: if it's not strength, then what is it?2:11:51well, strength is an element, but the Egyptians figured out that it was vision, it was actually the capacity to pay attention that was paramount, and the Mesopotamians had that figured out more or less too2:12:04because their god Marduk had eyes all the way around his head, he could see everywhere so seeing was a critical element of what should be on top, and the other thing for the Mesopotamians was the ability to speak2:12:15so by the time of Mesopotamia people had already dramatized the idea that cardinal human attributes are vision and the ability to speak2:12:24and the ability to speak the truth, too, not just speak other questions? [student] so, I wasn't really aware of what you just said that most people don't watch movies2:12:40[student] because I've probably watched [unintelligible] so is that why we sort of consider... 'cause we were talking about celebrity career2:12:49[student] that different levels of abstraction of celebrity are respected more? like reality TV probably lower than ... Cumberbatch, than like a theater actor, then like a novelist2:13:01[Peterson] sure, yes, that's exactly why, because, you see the less sophisticated the genre, the more the genre is like real life2:13:16and the more sophisticated it is, the more it has abstracted out across instances of real life the fundamental lessons2:13:26and that's what makes something profound and deep, it's abstracted from multiple sources and it applies across multiple dimensions; 'cause that's what you want, and here is why2:13:37fundamentally, you have a problem, but that's not the problem, the problem is that there are problems2:13:46so the problem is a metaproblem: there are problems you need a solution to that, that's not a solution to a problem, that's a metasolution to the class of problems2:13:58right, and that's what people have been trying to figure out ever since we were able to actually figure things out it's not: "how do you solve a problem", it's: "how do you act so that you solve the problem of problems"2:14:10and that's basically the complexity of life and the fact that you're mortal and vulnerable [student] so then a follow-up question, from your book you have this sort of strata2:14:22from play all the way up to religion and beyond that, sort of looking back retroactively with philosophy and rationality [muted]2:14:37well that's a good one, because I would say [muted] if you really wanna think this through, the best way to do that is to read Nietzsche and Dostoevsky at the same time2:14:48now, I'm sure there's other ways of doing this; but Nietzsche was actually quite heavily influenced by Dostoevsky more than people knew, although their thought runs very parallel2:14:57Dostoevsky is like the ultimate dramatist, he embodies his ideas, and he has them act out in a dramatic space it's literary; whereas Nietzsche has taken that up one level of abstraction, to the semantic2:15:10he says: "well, here's what's going on" in an articulated way, but he doesn't embody it in a story and you might say: "well, that's higher", but it's only higher in a way2:15:19it's more abstract in that it's more like words whereas what Dostoevsky does is half words and half images because when you read a novel what happens is that... people say, postmodernists say: "where the hell is the meaning in that novel?"2:15:34it's not in the word, it's not in the phrase, it's not in the sentence, it's not in the paragraph, where do you localize the meaning? great question, their answer sucks, bu the question's great2:15:45but what happens partly when you're reading a book, a novel, is that the words trigger representations in your imagination2:15:55a lot of what you extract the information from is actually your imagistic representation of the words2:16:04and that imagistic representation is richer than the words, because it's informed by all of your knowledge about people you know this happens, because you go to a movie, like the Harry Potter movies, and you say: "that's not how I imagined it"2:16:18the probability that there'll be a 1:1 correspondence between your internal representation of the book and the movie is 0; and usually the movie is less rich than the book2:16:28I love movies, and they have their own place, that's for sure, but... well, miniseries, the series now are more approaching the complexity and depth of literature2:16:39because they can extend across 20 hours, they don't have to compress a 12-hour reading experience into 2 hours of action2:16:49what I was trying to do with that hierarchy was to show how the knowledge moved first of all it's kind of implicit in your biology, and then it's distributed into society2:17:01and then by imitating society you make it part of your procedures, and then you watch your own procedures and start to build a representation of them, and then you can articulate that representation2:17:11and it's a bootstrapping process, too, because once you've made the representation, that can affect the way you behave so they start to loop; so here's one idea, imagine that there's a type of male who tends to win dominance hierarchy contests2:17:31and to emerge at the top, well that's the case, and that's why you're the way you are so what's happened among human beings, this is so cool2:17:40is that human females are choosy maters, so about twice as many men fail in their reproductive efforts as females fail but the men who succeed are more successful; so women are on average more successful2:17:54and men are on average more failures and more successful and I'm talking strictly about reproduction here, although it generalizes to other areas, but I'm talking about reproduction2:18:03so how does it work, exactly? well, the women have a real problem with mate selection who the hell are you gonna have as a mate? it's too complex to work out, so women in their genius don't2:18:16they let the men compete, and then they peel from the top acting out the assumption that the man who wins is the best man, and it's a good assumption2:18:25because if you have a bunch of men competing, especially if they're competing across competitions and someone pops up at the top, you can think: "well, they may not be worth much,2:18:34but they're better than anyone else at whatever it is that they're doing" and that makes men at the top of dominance hierarchies very attractive to women an then the women accelerate that, so you can imagine they're more likely to reproduce2:18:46so what happens is the proclivity to emerge at the top of the set of dominance hierarchies becomes inbuilt into the biology across time, and the women exaggerate that by differentially allowing the men to reproduce2:18:59and that's also why they're mother nature, they really are mother nature, it's not just a metaphor then the representation and the biology start to tangle together2:19:11and that's like, well, that's the difference between a meme and an archetype, a meme is this idea that propagates itself but an archetype is an idea that has propagated itself across such a massivespan of time that it's actually shaped the course of evolution itself2:19:28and men, I can tell you already... it isn't necessarily that you even have to compete with other men in order to see who wins; as soon as you admire someone, and that'll happen unconsciously, you won't be able to stop yourself2:19:44you've already elevated them in the dominance hierarchy contest, the act of admiration is your recognition that you've met someone who's better at whatever it is that happens to be driving your admiration than you are2:19:58and that's partly the manifestation of just the idea as the, what would you say, as the representation of the ideal2:20:08kids do that all the time, they hero worship other kids, usually like a 4-year old will latch on to a 6-year old who he or she will just follow everywhere, and do exactly what they do2:20:20why? because that person represents to that child their next ideal, their conceptualization of the place forward2:20:30any other questions? or should we maybe call it a day? [student] you said when the guy was smiling the thing was predatory glee2:20:46[student] which is insanity, how do you define insanity in this context? well, let's call it what you don't wanna encounter alone in an alley at midnight2:20:56and leave it at that, that is what I mean in this context, that's exactly what I mean and then not only is the person there waiting for you, but they're looking forward to whatever might happen2:21:07[student] sure, I just mean in a psychological context, using that word has all kind of connotations [student] I was making sure I wasn't interpreting it in a wrong way no, well the movie provides the frame for the interpretation in this particular situation2:21:20so he's the thing that hauls naive young boys off to their doom; OK, so that's bounded yes [student] could you elaborate on... you mentioned the process where people do the thing that's less hard but still hard?2:21:42[student] facing the shadow [peterson] that's actually a really productive way of procrastinating, although it comes with its own problems of rationalization [student] that reinforces certain circuits ... [inaudible] bring up inhibitory circuits, and I was wondering if you can elaborate2:22:02well, I've derived that partly from my study of addiction and also from my study of recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder2:22:17but let's talk about addiction, so there's a series of actions that occur before you take your cocaine2:22:26some of those are local, they are the things that happen immediately before, and some of those are distal they're farther back in the chain of events; and when you have a hit of cocaine, it produces a dopaminergic burst2:22:38and that feels really good, but it also makes the circuits that were immediately active before that grow that's what reinforcement is, and then the growth is proportionate, not linearly2:22:50but it's proportionate to how long before that event occurred, the closer it is, the stronger they're gonna get but even the ones that are somewhat distal get some reinforcement2:23:01because you might say: "well, what did you do before you found your latest fix?" and the answer is: "how long before?"; well, the closer, the more reward2:23:11what happens then is that if you take that person out of the normal environment and you put them into a treatment center they're off they're physical addiction, which is a weird thing in the case of cocaine, but...2:23:24like not that long, a week will do it, two weeks for sure, even heroin, and alcohol for sure if you can get them through the seizure part without dying; and so they're done, they're not physiologically dependent anymore2:23:39but you let that person go, and the first thing that happens is his old friend who is always doing drugs with shows up and bang! he's craving like mad, and that's because that thing in there is not dead at all2:23:53and it's activated by the cue, and it's a circuit... it's not, it's a personality it only wants one thing, it wants cocaine, it's gonna suppress any non-related thoughts2:24:05and it'll use lies, that's no problem, especially if lies have been reinforced, which they certainly have "where are you off to, son?" you know, you'll have a lie for that, and then 10 minutes later you have your drug2:24:17that little lie has just grown; or maybe you think... you try to quit, you think: "to hell with it!" and every time, 10 minutes before you take your drug, you think "to hell with it", and you do that a 1000 times2:24:29well, believe me, that "to hell with it" circuit, that sucker is strong, it's alive and it's not like it just disappears, it can't, it's you, it's grown in there2:24:41now, you can build another circuit to shut it down, and you can help it decompose across time by not giving it what it wants but you're gonna have to not give it what it wants in all of the multiple contexts that you've already associated with the drug2:24:55some of you have probably smoked, and then tried to quit smoking, and what you see is you get a craving when you have a cup of coffee or when you finish dinner, when you're done having a phone call2:25:05when you first get up in the morning, or whenever you regularly had the drug, whatever you had the drug in relationship to even complex things, like ending a conversation will produce a cue of craving2:25:16then that can extinguish over time if you punish it by either punishing it or not letting it get what it wants but a lot you have to build another circuit to just shut it down2:25:27and then that circuit's kinda fragile and stress can often disrupt it [student] that can be mediated by [?] people read about quitting smoking or things like ibogaine2:25:37oh sure, well, ibogaine's a whole different thing, because it seems to have a direct physiological effect but the addiction has a cognitive component, it's full of thoughts and desires and wants2:25:50you know, you may have to rebuild your whole personality in order to get that thing cornered religious conversion, for example, is a really effective treatment for alcoholism2:26:02that's partly why alcoholics anonymous works for the people for whom it does work but religious conversion, which is total personality conversion, is actually one of the few things that we know of that's an effective treatment for alcoholism2:26:15we don't know how to induce it, although that's not exactly true either because the early work with LSD... LSD was quite promising as a treatment for alcohol addiction2:26:27and there's recent work with psylocybin showing that if people have a mystical experience when given psylocybin their success rate of quitting smoking is about 80%2:26:39which is way higher than any pharmacological intervention for smoking has ever been alright, we should probably call it a day, we'll see you in a week0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 04: Marionettes and Individuals (Part 3)
0:00:000:00:09so I hope we can... my plan is to finish this today and then we'll go into the more concrete details now that you've got some sense of the way that a narrative like this can unfold0:00:23if you remember, we were just leaving this terrible little bar, which I think was called the Red Lobster something like that; where the fox and the cat had met the coachman0:00:35and the Coachman is obviously someone who takes you somewhere, he takes you on a trip and the coachman basically revealed himself, first he kinda looks like a, I guess a somewhat jolly old man0:00:48although his expression doesn't precisely read as jolly and then he reveals himself as something positively satanic0:00:58and that's enough to terrify these two-bit thugs, the Fox and the Cat who think they're tough, but really aren't tough at all and so they see at some point what they're really tangled up in0:01:10and I think I mentioned to you that that was something akin... Jung had this idea that people's shadows reach all the way down to hell which is actually a very frightening concept, and what he meant by that is0:01:22if you take a look at the impulses that drive you that are actually malevolent, if you can admit to such impulses that if you basically follow those all the way down to their origin, you can find some very nasty things0:01:36and what you find down there basically is what allies you with people who've done terrible things and that's not a very pleasant experience, I would say0:01:48although one thing that's worth thinking about is that it is something that can protect you against being very very badly hurt0:01:57because one of the things that characterizes people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder is that they're often naive, and then they encounter something that's really not within their framework of thinking0:02:09and it's usually something bad, and because there isn't anything in their philosophy, their way of looking at the world that has prepared them for that, they end up fragmented and devastated0:02:20it's actually protective to you if you can figure out what your full range of capabilities is because that can help you understand other people a lot better, and to be wiser and more careful in your actions0:02:36it's also useful, I think, if you want to convince yourself to act properly because if you regard yourself as harmless, which is a big mistake, then nothing you can do is really that bad0:02:51right? because you're harmless, after all; but if you understand that you're seriously not harmless then that can make you a lot more careful with yourself0:03:00and I would say that's especially true maybe when you're dealing... when you have kids, and you start dealing with your kids if you know that... what you're capable of, because you're human0:03:10then that can motivate you to be much more careful with what you say and do and I don't mean cautious, I don't mean timid, I don't mean any of that0:03:20I just mean that you wanna keep things pristine between you and your children, let's say because that way they're on your good side, and you want them on your good side0:03:29because children who get on their parents' bad side suffer very badly for it, and sometimes it's because they're literally abused but more often it's because they get, well they get abused, let's say, or neglected, in much more subtle ways0:03:44and you're definitely capable of that, I mean, all you have to do is think about the way you've interacted with someone that you've decided to not like, or maybe someone you genuinely don't like0:03:55and that can range from just not paying any attention to them, especially if they're doing something good to really pursuing them, and making their life miserable, and you can certainly do that with your family members0:04:05and you can do that with your intimate partners, and you can do that with your friends, and you can do it with yourself so it's really worth knowing that, so... well...0:04:16the Fox thinks he's a royal rule breaker, but he's really just a two-bit thug, and this is where he learns that so... sorry, I have a new phone, and I'm kind of stupid with it, still0:04:29so... well, hypothetically that would work, probably won't0:04:40anyways, the Coachman's got these guys in his grasp now, regardless partly because they're already down this road, and they can't back off, and partly 'cause he also offers them more money than they've seen before0:04:52so as bad as they are, they're going to get worse... many of you, I presume, have seen Breaking Bad that's a really good example of the incorporation, at least in part, or maybe the possession by the shadow from a Jungian perspective0:05:08right, because you have this ordinary high school teacher who really thinks that he's an axe [?] and his family as well you know, like your typical persona, roughly speaking, he's just a normal guy0:05:19but part of the reason that he's a normal guy is 'cause he actually hasn't been put in abnormal circumstances and then all of a sudden he is, and he has a genuine moral conundrum, right, he's gonna die of lung cancer0:05:29and he has a son who's got a lot of health problems and he's terrified that he's going to leave his wife and his child behind with nothing0:05:39and then of course as the story... and so he decides to do something that... temporarily... that he regards as... that he would normally regard as reprehensible0:05:48and of course he just gets tangled up in that, but then, as the story unfolds, you see that there's... it's more complicated because it's not that he was just innocent good guy, and he decided to turn bad, he's also very resentful0:06:00and angry, and it's partly because he's a bit of a pushover at the beginning, or maybe more than a bit of a pushover and also that he didn't really fulfill his own potential, and that, you know0:06:10he had friends who walked down the entrepreneurial path and maybe they weren't quite fair to him, but whatever he ends up not very successful as a high school teacher, so he's really angry about that, and so0:06:23there's more motivation for him opening up the door to the terrible elements of his personality than just the fact that he's got good motivations to do so0:06:33and that unfolds, so you see the warps and twists in his resentful character increasingly manifest themselves as he walks down this road to, really, total brutality, and it's quite good0:06:47there's a book called "Ordinary Men" that's a lot like that I don't think I've mentioned that to you before, but "Ordinary Men" is a book about... it's the best book of its type0:06:56maybe it's the only book of its type... it's possible, but it's plotted much like Breaking Bad in some sense it's a story about these German policemen in the early stages of World War II0:07:09and they were guys who were old enough to be raised in Germany really before the Hitlerian propaganda came out in full force if you were a teenager, say, in the 1930s, you were gonna be pulled right into the propaganda machine0:07:22and maybe you were part of the Hitler Youth, like you were raised in that, you know but if you were older, then you were raised before that and you're not as amenable to propaganda once you're older than about, well, I would say, about 22 or something like that0:07:35it's pretty young, actually; if you're gonna make a soldier, you have to get a soldier young 'cause once people are in their early twenties, say, they already have their personality developed0:07:46anyways, these policemen were sent into Poland after the Germans marched through and, you know, it was wartime, and there was this hypothesis in Germany that0:07:58the Jews in particular were operating as a fifth column in undermining the German war effort because of course the Germans blamed the Jews and a variety of other people for actually setting up the conditions that made the war necessary0:08:10and the police were sent into Poland, they were also required to make peace, roughly speaking they started out by rounding up all the Jewish men between 18 and 650:08:23and gathering them in stadiums, and then shipping them off on trains, but that isn't where they ended they ended in a very, very dark place, I mean these guys were going out in the field with naked pregnant women0:08:35and shooting them in the back of the head by the end of their training and what's really interesting about that is that their commander told them that they could go home at any time0:08:45so this is not one of those examples of people following orders and the reason they didn't, roughly speaking, there's many reasons, but one of the reasons they didn't0:08:55is because they didn't think it was comradely, so to speak, to leave the guys they were working with to do all the dirty work and run off; and that's a really interesting fact0:09:07because in different circumstances you wouldn't think about that as reprehensible you'd think: well, that's part of team work under rough circumstances; and that's at least in part how they viewed it0:09:19they were also made physically ill multiple times, physically and psychologically ill, by the thing that they had to do but they kept doing them anyways, so one step at a time0:09:29and that's the thing, is that you end up in very bad place one step at a time, so you better watch those steps anyways, Pinokio has now decided, after his latest misadventure, to return to the proper pathway0:09:45he's off to school again, and he's still pretty naive, although perhaps not as much so as he was before so he decided that he's gonna do things right, he's gonna go get educated, he's going back to school0:09:56he's gonna take the conventional route to discipline, and be a good boy, roughly speaking and so, he's off to school, and the fox waylays him again0:10:06this is a really interesting scene, took me quite a long time to unpack this too and so, the fox, first of all, starts out by acting like he's sympathetic again, sympathetic towards Pinocchio0:10:20and so, he's empathetic, you could say, and... so this is an interesting analysis of empathy so what happens is the fox convinces Pinokio through a variety of maneuvers0:10:33that he's actually not feeling very well, that he's sick, he really convinces him that he's a victim and one of the things... I had a graduate student named Maya Maja Djikic, who had worked with the UN in Bosnia0:10:47and she had toured some of the mass grave sites there, and we wrote a paper one time, called: "You can neither remember nor forget what you don't understand"0:10:56and it was a paper about the idea, for example, it was partly about the idea that we should never forget the Holocaust and that the idea there is that, well, we should never forget it and we should never repeat it0:11:07but the thing is, if you don't understand how those things come about, you can't really remember them, right? you think about them as a set of historical facts, but that's not the kind of remembering that actually makes any difference0:11:19you have to understand the causal pathways, you have to understand how a society would transform in that manner and more importantly, you have to understand the role of the individuals within that society0:11:30unless you're going to assume that they're so completely unlike you that there's no connection whatsoever in which case you haven't remembered it at all, you haven't learned anything at all0:11:39because the right lesson from what happened in the 20th century is: this is what human beings are like that's the correct lesson, and you can say: well, not me; but...0:11:50but probably you too, that's the thing, probably and probably me too, and least under normal circumstances; anyways...0:12:02the Fox convinces Pinocchio that he's sick, he performs a lot of tricks to do this now, you could say that Pinocchio is susceptible to this0:12:15because maybe there's still a part of him that's looking for the easy way out, and so... one of the things that Maja and I found when we were writing this paper we were looking at the discourse that precedes genocide and genocidal states0:12:28and the enhancement of a sense of victimization on the part of one of the groups usually the group that's going to commit the genocide first of all, their sense of being victims is much heightened by the demagogues0:12:41who are trying to stir up this sort of hatred, so they basically say: look, you've been oppressed in a variety of ways and these are the people who did it, and they're not gonna stop doing it, and this time we're gonna get them before they get us0:12:51it's something like that; and so there's something very pathological about the enhancement of victimization which is, well... see the problem as far as I'm concerned with it is, it's not thought through very well0:13:12because there's a point that's being made, and the point is that people have been oppressed and they suffer and that's true, that point; but then the proper framework from within which to interpret that0:13:31I believe is that that's characteristic of life, you can't take it personally in some sense and you can't divide the world neatly into perpetrators and victims0:13:42and you certainly can't divide the whole world neatly into perpetrators and victims and then assume that you're only in the victim class and then assume that that gives you certain... like access to certain... forms of redress, let's say0:13:55it gets dangerous very rapidly if you do that sort of thing, so... For example, one of the things that characterized the Soviet Union - and this was particularly true in the 1920's - but also afterwards0:14:04the Soviets were very much enamored of the idea of class guilt. So, for example, although it was only about 40 years previously that the serfs had been emancipated, they weren't much more than slaves, right?0:14:23So that was the bulk of the Russian population. They were bought and sold along with the land. So, they had been emancipated and some of them - many of them - had turned into independent farmers0:14:35and some of them had become reasonably prosperous, because, at least in principle well, I presume a certain proportion of them from being crooked, but I presume a larger proportion from actually being able to raise food0:14:47and of course, at that time the bulk of the Russian food population [sic] was produced by these relatively successful peasant farmers; and relatively successful would mean0:14:58maybe they had a brick house or something, and maybe they had a couple of cows, and maybe they were able to hire a few people so you know, it wasn't like they were massive land owners or anything0:15:08but I talked to you a little bit about the Pareto principle and the notion that in any domain of activity a small proportion of people end up producing most of what's in that domain of activity0:15:19the same was true in Russia with regards to these peasant farmers, some of them were extraordinarily efficient and they produced most of Russia's food0:15:29when the communists came in, they described those land holders as parasites, essentially predicated on the Marxist idea that if someone had extracted profit from an enterprise0:15:42that the had basically stolen that profit from the people, say, that they had employed or otherwise oppressed so you could be a member of the kulak [spells it out] class0:15:57and then because you were a member of that class, you were automatically guilty so what happened was... and you gotta think this through to really understand what happened so what happened was the intellectual communists were sent out in cadres out into these little towns0:16:12to find people who would help them round up the kulaks; now you gotta think about what a small town is like because... so imagine you're in a town, and there's three or four people, or maybe ten people or something like that0:16:23who are a little more successful than everyone else, and a certain number of people are gonna be fine with that any maybe eve happy about it, because they regard those people as particularly productive0:16:33and, you know, as stalwart members of the community, regardless of their flaws but there's gonna be some people who are not happy about it at all, that are gonna be very resentful about that and jealous0:16:43and so those are gonna be people whose characters, I would say, are of the less positive type and so when the intellectuals came in and described the reason that these people should be treated as parasites and profiteers0:16:55then it was the resentful minority in those towns, and that would be the kind of guy that hangs around in the bar all the time and is completely unconscientious, and fails at everything, and then blames everyone else for it0:17:06the intellectuals came in and said: this is unfair that this happened to you you've actually been victimized and now it's your opportunity to go have your revenge; and that's exactly what happened0:17:17now, in some of the villages sometimes the peasants would actually surround the farmsteads of these more successful people0:17:26and try to defend them, but that never worked out for very long so then these mobs, these angry mobs, would go into the farmhouses and strip the place right down to nothing0:17:37and they packed these people up and sent them on trains with no food, out to Siberia where there was no place to live so they were packed into houses, maybe they had a square meter each to live in0:17:48and their children died of typhoid and many of them froze to death many, many people died, millions of people died as a consequence of the dekulakization0:17:58at least in... as a consequence of its total effect so what happened then was that there wasn't any food produced0:18:09and so then six million Ukrainians starved to death in the 1920s, it's something you never hear about, right? you never hear about that, why do you never hear about that? that's a question worth asking0:18:20you know, it was an absolute catastrophe, they used to... so these people were starving, right to the point of cannibalism, right, I mean it was ugly0:18:29it was ugly as anything you could possibly imagine if you were a mother and... so you're supposed to hand all your grain in to the central committee most of it for distribution into the cities, you didn't get to keep any food yourself0:18:40and so maybe then afterwards, if you were a mother, you'd go out in the fields that had already been harvested and you'd pick up individual grains of wheat, and if you didn't turn those in, they'd sh... that was death for you0:18:52so that's how far it was pushed, so... well, so that's a little story about how the idea of victimization and perpetration can get out of hand extraordinarily rapidly0:19:07so whenever people are beating the victim drum, you know, they'll cover that up with empathy, roughly speaking0:19:18we're speaking on behalf of the oppressed; it's like, maybe you are, but maybe you're no saint because, you know, you're so sure that you're a saint and you're only speaking from the position of good0:19:29highly unlikely; anyways, so Pinocchio is enticed into believing that he's a victim now, the logical part of that is that it is the case that, you know, you can make a very strong case that0:19:40every human being is in some sense involved in a tragic enterprise right? because you're biologically vulnerable, you're not what you could be as a biological specimen, right?0:19:51you're full of imperfections and plus, you're going to be sick, and those you love are going to be sick and everything ends up in death, and so there's a very tragic element to that0:20:00and then, by the same token, you're also subject to the tyrannical aspect of your culture right, 'cause it's forcing you to be a certain way all the time0:20:12socialization does that, you're required to modify your own intrinsic nature in order to come into conformity with the broader community0:20:22and you can think about that from the Piagetian sense, which is that socialization makes you a more and more sophisticated person and there's some truth in that, but you can also be subject just to tyranny, you know0:20:34I see people in my practice, for example, they've had very tyrannical fathers, for example sometimes they have tyrannical mothers as well, but they not so much encouraged0:20:45to integrate properly into the social community, as they are harassed and abused or made to feel insufficient and, you know, basically subject to tyranny0:20:54and so it's quite... and that's true of everyone to some degree you know, you come to university and there's a tyrannical aspect to it; especially in a big institution like this0:21:05you're not really marked out as an individual in any sense, you know you're a number along with 60 thousand other people, and you know, there's something cold and impersonal about that0:21:17which is well represented in the design of this classroom, say but by the same token, you know, the university provides you with an identity while you're exploring an intellectual landscape, you know, you have a lot of freedom0:21:31compared to the vast majority of people, perhaps you don't have as much freedom as you might if you compared it to some utopian notion of freedom, but in any real world sense, you're unbelievably well protected by the university0:21:45partly because it stamps you with the identity "student", which is a respectable identity and so you can go off and educate yourself as much as you can0:21:55and everyone in society says that's okay, they carve out the protected space for you so at the same time as you're being tyrannized by the institution0:22:04and forced in some ways also to adopt the viewpoints, say, of the professors, depending on the professor you're also the beneficiary of that, just like you're the beneficiary of this huge industrial infrastructure0:22:16that underlies everything that you do; so anyways, the fact that your life is tragic necessarily and that you are subject to oppression makes the victimization story really easy to swallow0:22:29but then there's a dark side of that, too; and this is actually what happens with Pinokio so, what happens here is that he's told that he's ill0:22:39and convinced that he's ill, and they do use trickery, and... so again you could look at him in some sense as an innocent victim, but the innocence... the filmmakers do a good job of hedging against the innocent interpretation0:22:55because what he's offered and accepts because he's ill is an easy way out and so what the fox basically tells him is that he needs to have the vacation, because he's sick0:23:07and he can go off to Pleasure Island, which is this place of impulsivity, roughly speaking and whim, it's like reversion to being two years old in some sense and that he really needs that, because otherwise he's not going to be able to live properly0:23:21he's not going to be able to recover his health; and so what Pinokio is offered... is the opportunity to abandon your responsibility as a reward for adopting the guise of victim0:23:34and that's really worth thinking about, because one of the things I thought about for a long time is that... I've been trying to figure out what gives people's lives meaning0:23:43and tragedy gives life its negative meaning, and nobody disputes that even if you're nihilistic, you're not going to dispute the fact that tragedy gives life negative meaning0:23:53so when nihilists say that life is meaningless, that isn't exactly what they mean they mean that life is suffering, but there isn't anything transcendent about it that you could set against that suffering0:24:03that's nihilism, it's not that life is meaningless, that would just be neutral it's like... no one believes that, they certainly don't act like they believe it0:24:15if you look at it technically, and we will as we progress through this class in order to have any positive meaning in your life you have to have identified a goal0:24:25and you have to be working towards it, and there is a technical reason for that and the technical reason, as far as I can tell is that the circuitry that produces the kind of positive emotion that people really like0:24:35is only activated when you notice that... when you're proceeding towards a goal that you value0:24:44and so that means that if you don't have a goal that you value, you can't have any positive emotion so technically that's the incentive reward system, and it's... the underlying circuitry is dopaminergic0:24:54and when that circuitry is activated then it's part of the exploratory circuit, it gives you the sense of being actively engaged in something worthwhile0:25:03and that's, you know, you tend to think of positive emotion as something produced by reward but there's two kinds of positive emotion, one is the reward that's associated with satiation0:25:13and that's consummatory reward, and that's the reward you get when you're hungry and you eat but the thing about eating when you're hungry is that it destroys the framework within which you were operating0:25:24it's time to eat, well, you eat, and that framework's no longer relevant, so the consummatory reward eliminates the value framework and then you're stuck with: well, what are you gonna do next?0:25:34and so, the consummatory reward has with it its own problems, but the incentive reward is constantly what keeps you moving forward and incentive reward, because it's dopaminergic, also is analgesic0:25:45literally analgesic; so if you are in pain, you take opiates, and that will cut the pain but so will psychomotor stimulants, like cocaine or amphetamines0:25:55and so, it's literally the case that if you're engaged in something that's engaging, you're working towards a goal that you're going to feel less pain; and you can see this happening with athletes, you know, they'll break their thumb or something0:26:06or maybe sometimes even their ankle, and they'll keep playing the game, 'course afterwards they're suffering like mad but the fact that they're so filled with goal-directed enthusiasm means that, well, the pain systems are in some sense shut off0:26:20so that's an interesting thing, because what it suggests... I mean, then you can imagine... I might say: well, how happy are you that you've made a certain amount of progress?0:26:31and if you think about it what you'd say is: well, it depends on how much progress and in relationship to what so hypothetically you're gonna be happier if you'd made quite a bit of progress towards a really important goal0:26:43and then you have to think through what it means for a goal to be really important, 'cause that's not obvious now, you could say: you're in this class, and you're listening to some information0:26:53and maybe there's two reasons for that: you might find the information interesting per se, but let's forget about that for a minute you need to listen to the information so that you can do well on the assignment, so that you can do well in the class0:27:07you need to do well in your class so that you can finish up your degree you need to finish up your degree so that you can find your place in the world you need to do that so that you're financially stable and maybe you can start a family and have a life0:27:18and that's all part of being a good person, something like that and so, that's a hierarchy of goals, and you might say that being a good person would be the thing, however vaguely thought through, that's at the top of that hierarchy0:27:32and then, when you're doing things that serve that ultimate purpose, then you're gonna find those more meaningful and that meaning is actually produced as a consequence of the engagement of this exploratory circuit0:27:44that's nested right down in your hypothalamus, it's really, really, old it's as old as thirst, and it's as old as hunger, it's really an old system0:27:53and so, you wanna have that thing activated, I mean, at least from a... well, it isn't only from a hedonic point of view, you know, it's a matter of being happy0:28:05it's the wrong way of thinking about it, it's much more complicated than that, it's... yes? [student] I was actually just about to ask like a hedonic element, 'cause I'm just trying to understand0:28:15[student] this... I guess... not relationship but the differentiation between hedonism and satiation0:28:25[student] and you... like going back to when you mentioned that it's not that life is meaningless [student] but hedonism isn't exactly... like it's not satiation, because0:28:35[student] at that point people are just doing what they're doing for the sake doing [student] it's not just for activation of the dopaminergic system0:28:48[student] so I was trying to understand... well, what I would say, we're going to into that A LOT once we're done with this, like a lot0:28:57but I'll go over it briefly, I mean, it's not merely hedonism because there's an analgesic and also a fear-reducing element to pursuing a proper path0:29:08right, so there's control of negative emotion, but there's not just control of negative emotion and generation of positive emotion in the immediate future which is kinda what you think about with regards to hedonism; actually, Pinokio takes a hedonic route next0:29:20the problem with the hedonic route is that... so the pursuit of pure happiness, let's say is that what makes you happy in the next minute might not be something that will make you happy in the next hour0:29:31well you know that, there's this comic, what's his name, they call him king of the one-liners he talked about drinking wine; don't you know that's gonna cause a hangover?0:29:40and he said: yeah, at the end, but the beginning and middle are excellent and so that's really the problem with hedonism, right, is that0:29:49to pursue something that makes you happy in the immediate present risks sacrificing your, well, many things, but at least, let's say, your hedonism in the medium to long term0:30:00and of course that is one of the major problems with drug use, and alcohol's a really good example of that because whatever hedonic kick you might get from it that moment at night0:30:10you're going to pay for almost completely or maybe even more so, because the next day you're much more jittery and anxious, and that's a direct consequence of withdrawing from the drug0:30:22so when you're in... when you have a hangover you're in alcohol withdrawal so that's how fast you get, roughly speaking, addicted to it0:30:31and so if you take another drink when you're hungover it'll cure it, but it's not a very useful cure because all you do is push the inevitable hangover one more step into the future0:30:40and so part of the problem with the hedonic answer is: happy when? exatly; and over what period of time? and also: who's happy?0:30:49because maybe something makes you happy but makes your family miserable now, you could say, well, I don't care, but you do care if you have to live with your family because they're gonna take it out on you; so the impulsive hedonism, which is also fostered, say, by a positive emotion0:31:05it tends to put people into a state of... the pursuit of short-term hedonism, it's not a good medium to long-term solution I actually think that's why people evolved conscientiousness0:31:17right, 'cause conscientiousness is not happy, conscientious people aren't conscientious because it makes them happy we're starting to think that they're conscientious because they actually feel terrible if they're just sitting around doing nothing0:31:31and so it's a way of staving off stress that's related to enforced leisure, something like that you know, if you know industrious people, some of you are industrious0:31:43some of you will have industrious parents, they just can't sit around and do nothing, they have to be working they don't feel good unless they're working; so one thing about conscientiousness is that0:31:53it involves continual sacrifice, right, you're doing difficult things in the present, hypothetically to make the future better but that's not driven by hedonism by any stretch of the imagination; and conscientiousness is actually a pretty good predictor of long-term life success0:32:06in stable societies; 'cause there's also no point in being conscientious and saving things up and storing things if a bunch of thugs are gonna just come in randomly and take it all away0:32:18so conscientiousness actually only works intelligently in societies that have some medium to long-term stability you know, 'cause you can get wiped out by hyperinflation, too, 'cause hyperinflation kills off the conscientious people0:32:29the people who accrued debts are thrilled when hyperinflation kicks in, because it wipes out their debts but of course those debts are the things they owed to people who were conscientious enough to save0:32:39so anyways, Pinocchio is transformed into a victim, and he's offered this identity, and he takes it now, it's partly 'cause he's deceived and manipulated0:32:50but it's also partly because the Fox offers him the abandonment of responsibility as payment for adopting the victim identity0:33:01so this is where his own lack of morality, let's say, 'cause this is all about Pinocchio's development as a character plays a role in his demise0:33:13if I'm a victim, everyone else owes me something, and I don't have to take any responsibility and so, one of the things I've wondered... here's something to think about:0:33:22it might be that the sense of meaning that life can provide to you is proportionate to the amount of responsibility you decide to take on0:33:31and that'd be very strange if it was the case, you know, because responsibility of course is a kind of weight, obviously and it's difficult to take on responsibility; but if any positive emotion that you feel and your control of anxiety0:33:45and the control over pain is dependent on the activation of the systems that watch you move towards a desired goal then the more complete and weighty the goal is, the more kick there's going to be in the observation that you're moving towards it0:34:01and you know, you kinda already know this, because you'll have observed in your own life that when you're engaged in something that you believe in, that the time passes properly0:34:13you know, you can see this even if you're... maybe you're reading a paper and it's actually related in some intelligible manner to something that you wanna learn0:34:23so even though it's difficult, you get engaged in it, you can remember it better, you process it better and you're not so likely to fall asleep, and you're not so likely to wanna find distractions, all of that0:34:34you can get into it; and it would be very interesting if that was proportionate to the degree of responsibility that you're willing to shoulder, and I think you can make a strong case for that0:34:43I've also often wondered: imagine you could offer people a choice here's the choice: you can say, well, your life isn't meaningful, the nihilists have got it right0:34:54there's no meaning in your life, and because of that there's no reason for you to accept any responsibility so you can live a responsibility-free life and maybe one of impulsive pleasure-seeking0:35:06but a responsibility-free life; but the price you pay is that it doesn't get to be meaningful or you could say to someone: no, we're gonna do the opposite, we're gonna say: you can live a meaningful life0:35:16but it's only gonna be as meaningful as the amount of responsibility that you're willing to bear and then you might say: well, what would people choose? 'cause everybody always makes noises about wanting to have a meaningful life0:35:30but if the price you pay for that is the adoption of responsibility, then it's not so obvious people would choose meaning over pointless pursuits0:35:41if they had to... if the benefit they got for choosing the pointless pursuits was that they didn't have to care about anything they ever did there's no responsibility, and that's really what Pinocchio is offered, and that's what the Coachman offers him0:35:53and that's interesting, because, you know, so far it's been the Fox and the Cat, and they're kinda two-bit hoods and so, the pathological pathway that they offer Pinocchio is not the worst of the pathological pathways0:36:08but here, at least as far as the imagination, the collective imagination that created this movie is concerned this is where you get to the most pathological form of, let's call it temptation0:36:19and that's the temptation to engage in... to abandon responsibility and to engage in impulsive pleasure seeking0:36:28short-term pleasure seeking so here's the Fox, pretending to be a doctor investigating Pinocchio's illness0:36:37and he makes some notes, which is all just meaningless scribble it's like white noise, and it doesn't matter that the arguments that he's making are completely incoherent0:36:51and it doesn't matter that he actually doesn't know anything, what he's selling is easy to buy and so Pinocchio buys it0:37:01and by the end of the conversation with the Fox he's pretty convinced that he's useless and that he needs a vacation; you know...0:37:10this is an oedipal situation as well, which I touched on the other lecture, I mean...0:37:20let's imagine that you have a child that is a little on the neurotic side, so high negative emotion and maybe one that's also a little bit on the sickly side, so it has a variety of relatively minor ailments, but ailments nonetheless0:37:35and so what that means as a parent, we'll say mother for this example, 'cause I want to use the oedipal example you have to make a decision all the time about exactly how you're gonna treat that child0:37:46one decision is: well, I'm not gonna... you don't have to go to school today, because you're not feeling well, but fair enough, but do you make the same decision the next day? and do you make the same decision the next day?0:38:02and let's imagine that you enable the child to avoid responsibility as a consequence of capitalizing on their illness well then that's not gonna be very good for the child, the rule with a sickly child has to be something like:0:38:15I'm gonna push you right to your limit; because otherwise how is the person gonna figure out what they can do? and if they can't figure out what they can do, then they're not gonna be able to make their way in the world at all0:38:27and then that gets muddied very badly if you're not exactly sure that you want them to make their way in the world, you know maybe you're just as happy, because you'd be sitting at home, alone if your child was there with you0:38:38and maybe you'd be just as happy at some level if they never grew up at all because then they won't leave; and maybe that's because you have a terrible marriage, and you're lonesome, you know0:38:49maybe it's an abusive marriage and your husband has chased away all your friends and so you don't have anything at all, and maybe that's 'cause you didn't stand up for yourself very well apart from the fact that he was, you know, tyrannical in his central nature0:39:02and so then all those little warps and bends in your psyche are gonna manifest themselves right... right in the background of every one of those decisions0:39:14my daughter had a lot of illnesses when she was adolescent, and they were very serious, and it was very difficult to figure out what to do about that, because you couldn't exactly apply normative rules, right?0:39:27and we always had to figure out if she was communicating her symptoms to us, how seriously to take those and the answer was: the least amount of serious possible, it's something like that, because0:39:42we needed to know, and she needed to know, what she could do in spite of the fact that she had problems and one of the things I really tried to instill in her, and I think it worked, is that:0:39:53you don't ever wanna use your illness as an excuse for not doing anything not consciously, you know, sometimes you might not know, "I'm not feeling well, what can I do?"0:40:02well you don't know, right, because sometimes when you're not feeling well, you can do more than you think, and sometimes you can do less than you think it's not like it's obvious, but sometimes it's obvious, you know, this little temptation flits through your mind, and you think:0:40:14well, I don't really wanna do what I'm doing today, and I'm not feeling very well, so I don't have to do it you do that a hundred times, and *you* don't know how sick you are anymore and then you're in real trouble, because not only are you sick, but you actually have... you've muddied the waters0:40:29and so you have both problems, is you're actually ill, and you've betrayed yourself by using that as an excuse not to pursue your responsibilities0:40:40and that, I think, if both of those thing happen to you at the same time, you're in real trouble and it's really hard not to have that happen0:40:49so anyways, Pinokio gets enticed into believing he's a victim the fact that he's insufficient is used as an excuse by the fox and the cat to offer him a trip to Pleasure Island0:41:04and this is, I think, where the movie gets particularly dark and so off they go, singing away; they have to carry him so you could say in some sense he's carried by societal pathology and his own trouble0:41:18he's carried like a puppet off to Pleasure Island; and so the Cricket... the Cricket is again left behind, he's not the world's best conscience at this point0:41:29so, Pinokio goes off to meet the Coachman, and the Coachman has already said he's collecting bad little boys and he's got them on the coach, they're all delinquent types here0:41:41and the ticket on the coach was the ace of spades, which is what Pinocchio is holding and he's with this character here, called Lampwick0:41:51and that's an interesting name, so he's the thing that burns in the middle of a light, lamp wick and that's interesting, because it's a play on Lucifer, 'cause Lucifer means 'bringer of light'0:42:02and so Lampwick is a play on that, and Lampwick is really a nasty piece of work he's got this false arrogance about him, he's got this cynical voice, really deeply cynical voice0:42:13and he's only... I don't know how old he's supposed to be in this, maybe 12 or something like that, 13 And so he's one of those kids who's become prematurely cynical0:42:22I'll tell you a story about that so I used to live in Montreal, I lived in a poor neighborhood0:42:31and one day I was out in the back alley, building a fence, 'cause I was putting a fence around my little tiny back yard and there was a house across the alley down the street aways, where there was a lot of, like0:42:45not good partying, a lot of bikers were hanging around there, ans I knew there was a little kid that lived there as well anyways, I was out there in the back alley, pounding away on my fence, and these little kids came up0:42:56and they were little, they were like 3 and 4 years old, hey, and they spoke joual a kind of really heavily accented quebecois french, and my french isn't good0:43:07so I could hardly understand them; but they were watching me hammer, and they got a little closer and they had one kid who was clearly the leader, had a real scowl on his face, eh?0:43:17and so they were watching, and I kinda motioned to one of them, that they could use the hammer and that kid said, and I'm gonna mangle this, but he said "je voulai" or something like that0:43:27and what it meant is "I'll steal that"; and so I thought... you know, and then he came over and he tugged on it and he wanted to take it, and he was quite angry that I wasn't gonna let him take it, and then so...0:43:38so I couldn't engage him, I couldn't get him to play, you know, and his buddies were sort of hanging around behind him, and they wouldn't come and play, because he wouldn't, and so he was hostile right away to me0:43:49and then... so the fence piece was laying out in the alley, and these little monsters started running across it0:43:58which I thought was really remarkable, you know, but it was terrible at the same time, because they were really little kids that shouldn't be happening when you're like 3 or 4; if that's happening at that age, things are not good0:44:09and so that kid was already like seriously not happy with the world and you know, I've been studying antisocial behavior for a long time by that point, and I knew that0:44:20the kids who are destined to jail later in their lives are kids who are rough and tough when they're two years old, but then don't get socialized or maybe worse, they get anti-socialized, which is exactly what happened to this kid, he'd obviously been ignored and abused0:44:35certainly no one had ever played with him in any real way, because he wouldn't play; and it's not good if a kid is that little and you can't get them to play, something's gone seriously wrong, 'cause they're so playful at that age, that it's like 90% of them0:44:50anyways, so they were running back and forth on this fence, I thought, stomping on it, you know and I was right there, I thought, well, first of all I thought that was remarkable, but I also thought it was absolutely horrifying, because0:45:02you know, in some sense I could see where this kid was headed and why at that early stage in his life, it's really... it's not a pleasant thing to behold0:45:12but there was nothing that could be done about it, and that... kinda what this Lampwick is like he's prematurely cynical, this kid was already cynical, and he was like 4 years old you know, most kids don't get cynical 'till they're teenagers, and then often they don't get completely cynical and usually they more or less grow out of it0:45:29but it happened to him much earlier; so this Lampwick character, he's already decided that he knows everything, that everyone else's opinion is worth nothing0:45:40and that there's nothing in cultre or society that holds any utility whatsoever for someone like him now, you can imagine developing that way, if you were raised in a family where people were generally lying to you0:45:54and that they randomly treated you or neglected you, and that you couldn't discern anything about them that was admirable or positive of course you assume the whole structure is corrupt, and that you had to take care of yourself, and no one else0:46:09well, not of course, not everyone assumes that under those situations, I shouldn't say "of course" but it's a logical set of conclusions, so...0:46:19and of course it's proportionate to some degree to how much abuse you tak, althought there are lots of stories of people who've been terribly abused as children who grew up to be, you know, kind, remarkable, responsible, thoughtful0:46:33people who were absolutely opposed to abuse, instead of propagating it there's no direct causal pathway anyways, Lampwick is pretty happy to be on this coach way to Pleasure Island which he's heard about0:46:47he said, "well, it's all you can eat, all you can smoke, you don't have to do any work, you can do anything you want" so you might say, well, it's too good to be true, like the ginger bread house in the Hansel and Grettel story0:47:00right, the kids are lost, there's a ginger bread house, it's a house, which is something they need, and it's made out of cookies it looks like it's a little bit too good to be true, and of course in the house there's the negative part of that0:47:13which is the old witch who wants to eat children; and that's a story about what happens to people if they're offered more than they should be offered0:47:24so... anyways, Lampwick is firing off... he has a little slingshot and he's firing off pebbles at the horses who are pulling the carriage, and that's just the kind of guy that he is0:47:39so he takes Pinocchio under his wing; and the Cricket is down there in the dust, he's caught back up to the carriage but he's having a rough time at this point0:47:50this is also a story, to some degree, about transitioning to adolescence you know, because adolescence is a time when people are pretty impulsive, and their view is quite short-term0:47:59and are more likely to pursue immediate pleasures and all of that, and that can get really out of hand, so... anyways, they separate from the mainland, and go on a boat, and so they're off to Pleasure Island0:48:13a dark place; and the Coachman opens the gates and lets the delinquents into Pleasure Island, and0:48:24they basically have a riot; and this is Pleasure Island, here, it's full of amusement park rides, and0:48:35you know, one of the things that's kind of interesting about horror movies, I'm sure you've noticed this, is that they're often set in amusement parks and clowns are often characters of horror, we'll leave the clowns aside for now, but the amusement park thing, that's pretty interesting0:48:50why in the world would an amusement park be a place of horror? and the first question might be: well, have you ever been to an amusement park? because there is something about them, that's really...0:49:02they have a dark side, a clear dark side, and part of it is that people with nothing better to do are spending money stupidly, and they're being fleeced by the people who operate the amusement park0:49:16you know, and they have, let's say, a stereotypically dark reputation and they're moving around all the time, this is also something that psychopaths do0:49:27and all they're doing is moving from community to community, and taking the money from the rubes, fundamentally and so, the amusement park, well...0:49:37if you walk through an amusement park with that sort of thing in mind, maybe that's also coloring your vision, of course, but it's something that you could see very immediately; so there's something about them that's deeply sad, but there's also an underlying horror that characterizes them0:49:53it's easy for a horror movie or horror novel writers to immediately expand upon, there's something about it that that makes sense to people, so...0:50:04it's too easy, maybe that's... and it's also all short-term gratification, that's the other thing so you spend your money very rapidly, and it's gone; yes? [student] seems like a celebration of meanings divorced from reality (?)0:50:18yes, exactly, well, that's the impulsive element; the comment was it's a celebration of meanings divorced from reality yeah, it's also outside of reality, right, that's why it's on an island, it's a separate universe0:50:31and it's a universe where nothig that's happening is connected to anything outside and you're spending your hard-earned money, let's say, but it isn't that much... it's certainly not an investment0:50:41it's not that much different than burning it, well, it is, because of course you get some pleasure out of it, but it isn't... going there every day is probably not the wisest move that you could make, so...0:50:57the animators do a good job of, well, of presenting the, what would you call it the enforced hedonism, I guess I would say, of a place like that; this is a place where you're gonna have fun, that's what it's for, so...0:51:13anyways, Lampwick, who's got this very arrogant look on his face, and this kind of strut it's a bravado, that's what it's called, it's a false confidence0:51:24it's the sort of thing that people do when they're trying to impress upon others that they're high in the dominance hierarchy but really they're not, so it's a mimicry of dominance0:51:34but it's something that can be intimidating, there's no doubt about it I had a friend, he didn't come to a good end0:51:48this person who was a real good friend of mine, when I was in junior high and high school, and he was kind of crazy and he was tall, he was a bout six foot seven, and he was pretty thin0:51:59and we used to go out to the bar now and then, and in many of the bars that we were in, we lived in this little town there were bullies, and these were guys... and I worked in the bars, and I used to watch these guys, and they'd basically...0:52:12there was a handful of them in town, pretty psychopathic types and they'd go to the bar, and all they'd do is sit there and wait for someone to come in who they could beat up they knew who it was as soon as they walked in, that's actually why they were at the bar0:52:24and so they'd wait 'till someone came in, who didn't look very confident, and who could likely be intimidated by this sort of thing, and then they'd tell him to come outside for a fight, and if they didn't, well then they'd of course make fun of him, and if they did, well, generally they'd beat them up0:52:39my friend kinda caught on to this trick, and he started going into bars, and every time that someone like that came near him he'd go outside and fight with them; and one of the things he observed right away is that0:52:50almost inevitably when he went outside with them, they'd shake hands and make friends so as soon as he... and it was realy remarkable, watching him, 'cause he wasn't a particularly physically powerful person0:53:01although he was extraordinarily tall; but he had started to play this game, and he did it for along time, and I don't remember him ever actually having to fight, he just stared them down, fundamentally0:53:14so it was a very interesting thing to watch, but it was an indication to me of exactly how shallow this kind of bravado, bullying actually is0:53:23but people don't find that out, because they won't stand up, and it's not surprising, but...0:53:32anyways, they load up on food, Pinocchio's carrying a pie and a an ice cream cone simultaneously and then they're off to have a fight, and Lampwick says something like:0:53:44it's good to punch someone in the nose sometimes just for the, I think he says, heck of it and so Pinokio adopts this strut, and in they go to the roughhouse and then, in the next scene, you see this model home up for destruction, it's quite an interesting scene symbolically, you see...0:54:01in the middle of this house here there's a stained-glass window that has a mandala on it, we'll see it more clearly in a minute and a mandala is a sacred symbol of the Self, that's the Jungian interpretation0:54:14it's a symbol... it's very difficult to describe, but it's a symbol... music is a mandala, except it's played out across time, so you could say that thing is the same as music, but it's kinda like a slice of music0:54:26it's the same idea, you know sometimes you see those slow-motion or sped-up-motion videos of a flower unfolding? that's the same idea, you can imagine that being se to music, and somehow that would make sense0:54:40and the mandala's like a symbol of the unfolding of being, or the source of meaning, or something like that and it's also a symbol of the Self from the jungian perspective0:54:52so there you see it more clearly; the kids are starting to burn this place and trash it, and they're dragging the grand piano down the stairs, it's a destruction of high culture0:55:03about which they are nothing but cynical, 'cause they don't believe that hard work and sacrifice can can produce something of any value, and they want to bring it down and destroy it, and that's partly because...0:55:16you can see this in the story of Cain and Able Able is hardworking and everyone likes him, and he makes the proper sacrifices, and so his life goes pretty well0:55:25and that's part of the reason Cain hates it, and he's jealous and resentful, but worse than that if you're around someone, if you're not doing very well, especially if that's your own fault0:55:36if you're not doing very well, and you're around someone who's doing very well, it's very painful, because the mere fact of their being judges you, and so it's very easy to wanna destroy that0:55:46to destroy that ideal so that you don't have to live with the terrible consequences of seeing it embodied in front of you0:55:55and so part of the reason that people wanna tear things down is so that they don't have anything to contrast themselves against and to feel bad and that's exactly what's happening here, the kids are destroying all of this culture, roughly speaking0:56:11because it judges them; the fact that it exists judges them; and I've often thought this about Michelangelo's statue of David which is this heroic... so David was a shepherd, obviously, and it doesn't sound like much, but0:56:25back in those times being a shepherd was a big deal, because there were lions, and you had a slingshot so like, you've got to defend your sheep from lions with a slingshot0:56:35so you weren't exactly this, like, 19th century English guy dressed in a, you know, frilly blue suit you were tough as a bloody... well, someone who would go after a lion with a slingshot, it's no joke0:56:48anyways, the statue is very heroic, and, you know, you look at that, you think, well, that's the possibility of human kind but by the same token it's also what you're not, and so, as well as being an ideal, it's a judge0:56:59and every ideal is a judge, so... yes? [student] going back to your example of Cain and Able, um, so you're using that as an example illustrating0:57:10[student] becoming bitter as a result of not being able to achieve status... success as a result of hard work0:57:22[student] but in the example of Cain and Able, um, like one was a shepherd, and one was a farmer, and the one who was favored0:57:34[student] so was that a result of the hard work or was that a result of... (agriculture being favored?) good question, those stories are very compicated0:57:45and the story is very ambivalent about whether Cain is not rewarded because he makes bad sacrifices or beause God's just in a bad mood; I like that... if you read the story0:57:56I read multiple translations of the story, and when Cain comes to God to complain God basically tells him: look, buddy, before you go about criticizing the structure of reality0:58:09you should look to your own inadequacies; he says: sin crouches at your door like a predatory, sexually aroused animal and you invited it in to have its way with you, and something has emerged as a consequence0:58:21so don't be botherin' me about my creation before you look to yourself so there's a very strong hint that the reason that God has not favored Cain's sacrifices because they weren't of particularly good quality0:58:35but it is ambivalent in the story, and there is the sheperd versus farmer motif as well and of course that motif runs through the entire corpus of stories to some degree, especially the shepherd motif0:58:47so, it's only about a paragraph long, that whole story and it packs all that into that tiny little amount of space but the idea that Cain kills Abel to get rid of his ideal0:58:58and also to punish God, roughly speaking, it's a brilliant story; I mean... these guys who go around shooting up highschools, they're shooting at... highschools in particular, but...0:59:09you know, they're definitely out for revenge, and what they're revenging themselves against or to who is not exactly clear anyways, so these kids are just tearing down this model home0:59:20tearing down western civilization, I suppose is another way of looking at it, or just tearing down civilization, period and Pinokio's having a pretty good time, he's got his axe, and he's looking a little malevolent there0:59:31and happy to be destroying things, which is of course a pretty simple thing to do so there's that image that I told you about, the mandala, and that's a flower in this image0:59:42and so, what happens is that, I think it's Lampwick, throws a brick through it and so, what that means symbolically: the self is a symbol of your potential, among very many other things0:59:54but by engaging in this sort of impulsive, destructive activity Lampwick and Pinocchio are making it impossible to further their development1:00:03and they're doing that to some degree consciously, they basically say: to hell with it and toss a brick through this highest ideal, the thing through which light shines, so also that harkens back to the star as well1:00:16so, anyways, the coachman is paying attention to all this and he's actually pretty happy about the fact that these boys are so involved in their stupid amusements1:00:28that they're not paying any attention to what's actually going on he calls these people out of the darkness, these creatures out of the darkness, so... you get these black... you can hardly see them there, but theyre black cloaked figures with glowing eyes1:00:42and they're shutting the door of the amusement park and that's very interesting, it's an extraordinarily interesting happening it's like, ok, so all of a sudden the amusement park... we already know that the Coachman is up to no good1:00:55but now he's got these minions that are faceless in some sense, they're clearly creatures of the night and they're up to no good, and so you have this sense that...1:01:05that the boys are being offered bread and circuses, roughly speaking but there's something... there's a real reason for it, there's a manipulative reason for it, they're being enticed into a trap, the doors are closed, and these underground beings are involved in the plot1:01:21and obviously the coachman understands this perfectly well; so one of the ways to understand this is to think about what totalitarian states have to offer their populace, and1:01:33what they offer them, and this happened particularly as Rome declined, let's say that's where the term bread and circuses originally came from, is that as the situation degenerates, then people have to be offered stupid amusements more and more frequently1:01:46in order for them ignore what's actually going on in the background you know, a war can be that kind of stupid amusement1:01:56anyways, later that night the entire place is completely devastated, and all we see is the wreckage of everything that was there before and again the Cricket has gotten separated from Pinocchio, and so he's trying to find him1:02:08and Pinocchio ends up in this... this bar that's shaped like an 8-ball the 8-ball is kind of the random ball in pool, and anyways he's inside the 8-ball, and1:02:21he's shooting pool with Lampwick, and that's just another indication of wasting his time, basically, and you can see in the forefront there's some cards for gambling, so he's engaged in these sort of1:02:33you might say, pointless, hedonic hedonic pursuits, and he's enticing Pinocchio along the same route, and so1:02:43he teaches him to smoke, first, that doesn't go very well, so Pinocchio takes a huge drag on his cigar and it just about kills him, and when Lampwick asks him how he likes it1:02:56he shakes his head and says, you know, that it's really, was really quite good, but he's so sick that he can hardly stand up and he's hallucinating double balls on the pool table, and1:03:06then the cricket shows up and stands on the 8-ball, and kinda gives him one of those declamatory speeches again you know, 'cause he still hasn't quite figured out that standing up proud and spouting off the rules isn't exactly1:03:19the right way for the conscience to behave; and Lampwick picks him up by the scruff of the neck roughly speaking, and first of all asks who he is, so obviously he's divorced from his own conscience1:03:32and then makes fun of Pinocchio for paying attention to this little bug, and that's kind of a nice indication of what happens at adolescence, you know, because1:03:42of course as children move away from their parents and into their groups, especially when the groups are misbehaving often what happens is that the other members of the group will torture a person who isn't willing to try something dangerous or foolish1:03:56by making fun of the fact that they're, you know, too attached to their conscience there's a positive element to that, because you should take some risks when you're a teenager, and also later in life, and so1:04:09if you won't take any risks, there's actually something wrong with you, but there's a negative element in that well, you know, teenagers do all sorts of stupid things, and perhaps it's amazing that we all live all live through it actually, as far as I'm concerned1:04:22some people take extraordinary risks, extraordinary risks and they don't make it through at all or they end up in the permanently antisocial population1:04:34and then they're, you know, basically carreer criminals; five percent of the criminals commint 95% of the crimes it's another Pareto distribution, so...1:04:46anyways, Lampwick isn't gonna listen to Pinocchio or to the Cricket, he laughs at him with this kind of braying laugh which is some foreshadowing, and the Cricket gets all upset, puts his coat on backwards1:04:58and ends up dumped down a pool table hole, and otherwise abused, and so he stomps on out of there, he tells Pinocchio that he can take care of himself, and he stomps on out of there1:05:10and so Pinocchio is left without the guidance of conscience, and the Cricket is trying to figure out how to get off Pleasure Island BUT! he goes through the gates and he sees what's actually going on1:05:23and what's going on is that the Coachman had this like slave boat down in the bowels of the island, and he's got all these black-suited minions with the glowing eyes1:05:35working for him, and they're rounding up what looked like donkeys and so they're beast of burden, right? and so there's an idea here that if you produce...1:05:45if you pursue impulsive pleasure to the detriment of the development of your character you're going to end up a beast of burden, you're going to end up a slave to a tyrant1:05:54and that's exactly right, and so, anyways, the Cricket doesn't... you can see one of those black-suited horrors here, hauling donkeys out of this crate1:06:05and one of them has a hat on, and they look very sad and they're in different crates, and one of them says: sold to the salt mines, and one of them says: sold to the circus1:06:14so they're shipped off to be slaves, roughly speaking and they look very sad, and then one of them gets hauled out of a crate, and he's still got a hat on1:06:24he has a hat on and a sweater, and he can still talk, he's a boy, it turns out that's been half-transformed into a jackass, a brying jackass prior to being enslaved1:06:35so that's another thing that's quite interesting about the story, you know, it also makes the case that if you replace your voice with stupid braying, that the probability that you're going to become enslaved by a tyrant is extraordinarily high1:06:50and I always can't help but think about ideologues in that manner, you know Solzhenitsyn wrote about the radical left ideologues that got thrown in the gulag archipelago, you know1:07:02so they were part stalwarts, this happened to a lot of people, true believers who were vacuumed up by the stalinist machine and thrown into the gulag anyways, and1:07:12he said that those people suffered in some ways more than everyone else, because what did he say? they were bit by the beloved hand that fed them and so the first while when they were in the camps, Solzhenitsyn didn't really know what to do with people like that1:07:24because on the one hand, well, they were in the camps, and wasn't that awful, and they've been torn away from their family and you know, stripped of all their identity, and their status, so that's pretty rough1:07:34but on the other hand they were writing letters protesting their innocence and assuming that everyone else in the camp was guilty, but they were innocent, and they were still strident believers in the communist process1:07:46and so, you know, it was a conundrum, here they are being terribly punished but by the same token they're also the perpetrators of their own demise, so how do you deal with them?1:07:56they used to play "comrades", he said they used to play "comrades" with people like that and invite them into an ideological discussion about the camp situation, and the situation in the country as a whole1:08:08and let them rattle out their ideological justifications for everything that had happened trying to make them parody themselves, roughly speaking, it was a rough game1:08:19and Solzhenitsyn also concluded that there was no helping someone like that1:08:28when they were still ensconced inside that braying ideology, you could predict everything they were going to say it's like someone had a crank, you could just crank it, and out would come the proper ideological formulas1:08:39but then he realized that as soon as they, let's call it, repented of that and started to realize they're own role in it or the error of the system1:08:48then he would start communicating with them, you know, as if they were people who you could communicate with1:08:57yeah, that was very interesting, as far as I'm concerned anyways, this kid is still a little bit human, he starts to cry for his mom and the Coachman basically throws him back into the crate and says that he's not ready yet1:09:09and the reason for that is that he could still... he still had the power of independent speech you remember, right at the beginning of the movie, when the mouth was painted on Pionokio1:09:19we saw that mask that was really glaring at the process, I said that character recurrs continuously throughout the movie and this is a good example of that, because the Coachman is the enemy of anything that has it's own voice1:09:32so he's the anti-Gepetto, that's a good way of thinking about it, he's the tyrannical aspect of the culture but insofar as one of these mostly donkeys, mostly jackasses can still talk1:09:44then they're not completely fit for slavery; and you remember this movie was also being made at about the same time that1:09:53the Nazi transformation of Germany was taking place, and so all these terrible ounderground things you know, this process whereby people were being reduced to ideological slaves, say1:10:06and in this terrible process that was all playing out in Europe in a very big way It was not that people were not aware of that. It was in the air. So...1:10:18Anyway, the donkeys and the jackass can still talk. Crying and complaining and repenting, and1:10:28the Coachman turns into a full tyrant again cracks a whip if I remember correctly, and says: "You had your fun, and now you're gonna pay for it." The Cricket gets word of all this, he gets wind of it, he starts to understand what happened1:10:41is that all these bad kids were enticed out onto this island so that they could be enslaved and he's really taken aback by that, to say the least1:10:50when he realizes what's going on, so he runs back to find Pinokio, and then the scene switches back to the 8-ball bar where where Lampwick is drinking beer and complaining about what the conscience said1:11:03you know, 'cause he's kinda guilty and ashamed, but he won't admit it, 'cause he doesn't admit anything he knows everything, he's not gonna admit anything about himself that isn't perfect, he's a real totalitarian in training1:11:14and he drinks this beer, and he's laughing about the conscience and putting him down and then he says, well, what does he say exactly...? "what does he think I am, a jackass?" or something like that, maybe that's not the words exactly1:11:26and then he grows these ears, and Pinokio sees that and immediately takes a look at the beer and stops drinking it and then Lampwick transforms one more time, and his face turns into the face of a donkey1:11:40and he's laughing still, and then his hands... oh yes, he laughs and then he starts to bray like a jackass, he's horrified by that, and then Pinokio laughs, and the braying comes out as well1:11:53so now they're absolutely horrified, and Lampwick actually figures out what's going on he figures out that he's been tricked and that he's transforming and he's completely horrified by it1:12:03he becomes conscious of what's happening to him; and there's one particularly, I would say, dramatic scene where his hands have transformed into hooves, and he's kicking and leaping around the room in panic1:12:18and he comes up to a mirror, he sees himself as the jackass, and then he turns around and breaks the mirror so, you know, he's self-conscious for a moment, then he destroys his capacity for self-consciousness1:12:27then he transforms entirely into a jackass, he's farther down the road than Pinokio [should be 'further'] and he comes crawling to Pinokio to save him, and asks that the conscience comes back1:12:37so that he can get out of this, but of course it's a bit too late, and so then Pinokio grows jackass ears, and he's absolutely terrified by it as well, he knows what's coming1:12:49and the cricket comes back, and guides him off Pleasure Island, and so then they end up on a cliff because this is an island, after all, and they have to jump into the unknown1:13:01right, out of this impulsive, adolescent, hedonic playground into the unknown and that's how they escape; so that's the first time that Pinokio has to leave...1:13:13this is the first scene where he has to jump into the water to make a clean break from something pathological so tyranny... you see this echoed... you see echoes of this in the story of Moses leading his people from Egypt1:13:27because Moses is a master of water, right? he hits a rock with a stick and water comes out of it and he's floating on water when he's an infant, and he parts the red sea, and1:13:39so he's a master of water and transformation, and the pharaoh's kingdom is represented as desert stone, roughly speaking and so, the idea there is that, well, the kingdom is solid ground1:13:52but it can be a tyranny, and the water is chaos, but it can be the thing that you have to leap into to free yourself from the tyranny it's not like in the Moses story that that comes easy, right, because the Hebrews leave Egypt, which is a terrible tyranny1:14:07and you think, well, that's good, they escaped from the tyranny that isn't what happens, they escape from the tyranny, they actually end up somewhere arguably worse 'cause they're wandering around in the desert for forty years1:14:18and that's... it's a brilliant element of that story, because it states clearly that when you go from a bad place to a better place you go to a worse place first1:14:28and that's a great... it's a great thing to know because it also tells you why you might be unwilling to take the next step you know, you're aiming up, but in order to aim up you have to let go of something you already have1:14:41and then that will put you into a state of chaos and unless you're willing to undergo that intermediary state of chaos, and you might not recover from it you're not gonna get to the next level1:14:54so that's rough, well, so Pinokio, he decides that chaos is better than tyranny and guided by his conscience we don't see anything happening in the water in this particular scene1:15:06they come back to shore all half-drowned and exhausted by their adventure and they go back home, and I think maybe we'll take a break now, let's see, this is a good time to take a break1:15:221:30, perfect, so let's break for 15 minutes, okay? alright alright, so1:15:37Carl Jung talked about this phenomenon he... he described as retrogressive restoration of the persona1:15:52and so, it's a complicated idea, but basically what it means is that sometimes you take a leap forward and you learn some things, but you can't catalyze a new identity, so you try to go back and hide in your old identity1:16:05and that actually doesn't work, because, well, things have changed, and you've learned something, and that isn't who you are anymore1:16:14and so it's like you have to cut parts of yourself off in a destructive manner to fit back into the person that you were now, what happens here is that Pinokio escapes from this tyrannical situation1:16:28and undergoes this descent into chaos, but he tries to go back home, he tries to go back to what he was and he can't do that anymore, his father isn't at home anymore, and so1:16:42so when he goes home he finds that there's no home there, now this happens to people sometimes, and it's often a shock to them, so1:16:52one of the things I've noticed about Peter Pan type... I'm gonna speak about men here, because I've observed it more in men1:17:01is that they often stay under the thumb of their father, and you think, well why would someone do that, because it means they subject to the tyrannical judgment of their father1:17:12they're always concerned about what their father would think or whether their father approves of them and so forth and you think, well, that's gotta be an unpleasant place to be, why would you do that?1:17:26one of the things that I've suggested to my clients and to other people sometimes is that... here's a weird little exercise that you can undertake, a little thought experiment1:17:37so you have your parents and of course your parents have friends who are about their age, and maybe some of them are people you only know peripherally, and I might ask you, well1:17:48do you care more about what your parents think than you care about what these peripheral people who know your parents think? and then the answer to that is, well, of course, and then the question that arises out of that is:1:18:01why? I mean, for someone else your parents are the peripheral people, and their parents are central, like why is it logical that your parents' opinion makes any more difference to you1:18:14than the opinion of some randomly selected people who are approximately that age why is it the case that you would consider that they know more than someone else?1:18:26I mean, I know that they know you better, and fair enough, but that's not the point and then another point there is that to the degree that your parents' opinion about you matters more1:18:36than some randomly selected people of approximately the same age, Jung would say, well you haven't exactly separated out the God-image from your parents, and so you're still under that combination1:18:49it's like... it's a complicated thing to talk about, but think about the Harry Potter series Harry has two sets of parents, right, he's got the Dursley parents, and then he's got these, like, magical parents that sort of float behind1:19:02and he should know the difference between them, they shouldn't be one and the same, they're not - for him it's like, well, you have your parents and you have nature and culture as parents1:19:11and you shouldn't be thinking that your parents are nature and culture as well, they shouldn't have final dominion over you it means that you're not an individual yet if that's the case1:19:20Freud said for example that no one could be a man unless his father had died and Jung said yes, but that death can take place symbolically1:19:31ok, so there's that part of the idea, and then another part of the idea is one of the times in your life when you actually realize that you're an individual1:19:40is when you'll go and ask your parents something, and you'll realize they actually don't know any more about what you should do than you do, and that sucks1:19:50and that's partly why people are often willing to maintain a tyrant-slave relationship with their father; it's like on the one hand you have to be inferior in a relationship like that, you know, you've always got the judge watching you1:20:03but on the other hand there's always someone who knows what to do there's always someone standing between you and the unknown that you can go ask: what should I do? well, at some point you'll realize that the reason you can't ask that anymore is because they actually don't know any more than you do1:20:18and then that's a pain, that is a symbolic death that's also when you establish a more individual relationship with your parents it's at that point that you can conceivably start taking care of them instead of the reverse1:20:31and that's a time that should come, but you have to let that image of perfection go and that exposes you well, that's what happens here, you know, Pinokio goes home1:20:41and he wants things to be the way they were and he wants to stay under the careful care of the benevolent father but that's no longer possible, he's passed that point, and that's why the father has disappeared1:20:55and so, Gepetto has gone off to look for Pinokio, because he also needs a son but in any case, the house is abandoned1:21:04and so then we see inside the house that everything's covered in cobwebs, and everything's gone and Pinokio and the Cricket sit on the steps and they're very concerned; first of all they wonder where he went1:21:15so they're actually concerned that he's gone, but they also don't know what to do, because there's just no going home and so, you know, that's also the case that once you hit a certain point in your development...1:21:27well, it's the same thing we already talked about, the answers that you are looking for are not going to be found in your parents' house it's as simple as that, now you could artificially maintain your dependency, but, you know1:21:40if you do that for too long, things get pretty ugly, so you get pretty stale, and you know, you're like bread that's been on the shelf for too long1:21:49so, now they're wondering what to do, and where he could be and then something very strange happens, the star shows up again, and it turns into a dove1:21:59and the dove flies down and puts a piece of paper bathed in light with gold writing on it in front of the Cricket and the puppet1:22:12so what in the world is going on there? well, we know what the star is, we've seen it multiple times, right it's also the place that the blue fairy came from, but it's this transcendent place, it's this place that occurs sort of as this ultimate ideal1:22:27and this time it delivers a message; so what's happening here is that... Pinokio is fundamentally oriented by the wish that his father made so long ago, right?1:22:41and the wish was that he would become a fully functioning individual; and so that's that transcendent place and Jung would say...1:22:53when you orient your vision, different things appear to you in the world so, and I mean this literally, so, because you can't see everything -1:23:04you vision calculates what's necessary, your brain calculates what's necessary for you to see so that you get to the point that you're aiming at and I don't mean that metaphorically, I mean it literally1:23:16things that aren't relevant to what you're seeking, you won't see them unless they get in your way, and they have to really block your pathway before they will be literally visible1:23:31so you orient yourself towards something, and that makes some things visible that wouldn't be visible and makes others invisible that you might have seen1:23:40and so when you change your orientation, what manifests itself in the world also changes now, Pinokio is in despair here, and he asks himself: where could my father have gone?1:23:54and so, the question is: what exactly is he asking under those circumstances? and what he's asking is something like: I had a structure that was orienting me properly in relationship to the world1:24:10and as far as it was embodied in my actual father it's now gone is there any possibility that I can find that again?1:24:21and that is what you want, you see, like if you're in a chaotic circumstance, maybe you've escaped, let's say, from a bad relationship or something like that, and you're out of it, but now you don't know what to do1:24:31what you're hoping is that you can get your life back together, right? that you can put the pieces that have fallen apart back together1:24:41and so you're automatically going to generate a fantasy about producing another, let's call it stable state you're gonna be looking for the spirit that yould enable that state to be generated1:24:51'cause really what it is in some sense is your new personality you're in chaos, you have to become something new in order to get out of chaos, and so you're hoping for that, you're hoping that you'll see it1:25:02and so, that's going to make certain things visible to you, that's the proper way of thinking about it1:25:11you know, when you get curious about something, maybe you're curious about something and you walk into a bookstore that curiosity is going to guide you to a certain set of books1:25:20the fact that you have a question in mind is going to open your eyes to certain kinds of possibilities and so if your goal is to reestablish your union with the positive father, let's say1:25:32then certain things are gonna appear, and other things aren't, and that's what this represents the transcendent star is the goal, which is this developmental process1:25:43it's capable of, let's say, delivering a message to you; in some sense that's what's happening when you're thinking you know, because you have a problem you wanna solve, you have somewhere you wanna go with your thoughts1:25:54and as a consequence of that information reveals itself to you in the interior landscape it's a very strange thing; you know, in some sense it feels as though you're producing the thoughts, but1:26:06it could equally be said that you're watching the thoughts reveal themselves and which of those is more accurate is by no means obvious; you can certainly have thoughts that surprise you1:26:17which is very strange, it's like, they're your thoughts. How in the world can they surprise you, but they do so, it's like you didn't know them before you thought them up and then the question is well where did they come from1:26:26if you didn't know them before you thought them up? Well, they sort of spring out of the void. That's one way of thinking about it. Anyways...1:26:36this is a Holy Ghost symbol, this dove, as well, so that puts some Christian imagery in here again You could think of it as a manifestation of the spirit of transformation.1:26:48That's another way of looking at it. Anyways, it's the conscience that interprets the letter figuring out what the next thing should be, and weirdly enough, what the letter says is that1:26:57Geppetto was out looking for Pinocchio and he got swallowed by a whale which makes very little sense to put it bluntly1:27:09Geppetto went to search for Pinocchio and now he's at the bottom of the sea in a giant whale. We leap right over that tremendous gap in logic1:27:22and follow the story nonetheless. Okay, so what's the idea here? The idea is that if you fall into a chaotic state and everything falls apart...1:27:36there's the possibility that things can come back together including what you've just learned, in a new state.1:27:47And so you can conceptualize that symbolically as the existence of the dead father at the bottom of the chaotic landscape1:27:58That's the proper way, as far as I can tell, to think about it. It's like there's something down there that's capable of re-forming and reemerging that's1:28:07that incorporates the previous state but that takes it farther. And you're not going to find that unless you descend into this chaotic place where1:28:16it feels like all order is gone. well, you generate order, it's going to be akin to the order that you had before but there's going to be something new about it as well, so it's down to the bottom of the chaotic state,1:28:26to bring up what you're missing. And, that's one level of analysis. Another level of analysis you think is well that's also what you're doing1:28:36that's what you should be doing, in principle, when you're going to university You know, you're...you come to university in roughly the same state as Pinocchio.1:28:47You know, you're a bit of a puppet, and you're kind of a jackass, and what the hell do you know? And it's chaotic because you haven't found your place in the world properly. And I don't mean merely for career, not that that's not relevant, because it is,1:29:00but it's more important than that. It's because you're a historical creature. Because, you are a product of history, unless you are encultureated properly, which means you understand1:29:13your past, in the sense that the humanities can allow for that, then you haven't been able to incorporate1:29:24the wisdom of your ancestors into your day to day pursuits, and that's going to make you weak, that's the idea anyways. And so when you come to university, this is what university is for. It's so that you can go into the chaos,1:29:38and you can pull something out of it that's truly of value. and you can incorporate that in your own personality, and that makes you much, much stronger, like literally stronger, not more educated, but1:29:51not, it's not like you know more facts, it's that you literally are a better person, and "better" means you can do far more things. You can articulate your - that's something that's of crucial importance is that1:30:02you can articulate yourself properly, which is more useful than anything else you can possibly manage, like if you guys come out of university capable of making coherent1:30:13arguments, and using language properly, you're so powerful that it's ridiculous. You always1:30:22you can lay out a strategy and pursue it successfully and maybe the strategy is oriented towards something good, something that will actually work work for you, and work for other people as well1:30:33and I don't really understand why people aren't told this when they come to university, is that your goal is to make yourself as articulate in writing and thinking and speaking as you possibly can1:30:46because that opens the door to everything that you'll wanna do in the future, no matter what it is the more articulate person always rises, always1:30:59because they lay out strategies more effectively, they lay out the reasons for doing something or for not doing something1:31:08more particularly; they convince people, and properly so, that they can grapple with potential that lies ahead1:31:17effectively; and they can defend themselves when they're challenged and so, all of that is going into the past, into the chaos of the past, you could even say1:31:30and pulling up the spirit that inhabits that from the bottom and uniting with it and if you don't do that, well, you're defenceless in the case of... in the face of the tragedy of life1:31:45and then, that's not so good, because if you're defenceless in the face of the tragedy of life then you get way more hurt than you would otherwise get, and so will the people around you; and then1:31:56the probability that you're gonna be resentful and bitter about that is really high, because no one likes to fail continually; and then you get bitter and resentful1:32:07and then once you're bitter and resentful, well, being vengeful and mean is the next step it doesn't take much of a transformation to move from that place to the next1:32:18so now Pinokio has to face the thing that he's afraid of most and that's a complicated idea as well; so Jung had this1:32:31phrase that he took from the alchemists, which was "in sterqualinas invenetur" and what it meant was: "what you most wanna find will be found where you least wanna look"1:32:42there's this old story that's from King Arthur, and King Arthur has these knights, right they all sit around the Round Table, which means they're roughly equal, that's what the round table means1:32:51and they're off to find the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is the most valuable object, that's what it means so they're off to find the most valuable thing, but they don't know what it is, and they don't know where it is1:33:01but they know that there's a most valuable thing, so in osme sense it's akin to them orienting themselves by the star and they don't know where to look, and so what they decide is1:33:12they have the castle and it's in the middle of a forest; so each knight decides to start looking for the Holy Grail by entering the forest at the point that looks darkest to him1:33:22and so what's the idea there? well, imagine there are things that come easy to you and that you're fond of pursuing1:33:32and that you're happy about pursuing; so you've found them and pursued them and you've mastered them, so you know all that; but then there's another place that you don't wanna go1:33:43and so you haven't gone there and you haven't mastered it, and you're very small in comparison to it, because you haven't mastered it, and so it has this monstrous aspect1:33:52... but if what you're doing isn't working, it's where you haven't gone that you need to go1:34:03and so, I can give you another example of this, so let's say you're an agreeable person, and so you don't like conflict and you won't stand up for yourself1:34:13and you regard anger and the proclivity to provoke and to engage in conflict as something that's positively terrible it's not only that you're not good at it, it's actually that it's wrong1:34:25so that's where you have to go if you're gonna learn how to stand up for yourself and imagine that you're afraid, maybe you have something like agoraphobia so there's a whole bunch of things that you're afraid of, and you don't wanna go there1:34:38but if you wanna put yourself together, then that's exactly where you have to go and so it's frequently the case that what you wanna find is to be found where you least wanna find it1:34:51and that idea's echoed in the prominent stories of dragons and gold it's exactly the same idea, is that the dragon is this terrible thing, it's this terrible predatory thing that lives forever and is very, very wise1:35:05and lives underground, and it'll kill you, it'll burn you up in a second but it hoards gold; and so you have to go there, into the dragon's lair if you're gonna get the gold1:35:16and that's a representation of peoples' paradoxical relationship with reliaty, it's like you have to go out there and confront it in order to incorporate what it has to offer to you1:35:27but the probability that that's going to be intensely dangerous and push you right to the limit... first of all, those are actually the same thing; if it didn't push you to the limit, you wouldn't gain anything valuable from it1:35:40so you don't get one without the other, you don't get the gold without the dragon that's a very strange, very very strange idea, but it seems to be accurate1:35:51so all of that's lurking underneath this in this imagery of the whale the thing that's at the bottom of... now, the whale, you can think of the story of Jonah1:36:03what happens with Jonah is that, roughly speaking, he is a prophet and God tells him that he has to, if I rmember correctly, God tells him that he has to go to this city, and1:36:15straighten it out, because it's veered off the path and it's heading towards doom, and Jonah thinks: I'm not going to that city to tell those people anything like that, because they're not gonna be very happy1:36:27with me just showing up there and telling them, you know, everything they're doing is wrong, and so he hops on a boat and tries to get out of there, and then God conjures up this huge storm, and the boat is about to be swamped1:36:39and the sailors, they're worried, I think, about making the boat lighter, something like that they all draw lots to see who gets tossed overboard, and Jonah admits that it's actually his fault1:36:51because God's upset with him, because he got this direct command to go straighten out this city and he ran off, and so the sailors throw... they're not happy about this, but they throw Jonah overboard, and the seas calm1:37:01and a great fish comes up, a whale, and swallows him, and then he's down in the fish for three days and it throws him up on the dry land, and then he's learned his lesson by that time, and he goes off to have this...1:37:11to pursue his proper destiny; so that's echoed in this story as well that if you don't follow the pathway that you're supposed to follow1:37:25the seas will become stormy for you, and something will come up and pull you down and you'll be in a terrible place for some length of time, 'till you learn your lesson1:37:36and if you're lucky, you'll get spit back up on shore, and then you can go do what you should do well, I mean that's not a lesson that anybody needs to have interpreted, I think everybody understands that1:37:48anyways, the Cricket tells Pinokio what he has to do and then something kind of paradoxical happens, Pinokio decides he's gonna go do this1:37:59and then the Cricket has got this weird, paradoxical response to that; on the one hand he's he's sort of pulling Pinokio back, saying: look, you know, this is foolhardy1:38:09you're gonna go all the way down to the ocean, you're gonna confront this terrible whale, this is really, really dangerous but at the same time, when Pinokio's on the edge of the cliff, the Cricket helps him tie his tail around a rock1:38:22and he holds his finger in place, so that Pinokio can tie the knot, it's like the conscience is conflicted about this really dangerous and foolhardy, but it's also necessary, and so he plays this dual role1:38:34and Pinokio's leading at this point; so into the ocean he goes I guess partly what this means is that if you're not oriented properly in the world, you should take your...1:38:48you should take your doubts and the chaos that you're enveloped in seriously you should face it and think it through, you should go into it as far as you can go into it because you'll find something at the bottom of it; the alternative is to pretend that it doesn't exist1:39:04so then Pinokio is at the bottom of the water; he can actually breathe down there, it turns out, so you could think that he's gone into the unknown, he's outside of dry land,1:39:16he's in the unconscious, all of those things are true, and you might think, well, why would it be the world outside of what's known and the unconscious at the same time?1:39:28this weird intermingling of those two things; and as far as I can tell, that's because when you're in chaos and you don't know what's going on, then you start imagining what might be going on1:39:39and that imagination is partly the world as it might be but it's also partly the structure of your unconscious mind, which is producing the fantasies, and so1:39:49when you're truly in chaos, then the distinction between your fantasies and reality isn't clear that's actually what constitutes the chaos; so imagine this, so1:39:59you're in a relationship, and the person betrays you and you knew who they were, at least you thought you did, before that moment but now you're looking at them and you don't know who they are1:40:12and you don't know what the past was, and you don't know what the present is and you don't know what the future's going to be; all of that's been thrown up into the air in a major way that's traumatic, so much has fallen apart that it's traumatic1:40:24so what do you start to do? you start to imagine what might be the situation well, then the reality, like, the reality is the reality and your imagination at the same time1:40:34they're not pulled apart at all, you cannot distinguish between them, and so it was a Jungian idea... I could say that's the snitch that Harry Potter's chasing, by the way1:40:48I know that's a terrible leap, but that is what it is, it's that weird intermingling of potential and reality that that can manifest itself as the world if you pursue it, it's roughly that1:41:03so Pinokio's in this situation that's half-fantasy and half-reality, in this chaotic state and he has to go down to find the thing that he least wants to find1:41:13and he's hoping that it... he's got this intuition that in facing that thing, that chaos that life really is, that chaos that he's going to find his father and reunite with him1:41:28so you could also say that in some sense it's a decision of faith, i suppose, because you might ask yourself, well, why bother confronting chaos? if chaos is the ultimate reality, then what the hell use is facing it?1:41:43because it's just gonna reveal itself as the ultimate reality and drown you but the myths always say the same thing, they say: "no, no, if you confront what's really disturbing you1:41:52if you really confront it, and you do it voluntarily, you're gonna find order in it eventually" or at least that's the only way you're gonna find order now, it's not like these stories are optimistic, and it's not as if they give you a sure guide to success1:42:05that's the other thing, it's not like they're unerringly accurate, because you can be subsumed by chaos that's so total that even if you face it, you're not gonna prevail1:42:17I mean, that's why people die, that's one way of looking at it anyways but the mythology basically says that this is your best bet if there's a process that's going to work, this is it1:42:30and so, and then you might think, well, the better you do it, the better the chances are of success or the more consistently you do it, the better the chances of success are1:42:39and I think that that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it ok, so anyways, Pinokio's down at the bottom of the ocean and every time he says... he's trying to find out where Monstro is1:42:51and they ask questions to the fish down there, but every time they mention Monstro's name, all the fish disappear that's like Voldemort, right? he's the guy whose name you cannot say1:43:02and Monstro is precisely that, it's the thing that frightens everyone, and so asking questions down there isn't helping very much, and so Pinokio, what he does is he's calling for his father, and he keeps going deeper and deeper into the depths1:43:16and there's a scene where the darkness of the ocean turns into an even more profound darkness, and that's what Pinokio disappears into1:43:27and then we see Monstro, he's in this sort of foggy representation, this huge thing that lies very much at the bottom and there's no life or anything around him except, I think these are mackerel, but maybe they're tuna1:43:40they're animated anyway, so it doesn't matter but there's no life down there, he's so far down at the bottom of the ocean that there's nothing that's alive down there1:43:49so, and then we go inside the whale, which is, of course, abzurd we see that the whale has eaten a boat at some point in the past, this is one whopping whale1:43:58and Gepetto is sitting with the kitten, of all things, he's also got that litte goldfish bowl full of goldfish with him too, which is quite the feat anyways, he's sitting there and he knows that he's trapped in the belly of the whale too, and that he can't get out1:44:13and so that's an interesting issue, because it's not only Pinokio is lacking his father, which isn't a good thing but the father is lacking the son, and there's some indication that the father can't get out of the whale without the son1:44:26and so it's like the possibility for order is down there in this chaotic state but unless there's an active agent to go seek it out, it can't pull itself... it's not animated enough to get out by itself1:44:39you know, and you could say, well, there's wisdom in the libraries, but it's not going to.. without you going in there and gathering it, and embodying it, all it does is sit there in potential in all of that...1:44:51imlicit form, that's a good way of thinking about it so anyways, Gepetto is feeling pretty hopeless because he can't figure out any way of getting out of the whale, and he's also starving1:45:02he's starving in the belly of the whale here's a way of thinking about that:1:45:13Gepetto's a good guy, but he's old and that means his way of doing things is no longer fruitful, that's why he's starving and it's especially not fruitful, 'cause he's missing his son1:45:25he's missing the active element that the child represents, say, the playful and transformative element that the child represents and so, if you get stuck doing something the same old way, at some point it's no longer going to work1:45:36even if it was good at some point; it has to be updated and it's updated by, let's call it the spirit of youth, or the spirit of attention, or the spirit of play, something like that1:45:45the willingness to break boundaries and take risks; and Gepetto is very, very skilled, but but he doesn't have that, and that's symbolized by the loss of his son1:45:55that's why he was out looking for his son too, he needs him; and so, they're in despair down there trying to fish and not getting anything, and so...1:46:04Monstro wakes up a mackerel happens to swim by and Monstro wakes up, and so...1:46:13I think they're tuna, actually, they look like tuna to me and so, Monstro wakes up and he opens his mouth, and a bunch of water starts to come in1:46:23and so, and then you see Pinokio with the fish, now... there's very intense implicit Christian symbolism in this part of the film1:46:35and I'm gonna lay it out point by point, so you may remember and perhaps you don't, and perhaps you don't know, that one of the symbols for Christ is a fish, ichthys, right?1:46:46and that's a play on the Greek representation of Christ's name, buyt there's more to it than that, because all of Christ's followers are fishermen1:46:55and he performs a bunch of miracles with fish; and fish are strange things because, well, you can pull then up out of the depths, that's part of it and so they're things that can be pulled out of the depth; and you could say that...1:47:08it's going to be very difficult for me to take this apart, but you can say in some sense that Christ is a meta-fish a fish is something that you can dine on1:47:18but a way of being is something that provides you with something to dine on on a continual basis and so, you might say, well, is it better to have a fish or to be a fisherman?1:47:30that's another way of thinking about it, and obviously it's better to be a fisherman, because then you can get more fish and so, it's one thing to have something, but it's another thing completely to know how to generate good things1:47:43and so, if you had any sense, you'd take the latter over the former even though the former is more instantaneously gratifying and requires less work and responsibility1:47:53and so, anyways, the whale opens his mouth and goes chasing these fish and Pinokio tries... he's trying to get the hell out of there, even though he wants to find the whale1:48:03when he actually sees the whale, he leaves and that's also a very common mythological, umm, what would you call it? plot element1:48:13it's very frequently that what happens when the hero first sees the terrible thing, the dragon, say the terrible thing that he's come to conquer he freezes and gets the hell out of there, because1:48:22it's far worse than he thought it was going to be; and so Pinokio is like: no way, man I'm not going near that whale; and away he swims, and he's actually at the forefront of all the fish, which is quite interesting too1:48:33so, in the mean time Monstro has opened his mouth, and the fish are pouring in, and Gepetto is fishing like mad, and he's catching fish like crazy; and so, the little cat is...1:48:45Gepetto is flinging the fish backwards into this, like, box and the little cat is there, whacking them to kill them while they're flopping around1:48:54and so they're pretty excited about this, because... they have a problem, the problem is how to get out of the whale that's the actual problem; but a nested problem inside that is how not to starve to death1:49:06and so, Gepetto's pretty happy that even though he's not getting out of the whale, that he gets to have something to eat so you could say as well, that he's not exactly focused on the right thing1:49:16he's focused on the micro-problem instead of the macro-problem, and that makes him kind of blind so anyways, the whale swallows up Pinokio, and1:49:27Gepetto keeps fishing; and then he snags Pinokio now this is cool, because... and this is another example of that meta-fish idea1:49:37it's like... Gepetto's actually looking not for a fish, he's looking for a way out of the damn whale and then he catches a bunch of fish, and he's like focused on that like mad1:49:47and then he catches Pinokio, and Pinokio represents what would get him out of the whale but he's so bloody obsessed with the fish tha he doesn't even notice1:49:56so he catches Pinokio and flings him into the fish basket and so, it signifies the blindness of Gepetto's orientation when he's inside the whale, that's kind of a comment on his aged and insufficient nature1:50:11he's solving the wrong... he's solving the problem very well, but it's the wrong problem so anyways, he fires Pinokio into the fish bin, and Pinokio says: Father! I'm here; and Gepetto says: Don't bother me right now, Pinokio, I'm busy fishing1:50:28well then, that's fine, so then he kinda wakes up, he has this little moment of insight, this little revelation, that well, he's caught Pinokio, so who cares about the damn fish; so then he runs over to the fish box to grab Pinokio1:50:39and instead he grabs a fish, and gives it a kiss and so that is another way of hammering home the fact that he's... there's this confusion that he's suffering from1:50:48he can't distinguish the local truth from the transcendent truth and so anyways, he does figure it out; he tosses the fish aside and he grabs Pinokio1:50:58they're all thriled to death to see each other, and so they're united so Pinokio has found his father, but they're still trapped in the belly of the whale; now1:51:07Pinokio takes off his hat, he gets covered with a blanket, he takes off his hat, and he reveals his jackass ears, and so he's found his father, but he's damaged, and not... Pinokio, he's damaged and not in good shape1:51:21he isn't becoming what he was supposed to be; in fact, he's actually degenerated since Gepetto saw him last and so, he becomes embarrassed, and he says he has a tail1:51:31he says: that's nothing, I have a tail too, and then he spins that around kinda laughing and he brays and gets really embarrassed, and so, that's what you see here, he looks like, well...1:51:40he's revealed himself as a jackass to his father but you know, that's actually a good thing, because...1:51:50he is a jackass, and if he was unwilling to admit his insufficiency he wouldn't have ever gone on this pursuit, so...1:52:06it's this perverse willingness to note that he isn't all that he could be that's part of what drives him to find everything that his father represents1:52:17it's a humility, and it's an admission of insufficiency and you need that before you're going to learn anything, because before you learn anything you have to1:52:27admit that there are things that are important that you don't know, and that you're a fool and maybe that you're a braying jackass and so, that's why there are injunctions in many religious in many religious writings1:52:39that positively portray humility, as the antidote to arrogance that's the right way of thinking about it, is that humility means: I still have something to learn1:52:51I'm insufficient, I still have something to learn it's exactly the opposite, say of Lampwick's attitude anyways, Gepetto decides that son puppet who's half-jackass is better than no son at all1:53:03which is another indication of his relatively positive orientation towards the world and they reunite; and then Pinokio immediately sets his eyes on the main problem, it's like: hey, we're stuck in this whale, we need to get out of here!1:53:17and it turns out that Geppetto has already built a raft, but there's a problem, and the problem is that as Gepetto says... Pinokio says: well, we'll wait for his mouth to open1:53:26and Gepetto says: that doesn't work, because when he opens his mouth, Monstro opens his mouth, everything comes in, and nothing goes out so, raft - fine, but there's no way of using it1:53:36and so, Gepetto decides that they're not going to bother with that problem and they're gonna go have some fish but Pinokio, his eyes is still on the main prize, he thinks: no way, man, we're getting out of this whale1:53:49that's the fundamental think, we're not going to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic we're going to attend to the fact that it's sinking, we're gonna keep our eye on the primary problem1:53:59so he's a little more awake by now; so Pinokio says: we'll make a fire; now that's cool, I think, because he's down in chaos, where his father is trapped, and the first thing he does is to use fire1:54:11and of course that's exactly what people do, right, 'cause we're fire-users; and so and shaman, for example, are masters of fire; but there's this really primordial element to this story right here, and1:54:22it's an indication that the thing that can transform chaos into productive order is also the same spirit that mastered fire1:54:33and so, Pinokio lays that out; and he says: we're gonna build a fire! and we'll fill him up with smoke! and Gepetto says: great, smoked fish!1:54:45so he's still stuck on this whole fish thing and so Pinokio runs around gathering up all the spare wood on the boat including the furniture, which he starts to break; and Gepetto says:1:54:55well, what are we going to sit on? you know, while we eat our smoked fish and Pinokio basically says, politely: you know, enough with the damn fish thing1:55:04I'm going to fill the whale with smoke, and that's gonna make him sneeze, and then we can get the hell out of here and Gepetto says: that's gonna make him mad, it's not a good idea1:55:16and, well, I would say that that's the stance of the benevolent state against innovation you know, even if the innovation is positive, and even if it's transformative and freeing1:55:28the old state, even if it's good, it's going to stand in opposition to that and so that's also something that's very useful to know, because otherwise you can get bitter about that anyways, Pinokio makes this big fire, Gepetto's pretty worried about it1:55:40and he starts to fill the whale up with smoke; and so this is where the whale turns into a fire-breathing dragon which is quite cool, it's like in Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent turns into a fire-spewing dragon as well1:55:52and if you watch the Little Mermaid, that... what's her name? Ursula she turns into a gigantic snake-like creature as well, although she doesn't exactly spew fire1:56:03but the transformation of the ultimate monster into something like a dragon is very, very common 'cause it's the ultimate symbol of the unknown for a variety of reasons that we'll dusciss later1:56:14so anyways... yes, it's a symbol of chaos anyways, and this is quite a horrifying scene; when my son watched, and he watched Pinokio when he was about 41:56:27he watched this scene over, and over, and over; I don't know how many times he watched that movie, but it must've been a hundred times but he was really fascinated by this scene1:56:36and you know, he was like locked on to it, it was frightening, but there was something in it that he was processing and catching (?) on to so anyways, you see the whale is starting to prepare to sneeze, and he's belching out huge quantities of smoke and fire1:56:51and Pinokio and Gepetto and the cat and the goldfish bowl are all on the raft trying desperately to get out of the whale, which inhales and pulls them back, and then sneezes and pushes them forward1:57:05and at some point they actually break free, and there's a 'gates of hell' image there with the whale belching out smoke like mad and its jaws open1:57:15so they're paddling madly away, to get away from this whale and the whale is very angry, just as Gepetto suggested1:57:24and there's interesting sound effects that go along with this the whale actually turns into a...1:57:33that's what happens when your phone is smarter than you are the whale actually turns into into something that's like a locomotive and the sound effects become industrial; so it's this monstrous, machine-like locomotive dragon1:57:47that's bent on the destruction of Pinokio and you could say it's an amalgam of natural and social forces, completely unleashed1:57:57everything's unleashed against Pinokio and his father, and so... they're having a hell of a time, there's big waves, and they end up...1:58:06the whale actually abandons them, but before he does that, it nails them with its tail, and blows the raft into smithereens and so then they'e both in the water, and Gepetto and Pinokio are drowning1:58:15and Gepetto actually goes down for the third time, so to speak; and as he's going down, he says to Pinokio: save yourself, save yourself1:58:25and so that's kinda Pinokio's last temptation, because Gepetto's had it, and he could just get to shore on his own but he would've abandoned his father; and so that's the thing, is...1:58:36and that's one of the issues that this movie grapples with, is: what exactly is your responsibility? and you could say: well, it's to save yourself, but the myth that underlies this says: no it's not, that 's not exactly right1:58:47it's to rescue your father from the chatic depths, and integrate with that, and to save both and that's your duty to your culture; but more than that, it's also your duty to your soul1:58:58it isn't gonna work, if you just save yourself, 'cause you're still gonna be a jackass puppet even though you're gonna be back on shore so anyways, Pinokio grabs Gepetto and carries him to shore; and the whale shows back up1:59:12and gives them one more good wallop; and then we see everybody on shore and it's peaceful again, Gepetto is in his back on the dry land1:59:21and the kitten washes up, and the goldfish bowl washes up, and the cricket washes up, he's been outside the whale all this time and we see the Cricket calling for Pinokio, and then we see him lying in a pool of water, dead1:59:36so he's died rescuing his father, he died well, why? well, he is a jackass puppet, and maybe he was supposed to die if he rescued his father1:59:47because that insufficiency that characterized him is something that's descroyed by the process of encountering the chaos1:59:56which was so difficult it reforms the personality and the same occurs when he rescues his father and incorporates that, so it's like...2:00:06Bilbo in the first part of the... what is it called? The Lord of the Rings... The Hobbit!2:00:16he's this sort of jackass puppet guy, little overprotected Shire-dweller at the beginning and he goes on this tremendous adventure, and he has to develop the negative parts of his character, he actually has to become a professional thief2:00:30and he has to develop his bravery, and... and so the old personality in some sense has to die to give life to the new one and so...2:00:43you see in the Harry Potter series, too, at the very end Potter dies, and then is resurrected, right, that's... and that actually happens to a slightly lesser degree in the second movie2:00:56where the resurrection is aided by the phoenix tears, after he gets eaten by the... or he gets chomped by that big snake which is, roughly speaking, the same thing that's happening here2:01:05sorry about that okay, so anyways, Pinokio's dead, that's not good so, the next scene we see them back at home, and he's lying dead on the bed2:01:16and Gepetto and everyone else are mourning his loss and then we see this magic transformation, and we hear the Blue Fairy's voice2:01:28and so, it's like he's pushed himself to his limits, and a natural process kicks back in, and revivifies him but now he's no longer a jackass puppet, he's actually something that's real2:01:41and so then he wakes up and he notices that now, you know, he's undergone this proper transformation he notices his hands in particular2:01:50and then he tells Gepetto, who refuses to even notice; he says: no, no, kid, you're dead, lie down so, you know, Pinokio convinces him that he's not dead, and then2:02:03in celebration they start the clocks again, and so time kicks back in at that point and so, then they have a big celebration, music happens again, because this is a celebratory moment2:02:15and they dance, and the harmony's restored, the good old guy has his son, and so the house is properly set up, and the old state has its vision, and its capacity for transformation2:02:29and the thing that transforms has the stability of the culture behind it, and so - perfect and then the Cricket goes outside, and he's talking to the Start and the Blue Fairy, and he says that he's pretty happy about how this has gone2:02:42and so, then she gives him this little medal which is made out of gold, and it's a sun, and it's a mandala, all at the same time and it's made out of gold, and gold is a noble metal, it doesn't mate indiscriminately with other metals2:02:58it doesn't tarnish, and so it's a metal that represents the sun; and he flashes his little badge at the Star establishing a relationship between his function as the proper conscience and his orientation towards the highest good2:03:14and that's it there, so he's got this little sun, he's wearing his little sun so he's also transformed and developed as a consequence of this entire process2:03:24no Pinokio's conscience is properly oriented it's oriented towards the highest value; and then the movie closes2:03:34and that's "Pinokio"2:03:45so, I'll give you a minute, and I'll take some questions, and try to figure out how to shut my phone up2:03:58so does anybody have any questions? yes -> [student] you seem to have a vaguely psychoanalytic approach to kind of extracting the inarticulated messages2:04:10from the mythologies and the stories and religion that's developed over time so could you almost say that those are kind of constructing this to a societal level out of the individual level2:04:22that these are kind of the dreams of the collective unconscious? [Peterson] sure, that's exactly what they are they're the fantasies of the collective unconscious, that's one way of looking at it2:04:32I mean, they also take a socially determined form right, because it's animated, and that's a technology, and it's obviously something that exists in a particular time and place2:04:47but yeah, they're... it's a collective attempt to give voice to the oldest of behavioral patterns and so, here's one way of thinking about that2:04:56which we'll talk about in some detail, which you should have read about, at least to some degree, already the question is: where is that knowledge represented?2:05:05and Jung would say, well it's part of the collective unconscious, and it's got a biological origin, but his description of the biological nature of the collective unconscious is quite ambiguous2:05:21and I think that that's because it actually is ambiguous, like for example, we know that primates, and humans in particular, are at least biologically predisposed to be afraid of snakes2:05:34so we can learn that very easily; now, you could make a case that it's more than biological predisposition, and that it's actually built in but I would say the predisposition idea is actually a better one, because you at least need the exposure to the snake to get it going2:05:49so that would take place as a consequence of your experience, so it's not purely biological, although it is the case that snake fear tends to become more intense as you get older, which is not necessarily what you would expect2:06:03and the... I just read a paper this week, localizing snake fear in primates, and it was hypothalamic it's really old, because the hypothalamus is a very old part of the brain, it's older than the amygdala2:06:15and the amygdala is involved in snake fear as well, it's really, really old so you could say, well, you're prepared to develop snake fear, like you're prepared to develop language2:06:26and like you're prepared to walk by your biological structure now, whether that actually constitutes the contents of your memory, which is what Jung seems to imply2:06:36is an open question, but it doesn't really matter, because... so, one time when I went to visit my nephew, he was running around in a knight suit2:06:50he was only about 4 or 5; so he's acting out this mythological pattern, roughly speaking and you'd say, well, how did he know how to do that, and the answer would be: well, it was represented all around him in the culture2:07:03in fragments, and like kids are pretty good in putting fragments of stories together that's really what understanding is, is to put fragments into story form2:07:14and so, he watched Disney movies and his parents had read him storeis, and he did pretend play with the other kids, and all of those were like exemplars of this underlying narrative2:07:25they're variants of it; and because he can abstract and generalize, he's pulling out the central features of those narratives the heroic features, and then embodying them; so you could say, well2:07:36the central features of these narratives are fragmented and distributed across the entire culture and so, they don't have to be exactly inside your head, they don't have to be part of your memory2:07:49they're distributed in the behavior, and the actions, and the stories of the entire culture and they just... you can put them together out of that2:07:58so, and people do that, that's why they're so hungry for stories like... well, like this one, or like Star Wars, or like Star Trek, or like the Marvel movies, or like Harry Potter2:08:10[student] yeah, what you said about the last scene, your son watching it over and over again my little brother did the same thing with the last scene of the first Harry Potter movie, the guy with the two faces?2:08:19he watched that probably 20 or 30 times yeah, that's really interesting, watching little kids interact... like those movies are unbelievably complex I mean, you know, by the time you're your age, and you've seen, you know, several hundred of then at minimum2:08:33the impact wears off, but it's really something, sitting down with a four-year-old who hasn't watched very many movies, and walking through one with them, I mean they're so turned on it's just...2:08:44I took my daughter when she was too young, actually... I took her to see "The Mask", the Jim Carrey movie Jesus, I mean she survived it, I don't think I traumatized her2:08:53but she was sitting on my lap, and it was really like gripping a bundle of barbed wire she was just like that the entire movie, you know2:09:03and half way through I thought: well, that's probably a little too much psychophysiological intensity for one small body you know, but she... those movies, they just have a massive impact on little kids2:09:13and they will do exactly that, they'll watch it over and over, and over, and you think: what are they doing exactly? they're trying to understand, they're gripped by it somehow2:09:23right, and it's like they're deeply curious, they know there's something in it and they're trying to extract out what it is, and they'll repeat it, and repeat it, so...2:09:34they're hungry for the information 'cause it's part of rescuing their father from chaos, that's one way of thinking about it2:09:44other questions? well, good enough then, let's call it a day; oh, there is one more question2:09:56[student] so, in Maps of Meaning there is the idea that you keep returning to about when you first encounter the unknown it's like, it's first fearful; and then Jung has the idea of archetypes, so2:10:11are there other kinds of meaning that people will find in new information that's already patterned into them? [Peterson] that's patterned into them or into the new information?2:10:21[student] that's patterned into them, like ???, do people actually...? sure, well, they project the contents of their fantasy onto the unknown thing2:10:32and that's partly a process of self-discovery you know, so, for example, let's say that you, you know, you're gripped by love at first sight or something like that2:10:45now, you don't know anything about the person that you're tremendously attracted to but you'll have fantasies about them and that fantasy... in fact, your image of them is a fantasy2:10:55and if you take that fantasy apart, you'll find out what you value so you are projecting, you're projecting yourself into the world; and you can discover...2:11:06I mean you may also discover something about them, because there may be elements of them that match the ideal quite nicely, if you're fortunate and if your ideal is, you know, of a reasonable sort2:11:15but you can... you definitely encounter yourself if you look at the unknown because you use your fantasy to structure the contact2:11:25you know, and the fundamental structure is:the heroic encounter with the unknown because that's the pathway... that's the fundamental pathway of human beings, 'cause we're information foragers, fundamentally2:11:38[student] so it's that automatic response and the fantasies as well, that are part of the first contact... [Peterson] sure, sure, well, that's also... yes, absolutely, that's exactly right, yes, so...2:11:51I mean, imagine this, imagine that you're attracted to someone, and you're just too terrified to go speak to her well, what's happening? well, you have a fantasy of a judge2:12:02and that's your imagined representation of your own insufficiency in relationship to the ideal and you project that on this person as a judge, and then you're too paralyzed to even open your mouth around her2:12:13very common experience okay, let's call it a day, we'll see you in a week0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 05: Story and Metastory (Part 1)
0:00:000:00:11Now that you've had an opportunity to walk through a narrative then, hopefully, some of the things that I'm going to say, that are more technical, will make more sense0:00:22and so, what we're going to do today, at least in part, is to deal with... to start to deal with conceptualizing a solution0:00:32to the fact that the world is too complex to properly perceive so what the problem fundamentally is is that there's a lot more of everything else than there is of you0:00:43especially if you include in that everything else, all the parts of you that you also don't understand and so...0:00:53I want to walk you through how I think we solve that, at least in part and we do that by, essentially by simplifying the world, but0:01:02I think mostly that we simplify it as a place in which to act, rather than a place in which to perceive objects0:01:12and I really believe that there's a critical distinction between those two things and I think that part of the reason that there's been continual tension0:01:22say, between the claims of science and, let's say, the claims of religion is because the idea that the world as a place of objects and as a place to act have to be considered separately, isn't properly understood0:01:37I don't know... so I'm gonna try to straighten that up to the degree that that's possible so, I'm gonna talk to you about stories and meta-stories0:01:47and the story, I would say, is the simplest unit of useful information with regards to action and perception that you can be offered0:01:57and then a meta-story is a story about how a story like that transforms and I would say... we'll concentrate on the structure of the story0:02:09and then we'll get into the structure of the meta-story, and that'll constitute today's... today's class0:02:18so the first thing I wanna show you... I know many of you have seen this, but I'm gonna show it anyways for the longest time it was presumed that...0:02:31for the longest time, say, at least in the 20th century it was presumed that we make a pretty complete model of the world0:02:40and then we act in the world, and we compare what happens to that model and as long as our model and the world are matching0:02:53then, roughly speaking, we believe that everything is okay, and our emotions stay under control but if that model mismatches, then we know that something's up0:03:07now, a lot of this work was done by Russians, especially in the early 60s by two Russian scientists, Vinogradova and Sokolov0:03:18who were students of Alexander Luria, who was arguably the greatest neuropsychologist of the 20th century Luria spent a lot of time studying soldiers from WW2 that had received head injuries0:03:31of various sorts, and because of that he could draw inferences about how the brain worked and some of what we're going to talk about over the upcoming weeks with regards to brain function0:03:41much of it is predicated on Luria's work Sokolov and Vinogradova were his students, and they were interested in this phenomena... they were interested in psychophysiological measurement, right0:03:52as a way of inferring brain function so psychophysiological measurement is measurement of those physiological parameters say, like pupil width, or skin conductance, or EEG0:04:05that are in some ways directly reflective of how the brain works now, if you measure skin resistance, skin resistance changes with the amount that you sweat0:04:16that can change very, very rapidly, and it changes in response to physiological demands placed on your body so, for example, if your body assumes that you're going to leap into action for some purpose0:04:30and it's gonna open up your pores to prepare you to keep yourself cool and you can measure those transformations quite accurately by measuring the electrical resistance of the skin0:04:39and so what you see, if you put someone in a lab chair and you expose themselves to different stimuli, you find that...0:04:48for example you can expose them to something that's threatening say, like a picture of a snake, then their skin conductance will decrease, because they're...0:04:57sorry, their skin conductance will increase, because they sweat a little bit more and it's quite a rapid response, it can be a very rapid response now, one of the things that Sokolov...0:05:12yeah, that's right... noted was that if he... if I sat you down, for example, and I put some headphones on you and I played a tone to you that repeated, exactly the same tone that repeated at predictable intervals0:05:26that the first time you heard the tone you'd produce quite a spike in skin conductance and the next time a slightly smaller spike, and then the next time a slightly smaller spike0:05:35until after maybe you've heard it three or four times, you would not respond to it at all and that was often regarded as habituation0:05:44and habituations is the same thing that you can see in snails, for example and I'm using snails as an example, because they have very, very simple nervous systems0:05:53so if you take a snail and you poke it, then... like it comes out of its shell and you poke it, it'll go back into its shell and then it'll come out, and if you poke it again it'll go back into its shell0:06:03and it'll come out; but if you keep doing that, sooner or later the snail will just stop going in and you might think of that... it has been conceptualized as the simplest form of learning0:06:12habituation and the behaviorists tend to presume that if a human being manifested a response that could be modeled by a simple organism0:06:22then the human being was using a response that was analogous to that of the simple organism and sometimes that's true, and sometimes it's not, so... for example, you have simple reflexes that, you know0:06:33if you put your hand on a hot stove, you'll jerk back, and that's quite a simple circuit you'll move your hand back before the message gets to your brain because the spinal cord is smart enough to mediate a reflex like that all by itself0:06:46so you know, your brains is actually quite distributed throughout your body, it's not just in your head like people tend to think and so, we have conserved fast-acting reflexes at various levels of our nervous system0:07:01they aren't capable of sophisticated response, it's pretty much stimulus - response thinking about it from the behavioral perspective but they have as an advantage incredible speed, because they're just aren't that many neural connections between the stimulus and the response0:07:16and so, we have layers of response at different time frames that help us match with the demands of the external environment0:07:26so Charles Darwin, for example, used to go into the, I think it was a museum in England, I don't remember the name of it the snake in there, I believe it was a cobra, and he'd stick his face up at the glass, and the cobra would strike at him0:07:37and he'd jerk back; and he tried many, many times to master that reflexive response to the snake, but there was no way every time that thing struck at him, he'd jump backwards0:07:47well, you can imagine the survival utility in a reflex like that, but in reflexes in general okay, so back to Sokolov0:07:56now, what he decided... if you took that tone, and you did anything to it that was perceptible right, because there's certain gradations of tone that you're not capable of perceiving0:08:08but let's assume you took the tone, and you would adjust it enough so that it was perceptibly louder or it was perceptibly a different frequency, or something like that or even that the spaces between the tones0:08:19'cause I said they were predictably spaced even if the spaces between the tones were changed then, when the change occurred, the orienting reflex would be reinstated, you'd respond to it again0:08:31and Sokolov tried to vary the tone on many, many parameters but no matter what parameter he varied it on, as long as you could detect it perceptibly0:08:42you'd produce an orienting reflex; so Sokolov's idea was that you must be producing a complex internal model of the world that's in concordance with the world across pretty much every perceptible dimension0:08:54because if you weren't doing that, how in the world would you know that the tone had changed from what you had already learned about it? and so, for the longest time, and this was also true for people who were investigating artificial intelligence0:09:07we had this idea that what people did was make a complex model of the world, and hold it in their minds, so to speak and then they'd act in the world, and they compared what they expected to happen in the world with the model0:09:20and as long as there was a match, then there was no orienting reflex now, the orienting reflex turns out to be quite a complex reflex, it's not merely an alteration in skin conductance0:09:29what it is in essence is the manner in which you start to unfold your response to the unknown and the initial stages of that are very, very quick0:09:39but it's hard to tell when the orienting reflex stops, and when more complex learning begins they sort of shade into one another0:09:48so the initial stages of the orienting reflex are quite reflexive but the later stages can be extraordinarily complex, so for example...0:10:03well, I always think the example of betrayal is the best one, because it's so complex so imagine that you know, you come home and you find evidence, lipstick or something like that0:10:15evidence that the person that you're with is betraying you the first thing that's going to happen is that you're going to orient, there's going to be a real shock, and that's reflexive0:10:24it's very much akin to the response that you would manifest if you saw a predator, or a snake, or something like that so that's very instantaneous, you know0:10:34and then that'll prepare you for action, you'll get ready to do whatever it is that you need to do next a very unpleasant thing; but then0:10:43it might take you even years to fully manifest the learning that would be necessary in a situation like that because there's so many things that you have to reconsider0:10:53first of all, the person might now appear to you as a threat, that's pretty immediate so there's a biological, physiological response first, your body reacts first0:11:02then you respond emotionally, that's gonna take a while, and you know, the emotional response might extend over days, or weeks, or months, or even years0:11:11and then, as you're doing that as well, you're going to try to start to re-sort out your interpretive schema so that it can adjust to the transformation that this...0:11:22this error on your part, say, or this catastrophe, or this betrayal it has to adjust to whatever information that event contains0:11:31and so the orienting reflex can manifest itself over an extraordinarily long period of time it's best to think about it as the initial part of what can be a very complex learning process0:11:43now, that was a standard idea in psychology for the longest period of time that we created a detailed internal model of the world0:11:54and we watched how the world was unfolding, we compared the two and the physiology, the neurophysiology of this was even understood to some degree, even by the Russians0:12:04in the early 1960s, because they basially localized... you could use complex EEG, electroencephalogram technology to localize where the orienting reflex was occurring in the brain, and basically it appeared to occur, roughly speaking, in the hippocampus0:12:19and the theory arose that your brain, your cortex, let's say, produced a very complex model of the world an internal model; and your sense were producing a model of the external world0:12:30and the hippocampus was watching those things to see if they matched and if they didn't match, there was a mismatch signal, and that would be the orienting reflex and then your body would start to prepare itself for whatever that mismatch meant0:12:44and then you would engage in exploratory behavior to try to update your model that was the standard theory, it was a very well accepted theory0:12:53it has elements of cybernetic theory in it but it was accepted enough so that when people first started to experiment with artificial intelligence0:13:03that's how they tried to make artificially intelligent systems they tried to make ones that would model the world, and then act, and then compare the changes in the world to that model0:13:12but that didn't go anywhere, it turned out, because it turned out that it's so difficult to see and model the world that people had no idea how complex that was0:13:22it was impossibly complex, as it turned out, and so that's part of the reason we don't have robots wandering around, doing apparently simple things like walking walking in an environment like this0:13:33now, when we look at the environment, we think: well, it's not that hard to look at, it's full of objects they're just self-evident, there they are, and we can just wander through it0:13:43you know, and we don't even do that consciously to any great degree because so much of that perception is presented to our consciousness without effort0:13:52in some sense; but the AI guys learned pretty quick that perceiving the world was waaay more difficult than anybody had guessed and then this experiment really in some sense put a phenomenological punch behind that observation0:14:08because one of the presuppositions of the orienting reflex theory that I just laid out was that: you were very good at detecting changes0:14:18that your nervous system would automatically detect change, anomaly right, any mismatch between your model and what you expected, and then well, the AI guys, I think, figured out first of all that was a big problem0:14:30that the problem of perception was much more complicated than that you know, it's actually... it's out of that same set of observations in some sense that Postmodernism emerged in liternature...0:14:42in literary criticism, because, well it turns out to be hard enough to see a normal object, like a chair and part of that is that if you just do that to the chair, it's really different than it was before0:14:55you could imagine, how different it would be if you tried to paint the chair under both those conditions, right if you really got good at looking at it you'd find that even though, if I asked you what color this is, you'd say white0:15:07if you were actually painting it, you'd find out that the colors of the chair when it's in that location and the colors in the chair when it's in that location, just because of the difference in lighting0:15:17are substantially different I think it was Monet, I think who painted a very large series of haystacks in the French countryside in different seasons and under different conditions of illumination0:15:29just because he was exploring how radically different the same object could be as it moved through contexts so it isn't even obvious why we think this is the same object when you move it0:15:40and the answer is something like: well, you can sit on it in both positions which is not a description of an object, by the way right? that's a description of something that's useful, something that's a tool, something that exists in relationship to your body0:15:54it's not an object; and so... if you think that just looking at something like a chair is almost impossibly difficult and subject to interpretation0:16:04then imagine how difficult it is to perceive something like a text, you know, like a novel because a novel obviously is subject to multiple interpretations0:16:14and the interpretations are gonna depend on, well, at least in principle on the intent, conscious and unconscious, of the author of the time, of the place, of the culture, of the language0:16:26then that's just on the side of the production itself, but then there's the reader it's like, I've read books when I was sixteen, and then reread them, say, when I was forty0:16:36and the book was almost completely different, as far as I was concerned partly 'cause I knew what was in it the second time, and I didn't know what was in it the first time and so, the meaning that manifests itself out of a book0:16:50is a consequence of all the complexity of the book plus all the complexity of the reader, and so you know, if you're reading Russian literature, for example, and you've already read fifty Russian novels0:17:02you're going to be in a much more different interpretive space than you are if, say, the Russian novel is the first novel you've ever read0:17:13and the Postmodernists were grappling with this as well as with many other ideas that I think contaminated their thinking0:17:23and their conclusion was: well, you can't extract out a canonical meaning from a text it's so dependent on the situation that to say the text has an interpretable meaning is actually an error, now0:17:36just because it's difficult to do something doesn't mean it's impossible and there's massive holes in the postmodernist view I think it's an unbelievably pathological view, personally0:17:47but the thing is is that there are reasons why it emerged and the reasons were analogous to the reasons that the AI project initially failed0:17:57and analogous to the reasons that this experiment turned out the way it did so I'm gonna show you this, many of you have seen this already, but as I said, it doesn't matter0:18:06your job here is to count the times... there's a team of three people here, dressed in white and there's a team of three people here dressed in black0:18:16and your job is to count the number of times the white team throws the baskeball back and forth to the white team members ok, we'll just run that0:18:56okay, well, so, obviously or perhaps not so obviously, the the number of times I believe that they threw it back and forth was sixteen, if I remember this correctly0:19:09but of course that's not really the issue, because what happens in the middle of the scene is that a guy wearing a gorilla suit comes out into the middle of the screen, and pounds his chest three or four times0:19:20he comes out quite slowly, as you saw; is there anybody in here who didn't see the gorilla? no, well, I presume all of you knew about this video anyways0:19:30so, Dan Simon, who produced this video has got a couple of other ones where he shows that, you know, even if you're smart enough to see the gorilla, 'cause you've seen the video before you've heard about it0:19:40if you make other changes in the background, you'll count properly and you'll catch the gorilla, but you'll miss the other changes in the background and they're not trivial either, it's really quite remarkable0:19:49he's produced other short videos, for example, where you'll be looking at a... like a field and a road will grow in it, occupying about a third of the photograph's space0:20:02and you'd think well, yeah, you're gonna see that, it's like: you don't, you don't so, okay, so this threw a big spanner into the works this sort of experiment, along with the AI failures, and we could even say, the postmodern dilemma0:20:15it's like, well, hmm, everyone, virtually... every psychologist would've predicted before this series of experiments that there's no damn way you'd miss that gorilla0:20:25because your nervous system was actually attuned to change in the environment and that's a big change, and it's also a gorilla it's something you would really think that you couldn't miss, you couldn't possibly miss0:20:37especially when it's occupying the center of the visual field and so, well, this is part of a phenomena called change blindness and it helped psychologists who had been studying the visual system for a very long time0:20:50to figure out, well mostly figure out exactly how blind human beings are because we're way blinder than we think, and0:20:59and so we actually focus on much less of the world than we think, and we do that partly... it's not exactly obvious how we do it0:21:08it's kinda like we hold a still picture in our imagination and then fill in the details by using our central foveal vision which is always dancing around like a pinpoint or a laser beam, moving back and forth0:21:20and we're assembling those little snapshots from the fovea into a relatively coherent picture maybe what happens is that I look at you, and then I look at you [points to a different student]0:21:32and I've still got the information from looking at you, so my brain can sort of infer that that's remained stable but like if I look at you, and I... I tried to learn how to do this, 'cause you can look at something, and then pay attention to the periphery, it's annoying0:21:47but, so if I'm looking at you, I really can't make out your eyes [points to a different student] I can more or less make out the fact that you have a head especially if you move it, so your periphery is sory of like frog vision or dinosaur vision0:22:02it's much better at picking up movement than it is at picking up something that's staying still and that makes sense, because, well, if it's staying still, and it hasn't already hurt you, then0:22:13it's probably not going to hurt you; but if it's moving, then, you know, that's a good thing that you might pay attention to and so, if your periphery catches movement, then you'll focus your fovea on it0:22:22it's like you go from really low resolution to really high resolution so the center of your vision is incredibly high resolution but then it fades into low resolution as you move towards the periphery, until it's out here0:22:34which would be about 170 degrees if I concentrate on this hand I can tell it's a hand, mostly when it's moving0:22:44I have no idea what color it is, this one I can't see at all and then, I can probably see my fingers - now0:22:53and then I can clearly see them if I look at them with my fovea, and so your vision is a very, very strange thing, and it's focusing on something very specific0:23:03and so you're pointing your eyes at something very specific, and that's what you seem to see so then that opens up a whole new universe of questions, it's like...0:23:14how do you decide what to point your eyes at? that turns out to be an insanely complicated problem John Vervaeke talks about that all the time as the problem of relevance0:23:25and the issue is: well, there's many, many things in the world, there's an infinite number of things, let's say and you're not gonna be able to see them, that's for sure, even if they happen to be changing, as it turns out0:23:37and so, out of this mess, first of all, how do you pick what to look at? and second, even if you do pick it, how do you see it? 'cause it's so crazily complicated0:23:46so that's the problem that we're going to try to unpack now, roughly speaking, what seems to have happened with the gorilla video is you have to take that first theory, that you make a complete model of the world0:24:00which is the objects in the world, and how they're interacting and you compare that to the objects in the actual world and how they're interacting you have to modify that model, you say: well, no, you're certainly not making a complete model0:24:13and people should have known better anyways; even subjects to the limits of your perception, because there's all sorts of things in the world that you can't directly perceive, but0:24:22what you're doing instead is something like: you're making a partial model of the world but you're only making a partial model of the world that you're currently operating on0:24:33with some goal in mind and you're also comparing that to a model of the world as it's currently unfolding 'cause the other thing that was implicit... this is really tricky, this is where you have to watch your implicit assumptions0:24:45the other thing that was implicit in the original cybernetic theory was that you have a model of the world that's complete0:24:54and then what you're watching is the actual world as it unfolds and that's not a model, that's just your perception of the object; but that also turns out to be wrong, because0:25:04your perception of the world as it unfolds is also a model, and so what's happening is: you look at the world the world you see is a model, and a very partial model at that0:25:15and then you compare it to the model that you expect or desire, more accurately, desire although the initial models were expectation because if you're in the lab, listening to tones it's not like you desire anything0:25:27but mostly when you're acting in the world, you have desires so the experimental constraints skewed the data in some sense by making people assume that0:25:38what people were doing when they walked through the world was expecting instead of desiring anyways, you have a model of the world that's generated as you look at it you have another model of the world that's something like the world that you desire0:25:49then you compare both of them, and they can mismatch, and they can mismatch in a way that upsets your current pursuit that's the critical issue0:25:58you don't see the anomaly unless it upsets your current pursuit and you kinda know that too, because when you're... like, while I'm lecturing to you guys0:26:07you know, mostly you're sitting still, but people are moving their arms, and they're moving their glasses, and they're shifting their feet, and generally I don't see any of that, because what difference does it make?0:26:19you know, it's not relevant to the ongoing... to the ongoing what? ongoing contract? the ongoig series of interactions? it's something like that0:26:30so as long as you keep your movements bounded within a range that doesn't interfere with whatever it is we're doing then it's going to be as invisible to me as the gorilla was when you were counting the balls0:26:43and the cool thing is about the gorilla experiment, or one of them, is that the reason you were blind to the gorilla was because you were counting the balls and so, that's so fascinating , because what it shows to a huge degree, to an unfathomable degree0:26:58to an unfathomable degree is that the value structure that you inhabit determines what you perceive0:27:07it doesn't just determine what you expect or want, it bloody well determines what you see and that makes the world a completely different place, no one really expected that0:27:17and so, if you watch the basketball, you see the basketball if you stop watching the basketball, well then you see the gorilla, and so0:27:26the first question that arises from an experiment like that is: just exactly what is it that you don't see in the world? and the answer is: all of it0:27:36you see so little it's unbelievable; you see that tiny amount that's necessary for you to undertake the next sequence in your plotted movements...?0:27:46it's something like that; but then that becomes very complicated, too, because it isn't obvious how you can conceptualize or how you can determine what your next movement is0:27:57because it's not like you just add up movements and make up your life it's not that simple, and it's related to the novel problem, the problem of meaning in a literary work0:28:09so imagine: you're trying to specify the meaning of a literary work, well there's meaning in the word, but the meaning of the word is dependent on the phrase within which it's embedded0:28:22and then the meaning of the phrase is dependent on the sentence that it's embedded in and the sentence in the paragraph, and the paragraph in the chapter, and the chapter in the book0:28:31and the book in the corpus of books of that sort and then within the culture, and then within whatever your peculiar personal experience is0:28:40all of those things, nested, are operative to some degree when you're extracting out the meaning at any level of analysis they're all operating simultaneously, so you might say, well0:28:49what are you doing in this classroom? well, the answer is: sitting in a chair but that's... obviously that's a very short-term and context-independent answer0:29:03but you're also attending to what I'm saying, hypothetically and you're attending to some of it, and not to other parts, you're thinking about some parts and not other parts0:29:13and you're also attending a class, and a class is a sequence of lectures and that's embedded within your desire to finish up the semester0:29:22and then to finish up the year, and then to get your degree and then you nest that inside whatever it is, whatever the reason it is that you're getting your degree and then maybe that's nested inside your career goals, and that's nested inside your life goals0:29:35and that's nested inside your ultimate values, which you may or may not even be aware of and so, I could say, well, you're sitting here because it serves your ultimate values0:29:46well, that's true it seems a bit abstract to be useful, right, it's so vague out at the outermost levels, that0:29:56it doesn't really have much specificity, right, so it seems to lack information, but by the same token if I said what you're doing is sitting there it has the same problem of too restricted meaning, because of overspecificity0:30:08and so, there's some level in there that you would interpret as meaningful, God only knows why and that's the level... there's a natural level of perception for that sort of thing0:30:20so for example, when children learn to name an animal, for example, they'll name "cat" they don't name the species of cat, or the subspecies of cat0:30:31and they don't confuse cats with dogs, even though they're both in the category of "four-legged furry mammal" so, why not call the cat and the dog "furry mammals"?0:30:43well, children don't do that, they go to "cat" and "dog" and people who've studied the acquisition of language have found that there are basic-level categories that children pick up first0:30:54and they're often represented with short words, and the words are short, because they've been around a long time because they seem to reflect the natural level at which people perceive the world0:31:04but none of that's obvious, you know I mean you could just lump all animals together, for that matter, and just call them "animals", which we do sometimes0:31:14so... anyways, so it's very difficult to specify the meaning level, and it's not very easy at all to figure out how we do it and so that's partly what I'm trying to unpack, so...0:31:26here's part of the issue, so let's say that you're... you have a computer yeah, I have a story for this, so0:31:36one time, when I was in Montreal, I was using my computer I was in my apartment and I was typing out an essay, and it crashed, and so0:31:49what happens when your computer crashes? well, you know, usually you utter some sort of curse and it's interesting that you do that, because the circuit that you use to curse with0:32:00is the same circuit that monkeys use to detect eagles, or leopards, or snakes and so, when there's a bunch of monkeys together0:32:09you know, they're not all preyed on by eagles and leopards and snakes, but you know, there's usually a predator in that category for every single monkey population and so, when the monkeys are watching, they have an emotional utterance that the most nervous monkey might utter first0:32:23that basically says, you know, hide from the eagle; get out on the thin branch, so the cougar can't eat you; and look the hell out for the snake but there's a circuit that's linked to emotions that produces that instinctive utterance that represents that category0:32:38and that's the same circuit that you use when you curse and it's not the same circuit that you use for normal language we know that, because that circuit is activated in people who have Tourette's syndrome0:32:50because they preferentially swear you think, well, why in the world would you have a neurological condition that makes you preferentially curse? well, that's the reason: you don't just have one linguistic circuit0:33:00you have one for: "oh my God, there's a predator!" and that's the one that will get activated when something happens like your computer crashing0:33:10because, you know, you're an evolved creature, and so those old circuits that were there, say, 30 million years ago to deal with exceptions0:33:19are the same circuits you're using now to deal with your computer; why else would you wanna hit it? right? 'cause that's what you want - give it a whack! it's like: it doesn't behave - whack!0:33:28aggression right away, well, that's some clue as to the category system that you're automatically using to encapsulate the event0:33:39ok, so fine, what do you do when your computer crashes? well, first you curse, and then you do the stupid things that idiot primates do when they're trying to deal with something that's way too complex maybe you turn it on and off, right? and that doesn't work0:33:51it didn't work, and so then I thought, well, maybe the power bar went, so I checked the power bar and I turned it on and off, and nothing happened so I brought a light behind the computer, and the light wouldn't go on, so I thought, aha!0:34:03I must have blown a fuse! so I went to the fuse box and took a look, but the fuses were fine and so I thought, well, the power's gone out, so then I went outside, and the power was out0:34:14none of the street light were working, the power was out everywhere and it was seriously out, because this was the time that almost the entire northeast power grid in Quebec collapsed0:34:25and the reason it collapsed was because there was a solar flare that happens reasonably often, a solar flare produced a huge electromagnetic pulse because it's basically, you know, like a million hydrogen bombs going off at the same time0:34:3993 million miles away produces this tremendous electromagnetic pulse passes through the Earth's atmosphere produces a spike in current in the main power lines, and blows the whole system0:34:52and so, just so you know, an event like that happens about every 150 years and if we had one now, it would take out all of our electronics0:35:03like one of the big ones, there was a big one in the late 1800's everything, satellites, computers, cars, everything - gone and so that's a big problem, and no one knows what to do about it0:35:13one missed us by about nine minutes, I think two years ago so that's something else to worry about, if you're inclined to worry about those sorts of things um, ok, so what did I conclude from that? well, the...0:35:28the function of my computer was dependent on the stability of the sun it's not the first thing you check out when your computer crashes, right? you don't run out and go, hey, well, yeah, the sun's still there :)0:35:39no problem, I can cross that off the list but to me it's an extraordinarily interesting example of the invisible interdependence of things0:35:49you know, and our tendency to fragment the... what we seem to do is to look at things at the simplest level of analysis that actually functions0:35:58so, for example, when you're interacting with your computer, you're not interacting with your computer at all, really you're interacting with the keyboard, sort of one key at a time0:36:08and you're interacting with the symbols on the screen but as long as the computer is working, you don't care about it at all, you don't give it a second thought0:36:17and you certainly don't care about the fact that it's dependent on... well, the electrical power, for example, and the electrical power is dependent on...0:36:27you know, I don't know how many men are out there right now or were out there last night, when it was freezing rain fixing power lines and freezing to death while they're doing it, so that your stupid computer doesn't malfunction while you're watching cat videos0:36:41you know, I mean there's this incredibly dynamic living system, that's social, and economic, and political that has to remain dead-stable in order for us to have access to0:36:52functional and pure, non-fluctuating electricity 100% of the time 'cause you also don't think, well, the stability of your computer is dependent on the stability of the political system0:37:04but of course it is, because if the political system mucks up, and the economic system goes, then people don't go out and work to fix things; and things are breaking all the time0:37:14that's their normal state, is broken, not working; and so... and that's all in some sense folded up not only inside your computer0:37:25but actually inside your tiny conceptions of the computer while you're using it and you only get a glimpse of what the computer is really like when it doesn't work0:37:36then it's when it becomes a complex object, right as long as it's working, then your stupid perceptions are perfectly fine to get the job done0:37:47and that's another indication of what you're using your perceptions for is to get the job done and how you specify exactly the level of resolution that you should be operating at0:37:58I haven't sorted that out, but it's something like you default to the simplest level that moves you to the next step you know, so for example... and generally that is what you should do0:38:08if you're having an argument with someone that you have a long-term relationship with you can start by arguing about what the little argument is about or you can immediately cascade into whether or not you should have a relationship with this person at all0:38:21or even into whether or not you shoul even bother with relationships which is... you know, every time there's an argument, that question is a reasonable question to have emerge0:38:33or at least it's in the realm of potential reasonable questions but it doesn't seem useful to jump to the most catastrophic possible explanation every time some minor thing goes wrong0:38:43that's what happens to people who have an anxiety disorder that's what happens to people who are depressed, right? they can't bind the anomaly and so what happens is it tends to propagate up the entire system0:38:54until it takes out their highest-order conceptualizations you know, so if you're seriously depressed, maybe you'll watch a news article about something stupid, and you'll think: Jesus, why should I even be alive0:39:04you know, and I'm dead serious about that if you score like 60 on the Beck depression inventory, which puts you way the hell up in the "depressed" range anything that happens to you that's negative will trigger suicidal thoughts, roughly speaking0:39:17and sometimes even positive things will do it, because there are very few positive things that happen, that don't carry with them some threat of change or transformation0:39:27so, you know, one mystery, it's a big mystery why don't you fall into a catastrophic depression every time something little goes wrong?0:39:37because the level of analysis is not self-evident you see this with people who are high in neuroticism too, you know their trivial fluctuations at their workplace or in their relationships or in their health0:39:54will produce a very disproportionate negative emotional response it's part of the range of normal emotional responses some people are very, very high in neuroticism, so everything upsets them, some people are very low0:40:06and the reason that whole range exists is because sometimes you should get upset when some little thing happens to you 'cause it's an indication that the whole damn environment has got dangerous on you0:40:15and sometimes you should just brush it off, because it's net consequence is low but, how do you calculate that? very, very difficult question0:40:26so you know, when your computer goes wrong well, you have to pick the proper level of analysis to fix it, and you could say, well there's something wrong with the circuit board, and maybe there's a crack in one of the...0:40:43somewhere that it's soldered, and or you know, sometimes now that people are building microchips they've run into a crazy problem0:40:54you know, microchips keep getting smaller and smaller, right so the little wires now are down to atomic width or you know, the width of maybe 20 atoms or something like that, but really, really... they're really getting thin0:41:06and so, that produces another problem, which no one would have ever... you wouldn't expect, and that is that at the quantum level there's uncertainty about where electrons might be0:41:20normally that doesn't matter The degree of uncertainty where your electrons are, is smaller than your size so that it's basically irrelevant But down at the sub-atomic level where these microchips are starting to be produced0:41:32Sometimes the electron will be outside the wires and that means that they are getting so damn small that they'll get short-circuited by themselves because the electrons aren't stable enough to be where they're supposed to be in the wires0:41:43so well, the reason I'm pointing that out is because a problem that exists in the system can exist at any of the multiple levels of that system0:41:53and it isn't obvious where to start and lot of political arguments are like that, you know... it's like maybe a company goes bankrupt and its shareholders get, maybe a bank fails, so maybe people can't withdraw their money0:42:07One response is, well that just show you how rotten the capitalist system is It's like, well, maybe that is what it shows, but0:42:16it seems there is, it seems like that might not be the most appropriate level to start and so again, it's like Occam's Razor in the scientific world, right0:42:25You want to use the simplest explanation that it's not that fits the facts because you don't organize your perception by facts it's kind of like you want to use simplest tool you can possibly manage to fix the problem0:42:37so you don't... when your car has a flat tire, you don't buy a new car You fix the flat tire if you can figure out how to do it so you go for the thing that will put the tool back together with the minimum involvement of time and effort0:42:53it's something like that And you care about that because you have limited time and you have limited resources And so it make sense for you to conserve them, and0:43:04I'm telling you part for practical reasons too because this is a very useful thing to know if you're arguing with someone you want to argue about the smallest possible thing that you could argue about that might fix the problem0:43:18you want to really specify what's going on at a micro level and what's the minimum that I would require to be satisfied with that outcome0:43:27and if you're... This is especially true in intimate relationships. It's like... If someone is bugging you and you want them to change, you think, well, how can I be minimally bothered by this0:43:37and what's the tiniest amount of change I could request that might satisfy me cuz otherwise, the argument will come unglued and every time you guys try to discuss a problem0:43:48you'll talk about whether you should even be together and then you're done cuz you'll never solve a problem and then you won't be together, cuz you'll never solve a problem so0:43:58ok so, here's the way to think about perception so, let's say this is the thing you're trying to look at0:44:07I call that the thing in itself Now, that's schematic of a thing in itself so, the thing in itself, that's an old philosophical concept and I think it came from Kant0:44:19But I'm not sure about that. That might be older than that And the thing in itself is, what you could see if you could see everything about something, but…you can't…so it's a hypothetical entity0:44:29and maybe, who knows, if I were looking at you like the thing in itself maybe I could see every level of your being, from the sub-atomic level, up to this level of perception then beyond0:44:42I could see your family relationships I could see how they were nested in the societal relationships, economic relationships, political relationships, the eco-system as a whole0:44:52like, I would see all those levels at the same time of course, I don't, cuz I can't What I see instead is First of all, you are radically simplified by my senses because they are just not acute enough to see you at a microscopic level0:45:06and they're not comprehensive enough to see your connections across time so, my senses filter a bunch of you from me right away and then, I'm also filtered from you, by your willingness to act like I want while we were together0:45:23cuz that's ... cuz you could be doing all sorts of strange things at the moment. But you're not and so, you're helping me simplify my perception of you, by agreeing to play the same game that I'm playing while we occupy the same space0:45:36and that's basically politeness that's the mark of someone who's well socialized you walk in somewhere you get the game play the game and you don't scare the hell out of everybody0:45:45and that's…that's partly how we keep our emotions stabilized because you know if you're like a Freudian, you think0:45:54well, as long as your ego is well constituted, you can keep your emotions under control it's like, yes and no, mostly no0:46:03I like the Piaget an idea better, which is if you're well socialized, you're awake enough to identify the game that's going on wherever you go0:46:12and then you play that game immediately and so do all the other socialized primates and so then you can just understand the game you don't have to understand them, thank God0:46:22you could just understand the game and as long as the game continues you don't have to be nervous, because you know you at least know what's going to happen and maybe you even know how to get what you want in that game0:46:33and so… so that again that's really worth thinking about, because we talked about this before about why people want to maintain their culture0:46:42it isn't just because their culture is a belief system that helps them orient themselves in the world it's because I believe system is a game that everyone who shares that belief system is playing0:46:54and the fact that everybody's playing means nobody needs to get upset So it isn't like the belief system is directly inhibiting the emotions. That isn't how it works0:47:04so… and it's not like the culture is just a belief system it's only secondarily a belief system, man mostly it's a game that people are actively engaging in0:47:14that's way more important than the beliefs that go along with it you even need the damn beliefs you know that's why wolves can live with each other0:47:23I don't know what the they'll have a belief system exactly mostly they have a set of they have a game, that is the wolf game, roughly speaking0:47:34and all the wolves know how to play it, and, so, that's that that's how they keep themselves organized in their packs a lot of its externalized and so0:47:44okay, so, anyway, so, the thing in itself, that's a very complicated thing. It got multiple dimensions, multiple levels0:47:54and then it's worse than that because it doesn't only have multiple levels, but all those levels move across time and every one of those level shifts as it moves across time0:48:04and so I like to think of the thing in itself like a symphony I think that's a good model. I think that's why we like music, in fact because music shows you a multi-level reality that unfolds and shifts across time, within some parameters, right? because0:48:19it is not just chaos the music has an element of predictability and an element of unpredictability and it has these multiple levels and that's sort of what everything in the world is like. It's what the world is like0:48:33so this is… a even that is just a conceptual model of the thing in itself first of all that's only got 2 dimensions instead of 3 cuz it could be a cube0:48:42and then it has… even a cube has 3 dimensions instead of 4, because if that was a cube, adding the third dimension then it would also be a cube that would transform and shift as it moved across time0:48:55and that's what the thing in itself is but that's too damn complicated so then the question is when you look at it, what you see? and the answer is to some degree, it depends on what you want to use it for0:49:06and so I would say will hear look at the different ways you can look at this might say what is this somebody could say well it's a rectangle and would you say that's correct0:49:15it's like, well it's not correct because there's not a one-to-one correspondence, but0:49:24it might be a useful conceptualization if you think about that as a box it could contain that and if you are carrying the box to only have to be concerned about the box and so that would be fine0:49:35it's a good functional simplification that one's a little higher resolution because it says well yeah it's actually four rectangles and that one says, well, wait, think about that is an orchard that someone's looking at from the top0:49:48you want to figure out how to walk from South to North well, you got a little map there cuz you can think of those as bars instead of collections of dots0:49:58Piaget showed the children will automatically do this. So for example if you take six dots and put them in a row and you take the same six dots and you stretch them out so the rows this much longer0:50:10and then you asked the child where there are more dots, the child will say that there are more dots where it's longer because they're flipping in some sense between the perception of the individual dot, and the perception of the shape that the array of dots makes0:50:25and so, the shape is longer, 'cause you could see it as a rectangle so they think, well, longer is bigger, bigger is more, there's gotta be more dots0:50:36and then there's this one, which is sort of an amalgam of this one and this one, and then that one and that's the highest resolution model of that that's still a simplification0:50:47and you know, what I like about this diagram is that, you know, people say, well... the facts are the facts, and what we're disagreeing about is our opinion about the facts0:50:57it's like, no... yes... you have an opinion about the facts, but the world is so horribly complex that you can actually disagree about the facts themselves0:51:06and I think and ideology does that to people very commonly so I saw this movie once that Naomi Klein made if I tell you the same story, tell me, 'cause I don't wanna tell you the same story, but I might0:51:18so she went down to Argentina after a bunch of money had got out of Argentina beause of a financial collapse and she went to a factory that had been padlocked, and it was a heavy machinery factory0:51:30and the workers had decided they were gonna undo the padlocks and go build machines, you know to hell with the owner who shut it down!0:51:40and so, she went down and made this movie, and followed these workers around and showed how catastrophic their lives have been because they'd lost their livelihood in this big financial crash0:51:49and so that was really interesting; but then she went and interviewed the guy who owned the factory, and she treated him like he was... like a cipher in some sense instead of asking him: how he got the factory? what he wanted to do with it? how it fit in with his life plans?0:52:03why he shut it down instead of continuing it? she didn't get the back story on him, she just left him in the "evil capitalist" box and went on with the film0:52:14and it was... it wasn't like what she did wasn't true but it was only half true, and it was half true because she could perceive the complexity of the workers, having sympathy for them0:52:26but as far as she was concerned, the enemy, the owner had no complexity he was just "bad capitalist", and that how it was left in the movie I found it profoundly unsatisfying, because I wanted to know, okay, it's like0:52:38you know that these workers are suffering, it's not self-evident that you want your damn factory closed you'd think you'd want it open so you could be building things, it's like...0:52:47who are you? what are you doing? why is is this justifiable? have a question about it well, you can take this infinite set of facts0:52:57and then you subject it to your filters, and you let some of the facts through, and they're facts but what about all the facts that you don't let through?0:53:07that's the thing, and that's what the gorilla video shows, too it's like, yeah, yeah, you've got the basketball count right, but you missed the big primate and you might say, well, your priorities were a bit skewed in that circumstance, because0:53:18you were rearranging the deck chairs as the Titanic sank, as the old joke goes and so it's very much useful to think always, well, you're...0:53:29it isn't just your damn opinion that's biased, although it is it's your perceptions that are biased, so...0:53:39[???] it's even more, so you say, well you can't see the thing in itself 'cause it's too complex, so you perceive it simpler than it is0:53:48and some of that perceptual simplification is dependent on your aims so that's a vicious one, because it pulls the value structure that you're ensconced within into your perceptions0:54:00it pulls it into the reals of facts itself and then you do another... I think about this as a compression0:54:10you can compress a photograph by getting rid of redundant information that's sort of what you're here one of these squares, little black squares here, black rectangles, compresses all of those0:54:24it's like we're going to treat those as if they're greyish black, same thing happens here so we're blurring across them, so we have a much less high-resolution image here0:54:36so you take the thing in itself, you perceive it as a low-resolution representation and then you take that low-resolution representation and you replace that with a word0:54:46and so the word is a twofold compression and then when someone tosses you the word, you unpack it into a low-resolution perception0:54:56and then maybe into the world itself, if you can do that, but probably not so that's what we're doing, we're taking the complex world, we fold it into a simple perception we fold that into a word, we throw the word to someone else, and they unpack it0:55:08and the only way you can unpack it, of course, is if you'd had enough similar experience so that you have the reference for the word already in your experience which is why you have to use simplified language with children, right, because0:55:21there's no point tossing a child a concept that he or she can't unpack so we compress a very complex reality through a very, very small keyhole0:55:36that's basically our cognitive process okay, so then here's the next kinda argument, this goes along with... the science-religion argument that I was making earlier, which I wanna unpack a little bit more0:55:51I think that fundamentalists and atheistic scientists have the same problem0:56:00the fundamentalists, so we can say the christian fundamentalists in the US make the proposition that biblical stories, we'll call them mythological stories0:56:12are literal representations of the truth, but... and... that might be true depending on what you mean by "literal" ;) but what they mean by "literal", or what they attempt to make "literal" mean, is that they're in the same category, as scientific facts0:56:27because they don't have the idea that there are different ways of approaching truth and that truths can serve different purposes; they don't have the sense that your definition of "truth" is actually something like a tool0:56:40rather than an ontological statement about the reality of the world and so the fundamentalists basically make the proposition that0:56:49the idea that God created the world in six days, five thousand years ago is literally true and they get the five thousand year estimate, by the way0:56:58by going through the genealogies on the Old Testament, and adding up the hypothetical ages, and figuring out how long before Moses Adam lived, and some bishop did that, I think it was in the mid-1800s0:57:11I might be wrong about that, but it was somewhere back about that time and more or less that's been accepted as canonical fact ever since and then the scientists say: well yeah, those are empirical truths, they're just wrong0:57:23see, and that's the only difference there is between the fundamentalists and the atheist scientists the fundamentalists say: those are fundamental scientific truths, and they're right and the scientists say: well, they're scientific truths, they just happen to be wrong0:57:36I think that's a stupid argument, presonally for a bunch of reasons, one is that the people who wrote the ancient stories that we have access to were - in no way, shape or form - scientists0:57:50you know, modern people tend to think that you think like a scientist, and people have always thought that way first of all, you do not think like a scientist even scientists hardly even think like scientists0:58:00but if you're not scientifically trained, you don't think like a scientist at all so one of the things, for example, that characterizes your thinking is confirmation bias0:58:09so if you have a theory, what you do is wander around in the world, looking for reasons why it's true and a scientist does exactly the opposite of that in the little tiny, narrow domain where he or she is actually capable of being a scientist0:58:22and what they have is a theory, and look for a way to prove it wrong but, believe me, you don't run around doing that you can train yourself so now and then you can do that0:58:31you can learn to listen to people, for example, on the off chance that you might be wrong but that is by no means a natural way of thinking and of course, the fundamental philosophical axioms of the scientific method0:58:47weren't developed until Descartes and Bacon, and who else...? there's one more... anyways, the name escapes me at the moment, but0:58:57you can argue when science emerged, but it's certainly emerged in its articulated form in the last thousand years0:59:06I think you could say even more specifically that it emerged in the last five hudred years now, you might argue with that, and say: what about the Greeks and other people who were fairly technologically sophisticated?0:59:17or who invented geometry or that kind of thing but yeah, yeah, bare precursors to the idea of empirical observation Aristotle, for example, when he was writing down his knowledge of the world0:59:28it never occurred to him to actually go out in the world and look at it to see if what he assumed about it was true and it's certainly never occurred to Aristotle0:59:37to get 20 people to go look at the same thing independently write down exactly how they went about doing it compare the records, and then extract out what was common0:59:47and that's a... that seems self-evident to us to some degree, but, you know... it was by no means self-evident to anyone five hundred years ago, and people still don't do it0:59:58so it's not plausible... if you know anything about the history of ideas, it's not plusible to posit that1:00:08stories about the nature of reality that existed before 500 years ago were scientific in any but the most cursory of ways so why we have that argument continually is somewhat beyond me1:00:21part of the reason is, though, that everyone, fundamentalists included, really believe in scientific facts even though they hate it; they'll use conputers, they'll fly; computer's wouldn't work unless quantum mechanics were correct1:00:36the fact that you use a high-tech device indicates through your action that you actually accept the theories upon which it's predicated1:00:45right, the same as flying, same as anything you do in a complex technological society you're stuck with it; you're reading by the lights; do they work? yeah, they work1:00:54well, so it's really hard for people who are trying to hold onto a way of looking at the world that appears to contradict the scientific claims1:01:04when everything they do is predicated on their acceptance of the validity of the scientific claims it's really problematic for people it's problematic in a real way, I think, because1:01:15one of the problems with the scientific viewpoint is it doesn't tell you anything about what you should do with your life it doesn't solve the problem of value at all1:01:24in fact, it might make it more difficult, because one of the fundamental scientific claims, roughly speaking, is that every fact is of equal utility1:01:33at least from a scientific perspective; there's no hierarchy of facts that's not exactly true, because you can think of one theory as "more true" than another1:01:44but that boils down to saying that it's more useful than another so I don't think that that's a really good exception okay, so fine1:01:53you got the scientific atheists on one end and you got the religious fundamentalists on the other and what they both agree on, whether they like it or not, is that there's so much power in the scientific method that it's difficult to dispute the validity of scientific facts1:02:07and they seem to exist in contradiction to the older, archaic stories if you also accept them as fact-based accounts1:02:17so what do we do about that? well, if you're on the scientific atheist end of things you say: well, those old stories are just superstitious science second-rate, barbaric, archaic forms of science; you just dispense with them, they're nothing but trouble1:02:30and if you're on the fundamentalist side, you say: well we'll try to shoehorn science into this framework and really that doesn't work very well; it doesn't work very well with the claims of evolution, for example1:02:40in fact, it works very badly, and that's a problem, because evolutionary theory is like... it's a killer theory it's really, really hard...1:02:51like it's not a complete theory, and there's lots of things we don't know about evolution, but... you know trying to handwave that away, that's not gonna work without dispensing with most of biology1:03:05so that's a big problem; so here's another way of thinking about it you don't just need one way of looking at the world1:03:15maybe you need two ways of looking at the world, and I'm not exactly sure how they should be related to one another like which should take precedence under which circumstance1:03:25but one problem is: what's the world made of? you know, what's the world, conceptualized as an objective place, made of1:03:34and the other is: how should you conduct yourself while you're alive? and there's no reason to assume that those questions can be answered using the same approach1:03:46I mean, physics has its methods, chemistry has its methods, and biology has its methods so a method for obtaining the truth can be bound to a domain1:03:59so why would we necessarily assume that you could use the same set of tools to represent the world as a place of objects, and to represent as a place in which a biological creature would act?1:04:10I mean, anyways, I'm suggesting that we... that we don't view it that way, that we have two different viewpoints1:04:20maybe they can be brought together, although it's not obvious how but that it's not a tenable solution to get rid of one in favor of the other1:04:29and I think the reason for that is that... you need to know how to conduct yourself in the world you have to have a value system, you can't even look at the damn world with out a value system1:04:41it's not possible; your emotional health is dependent on a value system, the way you interact with other people is dependent on a value system there's no getting away from it1:04:51and you say, well, there's no justification for any value system from a scientific perspective you're gonna draw that conclusion that no value system is valid, where the hell does that leave you?1:05:01there's no down, there's no up, there's no rationale for moving in any direction there's not even really any rationale for living and so people say things like: well, why the hell should I care what happens, in a million years who's gonna know the difference?1:05:14it's like, yeah, yeah, true. stupid, but true and the reason I think it's stupid is because it's just a game, you know1:05:23I can take anything of any sort and find a context in which it's irrelevant it's just a rational game, it's like who cares if a hundred children freeze to death in a blizzard? what difference is it gonna make in a billion years?1:05:35well, what do you say to someone who says that? you say, well, seems like the wrong frame of reference, bucko that's what it looks like to me; you know, 'cause at some point you question the damn frame of reference, not what you derive from it1:05:49and it certainly seems to me that situations like that don't allow you to use that kind of frame of reference, there's something inhumane about it and that trumps the logic, or at least it should1:06:01and if it doesn't, then all hell breaks loose, and that doesn't seem to be a good thing okay, so I have this quote from Shakespeare here he says: all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in time plays many parts1:06:16well, it's the sort of thing that you'd expect a dramatist to pen, but that's how he looked at the world and we still watch Shakespeare's plays some hundreds of years later because there seems to be something essential captured in them1:06:30something about how people do act, but more importantly, I think, how people should and shouldn't act because what fun is it going to a play that doesn't outline how someone should and shouldn't act?1:06:42you want a good guy or a couple of them, maybe they can be complex interminglings of good and bad you know, that makes it more sophisticated and you want a bad guy or a bad... you always want to see that contract either within a character or between characters1:06:59and it's because you want to know how to live properly, that's how to be a good person and you wanna know how to live improperly, how to be a bad person, so you can watch out for people like that1:07:08or so you can figure out what that means for yourself; it's compelling and that's another thing that's worth thinking about:1:07:19why is it compelling? and it's compelling to everyone, and that's the thing that's so cool, is that there aren't that many phenomena that you can point to that are compelling to everyone1:07:29music is close, it's a very rare person who doesn't like at least some genre of music, no matter how narrow but the other one is stories, you're hard pressed to find someone, especially if they're younger, who doesn't like stories1:07:43why? is it a waste of time? or is there something going on? well... i think it's not only not a waste of time, it's actually the most fundamentally important thing you can possibly do1:07:57because there's no difference between understanding stories and figuring out how to get along in the world so, and there's a tight relationship between the story that you inhabit, that structures your behavior1:08:10and the games that Piaget talked about, that organize people's behavior, to some degree the reason we can all sit in this room together like this1:08:20is because a huge chunk of the value system that guides our behavior is shared so I'm lecturing and you're sitting in the classroom, and that distinguishes us to some degree1:08:33but you know that that's partly merely a consequence of the difference in our age it's the same trajectory, we just happen to occupy different positions in a value hierarchy that we both accept1:08:43and so, as long as you feel that that's fair and just, then you're not gonna object to it, but I'm here in the classroom for many of the same reasons that you're here in the classroom if you look at the higher-order parts of the value structure, and maybe right at the end of that...1:08:56'cause I've tried to figure out if you push why you're doing what you're doing right now to its ultimate limit so you can't get a story that's superordinate to that1:09:07it's something like, well, you belive that the investigation of the world to acquire knowledge is worthwhile otherwise what the hell are you here for? and even if 80% of your motivation is to get a good, stable job, fair enough1:09:20there's still something outside of that because the whole culture says, well, you're more likely to be able to function properly in a good, stable job if you're the sort of person who knows how to go out in the world and forage for information usefully1:09:33and I think that's very much analogous to the hero story it's like, you go out and you search the unknown to find something of value and so fundamentally that's what we're doing in the classroom1:09:43and the reason we can all organize our behavior is because we accept that framework consciously... consciously would be: we know how to articulate it1:09:53unconsciously it's: well, it doesn't matter, we know how to act out the patterns whether we can say the rules or not, doesn't matter same as a wolf pack; we know the procedures, and you could describe them with an articulated value structure1:10:13let's take a break okay, so let's go back to the complexity problem you see, I actually think in some sense that's the fundamental problem1:10:25when you read about the terror management theorist types they think that death is the fundamental problem and that's a good argument, because it's definitely a fundamental problem, but I think it's a subset of the complexity problem1:10:40and the reason I think that is because sometimes people's lives become so complex that they'd rather be dead and the reason they seek death through suicide is to make the complexity go away1:10:53'cause complexity causes suffering if it's uncontrolled you know, things just get beyond your control and that can happen, you know, if you're hit by three or four catastrophes at the same time1:11:04you know, maybe you have... oh, the political system collapses, there's hyperinflation you lose your job, and you have someone that you love or two people die, and maybe you get cancer, something like that1:11:16those things happen to people, and they just think, well, there's no getting out of this, it's just too much and you know, one of the interesting things about being a psychologist is that1:11:27what you learn if you're gonna be a psychologist is that people come to you with mental illnesses - and that's almost never true people come to you, because their lives are so damn complicated, they cannot stay on top of them1:11:38in any way that doesn't make it look like they're just gonna get more complicated and so then that causes symptoms, you know it's like... there's this old idea, a sort of a metaphor for genetic susceptibility1:11:51take a balloon and blow it up until it's beyond its tolerance - it's going to blow out at the weakest point well that's sort of what a genetic susceptibility is if I just keep adding complexity on top of you, at some point you'll blow out at your weakest point1:12:03you know, maybe you'll get physiologically ill, maybe you'll start drinking maybe you'll develop an anxiety disorder, maybe you'll get OCD, maybe you'll get depressed whatever, they'll be something about you that's the weakest point1:12:14and if I just push, that's where you'll blow out, so that's a mental illness, but those things almost never just happen sometimes, but not very often, usually people have just been hammered like two or three different ways1:12:26and then they collapse in the direction of their biological weakness, and then maybe you put them back together, but it's almost always a complexity-related phenomenon rather than a mental illness-related phenomenon1:12:38not always, but almost always okay, so now you got this complexity problem, and you think: well, you deal with it conceptually1:12:47and that's sort of akin to the idea that it's belief systems that protect you from death anxiety the ideas are roughly comparable, but again, that's wrong1:12:59it's the sort of thing only a psychologist could think up because psychologists think that everything about you happens inside your head, so to speak, in your psyche, but that's not true there's a huge chunk of you that's outside of you completely1:13:11and so, this is a really good example, like, we know the oldest cities, this is a medieval city in France a beautiful old city old cities were walled, and the reason for that was because1:13:24they were places of wealth, and if you didn't put walls around them then other people would come in and steal everything and kill you so having some walls was a good idea1:13:34the same as having walls in your house is a good idea walls between your rooms are a good idea, or borders between categories are a good idea1:13:43and so, part of the way you simplify the world is by building walls around your space, because then a whole bunch of things can't come in and so, you don't even have to think about them; it's not conceptual, it's practical1:13:54and so, and you know, one of the things I think I've figured out recently is the fundamental political difference between people and it looks to me like the fundamental political difference, is:1:14:06how many walls should there be around your stuff? and the ultimate liberal answer is: zero and the ultimate conservative answer is: bring on those walls, man!1:14:17and what's interesting about both those perspectives first of all is that there's temperamental contributions to them, and second that they're both valid so one of the mysteries, I believe, that permeates psychometric psychology right now is1:14:33why the temperamental factors that influence politics are those particular temperamental factors so there's five, let's say, right, there's classic Big 5: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness1:14:46well, the biggest predictors of political allegiance, forget about the politically correct types for a minute but on the liberal to conservative axis is that the liberals are low in conscientiousness and high in openness1:14:58and the conservatives are high in conscientiousness and low in openness and so then you think, well, why those two traits? that's the first question and the second question is: why those two traits together?1:15:08given that they're not very highly correlated, right, they're really quite independent so why do they co-vary on the political axis? and I think this is the reason, I think it's exaclty that1:15:18open people like to live on the periphery of boundaries and they like to break boundaries between things, 'cause interesting things happen when you...1:15:27when you think a different way, when you think outside of the box, so to speak that's what open people do, they always think outside of the box, no matter what box you put them in1:15:36you know, and sometimes you meet people that are so open that they're completely disorganized their thought process is almost completely associational, like a dreamer they just jump from one thing to another1:15:46they're very interesting to talk to, it's very hard for those people to get their lives together 'cause they're interested in absolutely everything, and their attention just flits all over the place1:15:55and so they're open, and that actually does go along with higher intelligence, generally speaking so, and then if they're low in conscientiousness, they don't see any utility in order1:16:04and orderly people... 'cause that's part of conscientiousness, and the biggest determiner of political belief in the conscientious domain the orderly people like to have everything in its separate place and properly structured1:16:17and so their world is box inside a box, inside a shelf of boxes and then that shelf of boxes is inside another box, and all those boxes are nice and neat and tight1:16:26and nothing inside them is touching, and everything in every box is the same thing and you know, you can see that... you can see the utility in that1:16:35that, as far as we've been able to tell is also associated with disgust sensitivity and people are disgusted, generally speaking, when things that shouldn't be touching, are touching1:16:46like something horrible stuck to you, for example that produces a very visceral sense of disgust and it's a boundary violation, 'cause that's what disgust is, it indexes a boundary violation1:16:59and you can... how separate people should be from one another as individuals or in groups is an entirely debatable issue1:17:08because there's huge advantages when people mingle and mix and there's huge dangers when people mingle and mix, and so... at some point you say, well, the danger are overwhelming the positives1:17:19and at another point you say, well the positives are overwhelming the dangers and you have a continual argument about that with your self, but more importantly with people who have different temperament than you1:17:29and the terrible temptation is to assume that only those people who have your temperament are correct and that's just... those other temperaments wouldn't exist if that was true1:17:41if you look at it from a strictly biological perspective so anyways, one of the things we do to simplify the world is to frame it1:17:51physically - and so you look at this, you've got wall number 1, and then you have wall number 2 but then inside the walls you have walls around everything all these houses are walls, and inside the houses there are walls as well1:18:02and so everything is... and what you do when you put walls around things is you make part of the worlds simpler, constantly the reason you have a house is so that everybody and his dog isn't in your house1:18:15you just want those few people that you can barely tolerate in your house and not all those other strangers, God only knows what they're gonna do you'll still invite people in now and then, beause maybe you're sick and tired and bored of the people that are in your house1:18:28and so you want a little bit of new information, but you want those barriers to be there so that you can voluntarily modulate the information flow1:18:37okay, so that's the first thing you do then you set up rules with everybody else that says, well: I'm gonna have some walls, so you can't come in, but what I'm gonna do is pay you for that privilege by letting you have some walls where people can't come in1:18:51and so, I think that's analogous... I was thinking about the issue of discrimination in relationship to sex because I've been thinking a lot about discrimination lately, because everybody thinks discrimination is a bad idea1:19:02which is a very stupid proposition, because you're discruminating all the time and the most fundamental form of discrimination is choice of sexual partner1:19:11and so you might say, well, why should that even be allowed? because it is the most fundamental form of so for example, almost everyone is racially prejudiced when it comes to sexual partners1:19:22so you think, well... what about... are you... do you use age as an exclusionary criteria? probably do you use physical attractiveness? only insofar as you're able1:19:35right? you'd use it completely if you could get away with it, roughly speaking but you can't, because the most attractive people aren't gonna be anywhere near you so you can't do it, but you'd like to1:19:45health? yes, strenght? yes, wealth? yes, education? definitely so it's unbelievably discriminatory1:19:54so you might say, well, why is that justifiable? and it seems to me that it's something like... well, you get to say "no" to me if I get to say "no" to you, it's something like that1:20:05we've agreed that everybody gets to discriminate on that basis, and because everybody can do it, then it's fair it's something like that, it's very much worth thinking about1:20:16you know, I don't know if you know this, but in Huxley's book, Brave New World where the family had been completely demolished, right, and children were conceived in bottles and produced in factories1:20:29the whole idea of the relationship between sex and procreation had become a taboo one of the mantras, slogans of the society, was: "Everyone belongs to everyone else."1:20:41and so, it was actually a social faux-pas to refuse to sleep with someone just as it was a social faux-pas to have any exclusionary relationship1:20:51because another thing you might notice is that there's nothing more discriminatory than falling in love with someone it's like: you're special! and all the rest of you? haha no1:21:02so it's the ultimate exclusionary act, right, and we presume that that's an acceptable... not only acceptable, we demand that as a right; and that's worth thinking about a lot1:21:15anyways, okay, so what you're doing is by agreeing to this segregation and boxing, what you're doing is carving off little bits of the world that are simple enough so that someone like you can live for some amount of time there without too much danger1:21:30and everyone agrees to do that, roughly speaking, because everybody needs to engage in that process of simplification and safety provision1:21:39and so, so we have towns, and those towns are nothing but boxes inside boxes so there's a good schematic of a little house1:21:51and you can see that even inside the same place we segregate off rooms for different purposes and then, what's interesting, too, is that we set up those rooms as little dramatic spaces; right, so you furnish them1:22:02and you furnish them with things that tell you how to behave in that room so table and chairs tells you that's where you're going to eat, and that's where people are going to sit, and1:22:11they're gonna sit facing each other, and that has certain implications, 'cause the chairs don't face the walls, they face each other and you have a living room where it's comfortable, and there's a fire, and1:22:20you know, you're setting up little stages, basically, so that... just like kids do when they pretend, you know, they all assign each other roles and then they lay out a little drama; and that's what you do when you invite someone over1:22:32well, let's sit in the living room, well, you'll probably get a drink if you sit in the living room and hypothetically you're gonna have some conversation so it's a bounded place, there are rules that apply1:22:42and then you get to have a little exploration inside that set of bounded rules, and if you're open, you're gonna discuss all sorts of things, and if you're conservative and closed, then you're gonna discuss a very, very small subset of things1:22:55and so, hopefully everyone will agree on that so that's one form of binding then another is: we put boxes around each other when it comes to groups1:23:06I think this is a picture from the Democratic convention when Obama was elected, if I remember correctly1:23:16but anyways, what happens is that people segregate themselves into little microgroups, like Democrats and Republicans and they basically do that on temperamental grounds, fundamentally1:23:27and then they produce these games that everyone knows how to play and that's another form of simplification1:23:37so when you bring all these people together at a political convention it's not like they all have the same ideas, they don't and it could degenerate into chaos, and sometimes that happens, you get big demonstrations at these places1:23:50and sometimes people throw tear gas, and all of that but mostly speaking, it's pretty peaceful and the reason for that is that there's a set of procedures in place that have some historical justification1:24:01that are embedded within a shared cultural and belief system and everybody goes there and agrees to play by the rules, roughly speaking and so then they can elect a candidate1:24:12they can kind of flip it down to a binary choice for the election, right yes or no, something like that, and nobody gets killed, usually, so hooray for that1:24:21that's a hell of a thing to pull off, to be able to generate out of 300 million people two people to run for the highest office then let everyone play a game to determine who they're going to be1:24:32and then to have the bloody thing function stably through power transitions that never happens, right, that's a complete bloody miracle and hardly any societies have ever pulled it off1:24:43the power transition being the really important thing 'cause a tyrant can be stable for a while, but usually what happens is: he dies and all hell breaks loose1:24:52I think it was George Washington that said or had said about him 'the reason that he was a great leader wasn't because he was president, but because he stopped being president'1:25:03and that's really worth thinking about so then the next thing that sort of simplifies the world is actually your physiological structure1:25:12we talked about that a little bit you can only see things that are in front of you, not things that are to the side or behind you you can only see a very narrow...1:25:27you can only see a very narrow chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum roughly that chunk that enables you to see by sunlight and to detect ripe fruit and that sort of thing1:25:36so it's very evolutionarily determined, and... you see things of a certain size quite easily, because they're handy1:25:47so objects manifest themselves to you as things- because they have some relationship to your capacity to use them as tools, and that's dependent on your size1:25:59you have a certain strength and not a different strength you have a certain degree of articulation, there's some things you can represent in language, so you have limitations that screen out from your consideration all sorts of things1:26:12and that's bad, because, for example, before people discovered germs, there was a lot of them zipping about, killing people and the fact that we couldn't see them wasn't such a good thing1:26:22but by the same token we're also not as overwhelmed with complexity as we might be if we could detect everything and one of the problems with being connected so much is that it's easy to drown in information1:26:35and that's rough for information foragers, you can't stay off your damn computer, because... it opens up your senses far beyond their normal limitations; and so where should you stop?1:26:47well, you don't; you're on the damn thing like a pensioner on a slot machine and for many of the same reasons1:26:56so your body also filters out the world for you and provides you acces to some information and not access to others and then the same thing is the case with your nervous system1:27:06and I do... I put the first picture there of the central nervous system that controls voluntary movement, for example1:27:15I put it there because people like to think that their brain is in their head but it's a stupid way of thinking about it, as far as I'm concerned, because1:27:24you have an awful lot of neurological tissue distributed through your body, and like your autonomic nervous system, if I remember correctly, which is mostly distributed through your body has more neurons in it than your central nervous system, and so1:27:35you aren't a brain in a body, your brain is really distributed through your whole body and I think the idea that you have a brain in a body is kind of a holdover from the idea that you have a soul in a body1:27:50not that I'm necessarily criticizing that idea, but I think they kinda got graften onto one another, and so but the problem with that is that it...1:28:01so it's the soul-body, brain-body, mind-body dichotomy, which I think is the same dichotomy and the problem with that is that it's easy to think of thought as something that's abstracted away from the body1:28:16I think that was an enlightenment idea that just like the soul shouldn't be contaminated by the demands of the body, if you were going to be pure spiritually1:28:27so your thought shouldn't be contaminated by your subjectivity, and your emotions and your motivations, and all of that it should... your abstractions should be independent of your subjectivity1:28:40and rationality and emotion are construed in that manner as enemies the purpose of rationality is to dispense with the irrationality of emotion and motivation1:28:54and that's... Freud's idea of the properly functioning ego is something like that, too because the Id is this place of compulsion and drive1:29:03and the ego has to basically suppress that in the service of the superego there's no idea of integration, really, in Freud1:29:12now, I don't wanna be rough on Freud and I think part of the reason that he thought that way is because the patients he had were precisely those who weren't very well integrated because of their pathological past1:29:26and so they didn't know how to get those subsystems up into the overarching game and so their only alternative was something like suppression or repression1:29:37because if you don't know how to be aggressive in a sophisticated way you're still gonna be aggressive, but you're gonna have to inhibit it, control yourself1:29:49because you can't just be aggressive around people, it just won't go well for you so if you can't do it in a sophisticated way, you're gonna repress it or you're gonna get in trouble, those are the options, so...1:30:01okay, but if you start thinking about the brain, the nervous system as part of the body as an inseparable part, well then the function of thinking seems to become something different1:30:12it's not so much the objective, abstract representation of the world which is kinda what you're pursuing if you're a scientist, it's more like...1:30:23it's more like conceptualization of and practice of the proper way of being in the world and I think that's what you're more interested in anyways, I don't see how you can't be, since1:30:37you're a living thing, and you're overwhelmingly motivated to1:30:46successfully manifest those actions that a living thing has to manifest in order to continue1:30:55and it's complicated, you can boil it down to survival and reproduction, it's a good overarching simplification1:31:04but there's nothing simple about survival and reproduction, I mean all sorts of complex monsters emerge even out of that simple conceptualization1:31:15but it's not unreasonable to assume that one of the things that people generally want to do is to continue living in as pain-free manner as possible it's something like that, although that's a simplification1:31:26so now the reason I'm making that case is because the fact that you have a body and the fact that you have a nervous system is another set of limitations on1:31:37how it is that you're going to interact with the world so now we've got the nervous system, we can go to higher resolutions - you say you have a brain and the brain... that's the frontal cortex there1:31:50and that's the temporal cortex there, and that's the parietal cortex there, and that's the sensory cortex there and these were, if I remember properly, these were divisions that I think were first1:32:04thought through in the late XIX and early XX century they're slightly specialized so this cortex back here does a lot of the elaboration of vision1:32:17and that one there helps you with your sense of embodiment and your knowledge about where your body actually happens to be localized and that one helps for example in some elements of language output, and1:32:31then the frontal cortex, especially the prefrontal part, which is up here is concerned with the organization of motor action1:32:42that's a good way of thinking about it, you've got part of your brain that deals with the sensory world and the integration of the sensory world, which seems to happen about there, where these places meet1:32:54and the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex the motor cortex helps you plan out voluntary actions1:33:05the prefrontal cortex grew out of that in the course of evolution so you might think, well, there's reflex actions and they happen when something happens to you, you resond1:33:16and then that elaborates up into the motor system, and that enables you to act voluntarily in the world and then that elaborates up into the prefrontal motor system, which helps you plan how you might act in the world1:33:28so it's the prefrontal cortex that's the home of, let's call it, complex, sophisticated, voluntary thought which you could think about as a way of representing the world1:33:38but which is more accurately a way of generating avatars of yourself in hypothetical worlds to figure out how they would survive if you did implement them into action1:33:49and so, I think that's why... one of the weird things that you discover psychometrically is that there's no correlation between conscientiousness and intelligence1:34:00and that's a weird one, because people think about intelligence as planning and forward thinking and all of that but that's also how they think about conscientiousness1:34:09as planful behavior and the consideration of future possibilities, but intelligence and conscientiousness have zero correlation1:34:19so you think, well, why is that? I guess it has to be that way, because you couldn't think abstractly if you were prone to act out what you thought1:34:28you'd just go and act it out I mentioned this to you before, when you dream, you're paralyzed and you can take that little part of the brain that produces that paralysis out of a cat1:34:39or out of a person, but we haven't done it with people out of a cat, and then when the cat falls asleep, it hits REM sleep, it'll run around until it runs into something, and then it'll wake up1:34:48so the dream thinking is so tightly allied with action that there's no separation between them, so there's no real abstraction there1:34:58if you couldn't abstract, you wouldn't be able to think and the fact that you can abstract means that you can separate your thinking from your action so that's why, as far as I can tell, there's very little correlation between conscientiousness and intelligence1:35:11it's like it has to be that way, because you have to be able to think about things that you wouldn't do, if you're going to think and generally we think of people who act as soon as they think as impulsive1:35:25so... there's a huge part of the brain that's devoted to sensory processing and there's a huge part of the brain that's devoted to planning1:35:37and the whole prefrontal part of the brain is devoted to planning and what that indicates is that in large part as far as your evolved body is concerned1:35:48the reason that you think is so that you can act better and of course that makes sense and you can think about memory from that perspective, too, because1:35:58if you think scientifically, you think that your memory of the world is something like an objective record of events, of objective events but it's really not very much like that at all1:36:08and besides, who cares? you don't need an accurate representation of all the facts about this room in fact, all it would do is weigh you down1:36:17who cares what color the walls are? or what color the ceiling is? or what color the paint is; all of that's not worth remembering partly 'cause it has no relationship whatsoever to what you need to do in order to continue to act1:36:31and so what you're doing when you remember, as far as I can tell is that you're mining your experience for information that you can bring forward into the future it's purely pragmatic, and so...1:36:43I treat people who have post-traumatic disorder or symptoms of post-traumatic disorder and so, let's say they got post-traumatic stress disorder because1:36:55again, because a relationship collapsed on them suddenly, which is quite common you know, they get betrayed or someone leaves them suddenly, and then they don't know what to do, because1:37:05especially if they're conscientious, because then they just tear themselves to pieces trying to figure out what they did wrong to bring about that event and the reason they're doing that is that they wanna retool their perceptions and their actions1:37:17so that the probability that they'll have the same experience again is minimized and their mind won't leave them alone 'till they do it and no wonder, tight, because if you fall into a big pit and you get really hurt1:37:30the first thing you should figure out is how to not fall into big pits anymore and your mind is set up exactly for that, and so... what you do with someone whose having problems like that1:37:41so maybe they're waking up in the middle of the night, obsessing about what went wrong is you walk them through it you do a situational analysis first, because1:37:51one of the oversimplifications that people make, and this is especially true for conscientious people, is: if something bad happened to me, I must have done something to deserve it1:38:01now, that's actually a prestty functional idea, because it suggests that there are things about your behavior that you could change that would make the future better1:38:10but the problem is that, say if it's the collapse of a relationship and you've been with that person for eight years or longer well, you did so many things with them1:38:22that the idea that you did something wrong pretty much extends to every single thing you ever did with them and that's... how are you gonna fix that? and so that's part of the trauma, actually; the trauma is1:38:3480 million snakes, all at the same time; it's like, well, forget it you don't have time to go through all that material, and so1:38:44partly what you do with people, and this is what you should do with yourself, too is you do a situational analysis don't be assuming necessarily that the thing that happened to you only happened to you because of what you did or didn't do1:38:56there's all sorts of factors at play, so one of the things I sometimes do with clients is that if they were in a relationship and I can get some reasonable personality information about both of them1:39:06I can point out where they were temperamentally incompatible you know, like if you're a highly conscientious person and your partner is very, very low in conscientiousness1:39:15it's like: well good luck to you two! how in the hell are you ever gonna work that out? because you want everything to be exactly where it's supposed to be and you're working all the time1:39:24and your partner could care less whether things were where they're supposed to be, and they're not gonna work and you can butt heads about that forever, but the probability that you're gonna shift it1:39:35you know, except to some minor degree, is very, very low and so sometimes you end up with someone with whom you get along very well on one temperamental dimension and you're an absolute catastrophe on the other four1:39:47and he probability that you're going to be able to mediate a huge temperamental difference is extremely low you wouldn't expect yourself to mediate a huge intellectual difference1:39:58right? you're gonna make the other person smarter? or maybe you smarter, depending on who you're with; it's like, no, probably not, a bit, maybe so you do a situational analysis1:40:10and so what you're trying to do is to extract out information from your past and your present that will enable you to conduct yourself properly into the future and so that's another example of the pragmatic element of thought1:40:23well then, within the brain itself, apart from the major subdivisions which we just described, there are minor subdivisions, and here's a bunch of them listed1:40:33the caudate nucleus, the cerebral cortex, a huge, newest part of the brain that's about a square meter if you unfold it, it's all folded up1:40:42and most of the processing occurs right on the surface, that's the idea, anyways the thalamus, that's a place where a lot of the information in the brain appears to be integrated1:40:51the cerebellum helps you with balance and the sequencing of complex motor activities the hippocampus, that's the one we talked about before one of the things that the hippocampus does, seems to do, is compare your model of the world as it's unfolding with the model that1:41:06that you desire to be ocurring, and then keeps track of mismatches and if it detects a mismatch, then it disinhibits other emotional and motivational centers1:41:16and that's the beginning of your response to the unknown, so... one of them is the hypothalamus, I'm gonna concentrate on it for a bit1:41:25it's a little, tiny part of the brain that's pretty much at the top of the spinal cord, see it's really small compared to the rest of the brain now, imagine this is a cat brain for a minute1:41:37and you take off the whole cat brain except for the hypothalamus which people do, you take off the whole cortex, for example1:41:46and then the cat's still alive if you do it carefully but it doesn't have much of a brain, and so you might think, well that cat would just do nothing, but it...1:41:55cat's actually pretty functional if it's reduced just to it's hypothalamus and that's because the hypothalamus is an incredibly important part of the brain and it provides what I would say constitute the major frames, the maojr psychological frames1:42:09and so, a decorticate cat can stil eat and drink and regulate its body temperature, and engage in defensive aggression1:42:19and if it's female, it can still mate, male can't, 'cause the male mating behavior is more complicated and as long as you keep it in a bounded environment, it can function reasonably well1:42:31it's hypercurious, though which is very weird, because you wouldn't expect a cat with no brain to be curious about anything but a cat with no brain is curious about everything1:42:40and that seems to be because... part of the reason that you aren't curious about something anymore is 'cause you've investigated it and you've built a representation of it that's functional1:42:50and that functional representation then stands for the thing itself and then you can ignore it, and so you learn to ignore things they're interesting to begin with, and then you learn to ignore them1:43:00and so, one of the things that I think artists do, if they're great artists is remind you that there's more to things than you see now that you've learned to ignore them1:43:10so you get a kind of a halucinogenic painting of flower, like van Gogh might produce like his famous irises, which I think sold for like 220 milion dollars or something outrageous1:43:20it's like what van Gogh is trying to show you is what those flowers looked like before you thought you could see them 'cause now: "flower", and you walk by, you don't see it at all1:43:30'cause you're off to get a peanut butter sandwich or something you don't have time to glory in the wonder of the world, you've got something practival to do alright, so we're gonna zoom in on the hypothalamus here1:43:44and what you see, of course, when you zoom in on the hypothalamus, is that it's not a thing it's a whole bunch of things and then it's one of those horrible whole bunches of things that are made out of even more bunches of things, and then they're made out of more bunches of things, and1:43:59what's really interesting about going down the body from an analytic perspective is that it doesn't seem to get less complex as you go farther down, you know1:44:08some of the... I should actually show you that... I haven't shown you that little video of DNA fixing itself, eh?1:44:17I better show you that, it's so cool, it's ridiculously cool, so you definitely need to see it >>untill I encountered the artworks of David Goodsell, I was a molecular biologist at the Scrips (?) Institute1:44:31>>and these pictures are all... everything's accurate, it's all to scale >>and his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside us is like1:44:40>>so this is a trans-section through blood, in the top left hand corner you've got this yellow-green area >>the yellow-green area is the fluids of blood, which is mostly water, but it's also antibodies, sugars1:44:49>>hormones, that kind of thing >>and the red region is a slice into a red blood cell, and those red molecules are hemoglobin >>they are actually red, that's what gives blood its color >>and hemoglobin acts as a molecular sponge to soak up the oxygen in your lungs and carry it to other parts in the body1:45:03>>I was very much inspired by this image many years ago >>and I wondered whether we could use computer graphics to represent the molecular world, what would it look like? >>and that's how I really began, so let's begin1:45:15>>this is DNA in its classic double helix for, and it's from x-ray crystallography, so it's an accurate model of DNA >>if we unwind the double helix and unzip the two strands, you see these things that look like teeth1:45:26>>those are the letters of the genetic code, the 25 000 genes you've got written in your DNA >>this is what they typically talk about, the genetic code, this is what they're talking about >>but I wanna talk about a different aspect of DNA science, and that is the physical nature of DNA1:45:39>>and it's these two strands that run in opposite directions for reasons I can't go into right now >>but they physically run in opposite directions, which creates a number of complications for your living cells1:45:50>>as you're about to see; most particularly when DNA is being copied >>and so, what I'm about to show you is an accurate representation of the actual DNA replication machine1:46:00>>that's occurring right now inside your body, at least 2002 biology >>DNA is entering the production line from the left-hand side >>and it hits this collection, this miniature biochemical machines that are1:46:11>>pulling apart the DNA strand and making an exact copy >>so DNA comes in and hits this blue doughnut-shaped structure, and it's ripped apart into its two strands1:46:20>>one strand can be copied directly, and you can see these things spooling off down to the bottom there >>but things aren't so simple for the other strands, because it must be copied backwards >>so it's thrown out repeatedly in these loops, and copied one section at a time1:46:32>>creating two new DNA molecules >>now you have billions of this machine right now working inside you, copying your DNA with exquisite fidelity1:46:43>>it's an accurate representation, and it's pretty much at the correct speed for at what is occurring inside you >>but I've left out error correction and a bunch of other things1:46:52[applause] >>this was work from a number of years ago; thank you >>this is work from a number of years ago, but what I'll show you next is updated science, it's updated technology1:47:03>>so again we begin with DNA, and it's jiggling and wiggling there because of the surrounding supermolecules, which are stripped away so you can see something >>DNA is about two nanometers across, which is really quite tiny1:47:13>>but in each one of your cells, each strand of DNA is about 30 to 40 million nanometers long >>so to keep the DNA organized and regulate access to the genetic code it's wrapped around these purple proteins, I've labeled them purple here1:47:27>>It's packaged up in bundles [?], all this field of view is a single strand of DNA >>this huge package od DNA is called a chromosome, and we'll come back to chromosomes in a minute1:47:37>>we're pulling out, we're zooming out >>out through a nuclear pore, which is sort of the gateway to this compartment >>that holds all the DNA, called the nucleus1:47:46>>all of this field of view is about a semester's worth of biology, and I've got 7 minutes, so we're not gonna be able to do that today1:47:55>>no, I'm being told no >>this is the way a living cell looks down a live microscope >>and it's been filmed under time lapse, which is why you can see it moving1:48:04>>the nuclear envelope breaks down; these sausage-shaped things are the chromosomes, and we'll focus on them >>they go through this very striking motion that is focused on these little red spots1:48:14>>when the cell feels it's ready to go, it rips apart the chromosome >>one set of DNA goes to one side, the other side gets the other set of DNA >>identical copies of DNA; and then the cell splits down the middle1:48:26>>and again, you have billions of cells undergoing this process right now inside of you >>now we're gonna rewind and just focus on the chromosomes >>and look at tis structure, and describe it1:48:37>>so again, here we are at that equator moment >>the chromosomes line up, and if we isolate just one chromosome, we're gonna pull it out and have a look at its structure >>so this is one of the biggest molecular structures that you have, at least as we've discovered so far inside of us1:48:53>>so this is a single chromosome, and you have two strands of DNA in each chromosome >>one is bundled up into one sausage, the other strand is bundled up into the other sausage1:49:02>>these things that look like whiskers that are sticking out from either side are the dynamic scaffolding of the cell >>they're called microtubules, but the name's not important; but we're gonna focus on this red region, I've labaled it red here1:49:12>>and it's the interface between the dynamic scaffolding and the chromosomes >>it is obviously central fo the movement of the chromosomes >>but we have no idea, really, as to how it's achieving that movement1:49:24>>we've been studying this thing they call the kinetic core for over a hundred years with intense study >>and we're still just beginning to discover what it's all about >>it is made up of about two hundred different types of proteins, thousands of proteins in total1:49:36>>it is a signal broadcasting system >>it broadcasts through chemical signals, telling the rest of the cell when it's ready >>when it feels that everything is aligned and ready to go for the separation of the chromosomes1:49:49>>it is able to couple onto the growing and shrinking microtubules >>(?) it's involved in the growing of the microtubules, and it's able to transiently couple onto them1:49:58>>it's also a tension-sensing system, it's able to feel when the cell is ready, when the chromosome is correctly positioned >>it's turning green here, because it feels that everything is just right1:50:09>>and you'll see there's this one little last bit, that's still remaining red >>and it's walked away down the microtubules >>that is the signal broadcasting system sending out the stop signal, and it's walked away, it's that mechanical1:50:23>>it's molecular clockwork, this is how you work at the molecular scale >>so with a little bit of molecular eye candy... >>we've got kinesines, which are tho orange ones, they're little molecular courier molecules walking one way1:50:36>>and here are the dionine(?), they're carrying that red broadasting system, and they've got their long legs so they can step around obstacles and so on >>so again, this is all derived accurately from the science, the problem is we can't show it to you any other way1:50:48>>exploring at the frontier of science, at the frontier of human understanding is mindblowing >>discovering this stuff is certainly a pleasurable incentive to work in science1:51:01>>but most medical researchers... >>this is just... discovering this stuff is simply steps along the path to the big goals >>which are to eradicate disease, to eliminate the suffering and the misery that disease causes and to lift people out of poverty, thank you1:51:17>>[applause] so like that's just so ridiculously mindblowing that it's amost unbearable to think about that as clockwork even is a pretty strange idea1:51:29because those little things walk over obstacles, how the hell does that happen? they're just molecules so it's so cool, 'cause when you go down you think "simple", but you know1:51:40and he said at the beginning, when the little machines were taking the DNA apart that he didn't show the error correcting there are these other little machines that go along and see if everything's okay, and if it isn't, they cut it out and put the right piece in1:51:55yeah, things we don't understand, there's no shortage of them, that's for sure okay, so what I'm doing in some sense is walking you though a psychophysiological representation of1:52:08Piaget's developmental process, I would say I wanted to zero in on the hypothalamus, becaue it seems to me the thing that sets the most basic frames1:52:19and so, we'll go ahead with that so you see that it's made up of all these little parts1:52:28so it's called the hypothalamus more for convenience than because it's a homogeneous set of structures 'cause it's not a homogeous set of structures1:52:38this is something to consider very carefully when you're thinking about the terminology that psychologists use or that you might use to describe your own behavior 'cause you know, you can roughly... there is a psychology of motivation and there's a psychology of emotion1:52:51and you might think, well, emotion and motivation are categorically different entities but they're not in fact, there's no such thing as a uniform set of motivations, and there's no such thing as a uniform set of emotions1:53:03and the distinction between a motivation and an emotion is unclear, to say the least and that's partly because the physiological substructures that subsume what we call motivations and what we call emotions1:53:16it's not like there's a motivation center that's homogeneous the closest is the hypothalamus, but it's made of structures that are qualitatively different1:53:25and then the emotions... 'cause I have to use that descriptive terminology, 'cause we have to communicate about it somehow there's all sorts of different structures in the brain that contribute to emotional expression1:53:36they're not even in the same place much less composed of identical structure or function so you know, we have shorthands that we use to divide up the world, but they're...1:53:49they're awkward and untenable as the level of resolution increases but anyways, I'm still gonna go with motivation and emotion, becasue it's a useful simplification1:53:58but you can see with the hypothalamus that there's all these complicated little subsystems in there and I showed you that video to show you just how complicated the subsystems are1:54:07all the way down to the molecular level how those little machines manage what they do is completely beyond me they call it clockwork when those little things that walk can walk over obstacles1:54:19it's like: clockwork does one thing only click, click, click, click, that's all it does, no exceptions this thing walks over obstacles to get where it's going; who knows what's going on down there?1:54:33but it works well enough, so here we are, weirdly enough so motivation seems to be to be the initial framing process1:54:42and you come in to the world with the motivational systems roughly ready to go babies are hungry, babies get cold, babies want something to drink1:54:52so the world already comes... in some sense they come into the world with pre-packaged categories for existence and those are the categories that are going to aid their survival1:55:04and you know, they're not simple, either; it's not so simple it's hunger, thirst, pleasure, pain, anxiety, and the classic emotions: sadness, joy, and so forth1:55:16those systems are already there, but babies have more complicated systems, too like the system for exploration is already in place, and the system for play which is really complicated, it's already in place, so1:55:27you come into the world with a human nature and the nature seems to be distributed across the subsystems, that's one way of thinking about it1:55:36and it's also useful to think about the operation of those subsystems as something like... you can think abouth them as games with an aim you could think about them as stories, you could think about them as frames of reference, you can think about them as action patterns1:55:51all of those, and you can think abouth them as subpersonalities, which I actually think is maybe the best way to think about them because if you're hungry, it's not a deterministic drive1:56:01it's a subpersonality that has a goal and then it has a bunch of action patterns that are going to work in reference to that goal it has a bunch of perceptions that suit that goal1:56:12and it organizes your emotional responses around that goal and so, to think about it as a personality is a much more intelligent way to look at it1:56:21one of the things about Skinner's rats... you know, Skinner could get rats to do almost anything, and he would reward them with food and so he had a simple rat model, but his rats were starved down to 75% of their normal body weight1:56:33so not only were they not social, gregarious ratts, like rats are, 'cause they were isolated they were genetically altered from wild rats1:56:42but they also weren't as complex as a real rat, because they were starvind, and so but you know, a starving rat is a prety good model of a rat and a rat is a pretty good model of a person1:56:51but a lot of our models of simple behavior learning were based on starving, isolated rats, so anyways how to think about motivation? we'll think about it from the hypothalamic perspective1:57:04so we could say one thing that motivation does is set goals we could say that emotions track progress towards goals and I'm gonna use that schema, even though it's not exactly right1:57:14so you say, well, motivation determines where you're gonna aim, so if you're hungry, you're gonna aim at something to eat and then that will organize your perceptions, so that you zero out everything that isn't relevant to that task1:57:25which is almost everything you concentrate on those few things that are gonna facilitate your movement forward when you encounter those things, that produces positive emotion1:57:34as you move throught the world towards your goal and you see that things are alying themselves out, that facilitate your movement forward those things cause positive emotion1:57:43and if you encounter anything that gets in the way, then that produces negative emotion and it can be like threat, 'cause you're not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way1:57:52it can be anger, so that you move it away, it can be frustration, disappointment, grief, those would... if you have a response that serious to an obstacle, it would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence1:58:04so you walk downstairs and I don't know, the contracting company sent a wrecking ball through your kitchen that's gonna be disappointing1:58:13you're not gonna keep eating your peanut butter sandwich in the rubble that little frame is going to get punished out of existence and some new goal is gonna pop up in its stead and one of the things we're gonna try to sort out is how do you decide1:58:25when you've encountered an obstacle that's so big that you should just quit and go do something else 'cause that's not obvious you can get into counterproductive persistence pretty easily1:58:37we don't know how people solve that problem, it's a really complicated one so anyways, we're gonna work on that scenario your hypothalamus pops up micro-goals that are directly relevant to biological survival1:58:49that produces a frame of reference so it's not a goal, and it's not a drive, and it's not a collection of behaviors, it's a little personality1:58:58and the little personality has a viewpoint, it has thoughts that go along with it it has perceptions, it has action tendencies, all of that you can see this in addiction, most particularly1:59:10so one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic is they lie all the time and that's because when they built a little alcohol-dependent personality inside of themselves1:59:21or a big one, maybe it's 90% of their personality and one of the things that consists of is all the rationalizations that they've used over the years to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people1:59:35and so the addiction has a personality and so when the person is off... maybe they're addicted to meth or something like that, where we know the addiction is more...1:59:46it's more short-term powerful than, I would say, an alcohol addiction they'll say anything, and the words are just tools to get towards the goal1:59:56and if they happen to be deceptive, whatever, it doesn't matter, they're just practical tools to get towards the goal and then when you get towards a goal, you take a nice shot of meth or something like that2:00:05you reinforce all those rationales that you used to get the drug, and the next time you're even a better deceiver and liar so we're gonna say, motivations, one way of thinking about it is they set goals, but it's not the right way of thinking about it2:00:19they produce a whole framework of interpretation, and so we're gonna think about that framework of interpretation and then emotions emerge inside of that so the world is framed, motivation set goals, you could say the world has to be framed2:00:33so motivation sets that frame: goals, emotions, perceptions and actions and then the actions (he means emotions) track progress, so positive emotion says: you're moving forward properly towards your goal2:00:44and if you encounter something you don't expect, you stop, that's anxiety it's like: oh! we're not where we thought we were and so we don't know what to do, so we should stop, 'cause we don't know where we are and what we're doing; stop, frozen2:00:56and then the more powerful negative emotions like pain, they might make you get out of theres, so... emotions: forward, stop, reverse; that's your emotions within that motivated frame2:01:09and that's another example of how your mind is embedded in your body emotions are offshoots of action tendencies, that's the right way to think about it2:01:20'cause action is everything, fundamentally so what are some basic motivations? most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus, by the way, and that tells you just how important a control system it is2:01:31the other that's useful to know about the hypothalamus is that it has projections going up from it that are like tree trunks and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grape vines2:01:42so you can kinda control your hypothalamus as long as it's not on too much, but if it's on in any serious way, its like... it wins2:01:51so partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the dominion of your hypothalamus is to never, ever be anywhere where its action is necessary2:02:01right? you don't wanna go into a biker bar because you might find yourself in a situation where panicked defensive aggression is immediately necessary2:02:10you probably don't want that; you don't want the panic, you don't want the terror you don't want the frenzied fight, you don't want any of that, you don't wanna have to run away in absolute panic2:02:19so you just don't go there and a huge part of how we regulate our emotions is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them2:02:29and so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control, and everything to do with staying where you belong so... okay2:02:38so, basic motivations: hunger, thirst, pain pain is not regulated by the hypothalamus, that's a different circuit anger / aggression, thermoregulation2:02:48panic and escape affiliation and care, sexual desire, exploration, play and you can kinda break those into2:02:58the classic darwinian categories, too, and say, well, there's a set of motivations that go along with self-maintenance that's be your survival, ingestive and defensive2:03:08see, I've sort of coded them there so the self maintenance there's an ingestive set of basic motivations that go with self maintenance, that's hunger, thirst2:03:20there's a set of defensive motivations: pain, anger, thermoregulation, panic and escape and then there's motivations that are associated with reproduction2:03:30affiliation, care, and sexual desire and then I put exploration and play sort of outside of that I would say because those two things serve both of these approximately equally2:03:43so what I tried to do is take the basic motivations, and then nest them inside a fundamental darwinian framework so that you can see how the biological process of evolution has manifested itself, an then sort of differentiated into these fundamental biological systems2:04:00okay, so this is a rat brain flat map so it's basically what you would see of a rat's brain if you flattened it out, unrolled it, flattened it out, and then made it two-dimesional2:04:12and you can see here... so this is the hypothalamus and you can see that it's made out of these different nuclei, that's what they're called2:04:22and they sort of correspond to those shapes that I showed you in the human hypothalamus earlier and you see that there's different systems, there's the system for eating and drinking, it's outlined in green2:04:31and the reproductive system, there's two of them, and they're outlined in I think it's red... is that right? yeah, reproductive is red, and the defensive ones are in magenta2:04:44and so those are the... you could think about those as the three fundamental value systems of living creatures with complex nervous systems as far as the hypothalamus is concerned2:04:54and then, given what I told you about the hypothalamus, which is... you hardly need the rest of your brain at all, as long as you have a hypothalamus2:05:04it's worth thinking that those are very fundamental to value per se now, you might think, if you only need the damn hypothalamus, why bother with the rest of the brain at all?2:05:14which is a very useful question especially because most creatures don't have much of a brain, so... but it seems to be something like:2:05:23well, you've got your eating and drinking system, your reproductive system, and your defensive system, but the problem is that those things, first of all, can conflict,2:05:32you know, are you too hungry to sleep or too sleepy to eat? that's a pretty simple kind of contradiction are you more angry at your partner or do you want sexual relations more?2:05:43so they can conflict in the present but then they can conflict with other people doing the same thing and they can conflict across time2:05:52and so partly the reason that you need the rest of your brain is to solve the problems from the solutions that the hypothalamus offers and so, because you don't wanna just eat and drink, and reproduce and defend yourself2:06:06you wanna eat now, later, tomorrow, next week, and next month while you're able to engage in reproductive activity and defend yourself2:06:16in multiple contexts, with a whole bunch of people, for as long as you can possibly manage it and so you need the rest of your brain to calculate that and so what the rest of your brain has to do, roughly speaking, is regulate these2:06:29and also elaborate them up into... into something that's integrated inside you which might roughly be your personality, and then so that that personality is integrated with the personality of other people2:06:41and so you can think about it as an emergent process this is one of the things I really like about Piaget he's so damn smart, because Piaget is the only thinker I know, really2:06:51who really addressed the problem of the evolution of value systems like, he never nailed it down to the physiology, because there wasn't enough known about physiology when he did his work2:07:01but it maps really nicely onto the physiology ... but he got it right anyways, he said: you come into the world with a handful of preestablished reflexes2:07:13okay, we're gonna complicate that up a bit: no, you come into the world with a handful of micropersonalities that are centered around these fundamental motivational axes, okay2:07:24and then that gets you started and that has motor output as well as perceptions, and all of that, that's associated with it and then, as you interact initially, let's say, with your mother2:07:35you start to learn how to integrate those things in some sort of social context because you form a relationship with your mother right off the bat and so, you're starting to figure out how to produce patterned and stable interactions between those motivational systems2:07:52on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis and one of the things you do with kids, it's really important to do this with kids you wanna get them on to some sort of a routine2:08:02'cause what the routine is actually, is the beginnings of the system that integrates all of these underlying biological systems into some sort of unity 'cause they have to sleep and wake up, so you wanna get that nailed down, so it's predictable2:08:16you know, they have to eat, they have to stay warm and they need to do that in a manner that's stable and so, it's to your great benefit as a parent that you get islands of stability planted in the life of your kid2:08:32so that some of this gets simplified, so that the kid isn't constantly preoccupied with domination by these different motivational systems and so it's a useful thing to know, because you might think, well, you don't wanna impose any structure on your baby, it's like, no, wrong2:08:46you don't wanna be a tyrant about it, but there's no difference between that structure, and the emergence of the child's adaptation to the world2:08:55and to some degree what you're trying to do is free them up from arbitrary domination by these underlying motivational systems you know, 'cause if the baby gets too tired, it's a horrible little thing, it'll just scream at you non stop2:09:08and it's not happy about it, it's like it's not good for anyone for that to happen and so the faster... you have to do it in relationship with the child some will sleep right away in a schedule almost immediately2:09:20and other kids are harder to get their circadian rhythms regulated so you have to attend to the individual differences that characterize the child, but2:09:30you're still trying to establish some stable harmony out of this mish-mash of initial systems2:09:41alright, so that's sort of a physiological look, and this is a more of a conceptual look at it I said that each of these systems you can think about in a bunch of different ways2:09:52you can think about it as something that sets a goal "I'm hungry, and I don't wanna be hungry - point A, point B2:10:01so the hunger and the vision of the satiation of the hunger are all part of the same frame and so, if you're hungry, you go into the kitchen2:10:10you know that already, that's part of your procedural knowledge about how the world works and then what you're gonna look for are only those things that are relevant to what you're trying to do in the kitchen2:10:23everything else is zeroed out, you won't even really see it, and why would you? you want to see the things that are relevant to the task at hand and so that's the thing that's so cool, I think2:10:34because what it means is that you see the things that are relevant to the task at hand and so, here's something to think about let's say that you see a whole bunch of things that you don't wanna see2:10:44that make you constantly miserable and unhappy one thing that you might ask yourself is: are you sure that your goals are proper?2:10:53because your goals determine what you see; now, not a 100 percent, obviously you could be thinking about the homework you're gonna do and step off a curb and be hit by a van, it's like2:11:03you're gonna get hit by the van regardless of how you've oriented your perceptions, in all likelihood so I'm not trying to argue for pure solipsism but it is very interesting to consider that since you see in relationship to what you want2:11:18that a very large amount of what you see is dependent on what you're aiming at and so one issue is: if your life is wretched and miserable one thing to think about is whether or not what you're aiming at is the right thing to be aiming at2:11:30and "nothing" is exactly the wrong answer to that "I'm aiming at nothing" Okay, you're gonna experience a tremendous amount of misery and not very much joy2:11:40so anyways, you've got this little frame: you're somewhere, and it's not good enough, and you're going somewhere else, that's going to be better and what "better" depends upon is the state of these underlying biological systems2:11:55and then, more complexly, as those biological systems get integrated into a personality, and into the social world then the frame and the goal is going to be dependent on that more complex hierarchical organization2:12:08so, you're not in here 'cause you're hungry you're in here, because if you get a degree, maybe you don't ever have to be hungry so the hunger is properly incorporated into your...2:12:20you don't wanna be cold, you don't wanna freeze to death in the winter, you don't wanna be on the street you know, so your higher-order goals are long-term socially negotiated solutions2:12:30to the problems that are implicit in your being, that might be one way of thinkig about it and the microelements of this... so you could say "I'm hungry", that's a physiological state and a conception2:12:44"I have a vision about how I'm going to solve that" but then... and that's an abstraction but what you do to transform point A into point B is not an abstraction, you act2:12:56you know, so if you're hungry, you actually move your body, say down from the second floor into the kitchen and you arrange things so that there's transformations in the world2:13:07that's a good way of thinking about the relationship between the mind and the body your hypothetical solution to your problem, that's the mind but the manner in which you incarnate that solution2:13:18that's no longer abstract you know, people are always trying to solve the mind-body problem and as far as I can tell, that's how you solve it, is: you have abstractions, but they're not abstractions that are representations of the world2:13:31they're abstractions that are representations of action patterns and the way those are implemented in the world is that you act them2:13:40and so, it's strange, 'cause you've got this weird level of control I can move my arm, and I seem to be able to do that voluntarily but Ireally have no idea how I'm doing it2:13:49like I don't have conscious access exactly to the musculature, except technically and I certainly have no idea what I'm doing chemically to make those muscles transform2:14:01so my abstractions ground out in this movement and I can observe the movement, and modify it, but2:14:12I have no conscious access whatsoever to the micro processes that are making tha possible I've no idea why that is, probably because I'm not smart enough2:14:21that would be my guess evolution is only going to allow your mind to control those elements of your being that you're smart enough to control2:14:31and so you don't get voluntary control over your heartbeat, for example, because you'd just forget and then you'd be wandering around, and then you'd forget to beat your heart, bang, you'd be dead, so you don't get to do that2:14:42... all these different... I classify these, again, as self-propagation and self-maintenance motivations2:14:54if you're too hot, well, you wanna go somewhere cooler, and if you're too cool you wanna go somewhere hotter same if you're thirsty and hungry and for self-propagation, well, you get lonesome and maybe you have some sexual desire2:15:05and each of those different systems competes for access to this central frame and that's something like the contents of your consciousness at any given time2:15:15so up pops a desire... but it's a wrong way of thinking about it 'cause a desire sounds like something that's pushing you forward but the desire is goal, framework, emotion, perception, action pattern, all at the same time2:15:29it's a little personality, or it's a little story actually, when you describe the operation of one of these things, that's when you're teling a story so I was somewhere, I needed something, I went and got it2:15:42it's a boring little story, but that's the basic unit of a story 'cause I don't care to hear what you're doing unless you had a reason for doing it I just say: what's the point of the story?2:15:53and the point of the story is the point it's directional, right? it says: "I went from here to there", that's the point, "here's how I did it", that's the point2:16:03and you're interested in that, because maybe you want to know how to do it too and you won't have to struggle through it like I did, you could just listen and so we're always throwing these little units of information back and forth to each other2:16:13and for good reason; I wanna know what your point is because better Iearn it from you than make all the mistakes that you had to make when you were learning it2:16:22and human beings, we've got that figured out, that's for sure okay, I'm gonna just explain this2:16:31and then we'll stop; alright, so we're in one of those frames now, and we're going from point A to point B2:16:40and so, the question is: how does the world lay itself out? okay, so the first thing to understand, and this is partly the reason I showed you the gorilla video, is that2:16:49the first thing a frame does for you is make almost everything irrelevant and that's so great, because that's what you want you want almost everything to be irrelevant, because otherwise you're gonna be so flooded with information, that you...2:17:01that's what hallucinogens do, at least in their initial stages is they take away that filter, and make everything relevant you can read about that in Huxley's "Doors of Perception"2:17:13he does a great job of describing the initial stages of a mescaline experience and what happens is that all of the memory, in some sense, that regulates his perceptions is stripped off2:17:23and so he sees everything glowing, and alive, and magical like he'd never encountered it before which is exactly how you would see something if all your memory about it was gone2:17:33and so he sees things as way more complex and interesting than he normally sees them well, that's fine, but, you know, if you're like that all the time, then, you know, you end up in a ditch, starving to death or something2:17:43it's not commensurate with normal life, that's what it looks like and so your perceptions are just shrunken, restricted to the bare minimum necessary to keep you moving in the direction that you're moving2:17:54alright, so the first thing you wanna do is you wanna make things irrelevant now, if you're with someone in a relationship2:18:04partly what you want them to do is to help you continue making most of their possibility irrelevant it's polite2:18:13so you say, well, "we have a friendship", let's say so that means you've agreed to act in a friendly manner towards me, and to support me2:18:23there's all sorts of other ways you could act like a myriad of them and I' gonna do the same for you, so we're simpler to each other than we would normally be2:18:32and then you go and so something that betrays me, it's like bang, that whole simplification is gone and all those parts of you that were supposed to be irrelevant, 'cause we were playing the same game2:18:42they're dead relevant, and I don't know who the hell you are and so that's really rough, and people do not like that it's this emergent mismatch between their desires and the way the world is manifesting itself2:18:53so one of the issues of complexity is that when you hit an obstacle, everything that you have agreed with other people to make irrelevant - is relevant2:19:05and that's generally a disconcerting experience now you can, you know, you might wanna toy a little bit with that in a relationship2:19:15maybe you encourage your partner to dress differently or you go do different things or something 'cause you don't wanna be stuck in exactly the same old rut and so what you'll agree is how you can both deviate an interesting amount2:19:27but that's voluntary and controlled, it's not the same at all as having that little mess of eighty million snakes pop up right in front of you which is the last thing you wanna have happen, and so2:19:39it's so weird, because one of the things that we're striving to do constatnly is to keep most of the world irrelevant and our cultural systems are designed precisely for that purpose, and par of what you do when you disrupt them is2:19:53you force people to consider a far more range of relevance than they are even vaguely comfortable or vaguely comfortable to manage and it just burns them to a crisp2:20:03because what your body does is: if all of a sudden everything around you is relevant... like I could say: "you're stripped naked, I take you in a helicopter, drop you right into the middle of the jungle at midnight"2:20:14it's like, you're not bored standing there, frozen, paralyzed, everything is interesting well, too bad for you, 'cause too interesting is very little different from terrifying, and so2:20:29you know, your heart rate's gonna be at 160 for like two days, and then something will eat you, and your problems will be over alright, so this diagram basically suggests this2:20:39is this is how you break up the world when you're going from point A to point B it renders almost everything irelevant, hooray and then what happens is the rest of the world is broken up into obstacles that get in your way2:20:52and tools that facilitate your movement forward and that's actually what you see when you come into a place like when you come into this room, these are obstacles insofar as you con't walk through them2:21:03and those are tools insofar as you can sit on them and watch the class and this is a tool, and these are tools, and this is a tool2:21:12and I'm a tool, although I'd never admit it but anyways, I'm a tool, because you need to take this class in order to advance towards your degree2:21:23and so, basically what you see inthe world are entities of functional significance and those are not objects, they're not the same thing and that's very much worth considering, because we're trying to2:21:35build up a case, at least in part, for analyzing the nature of the structure within which you organize your perceptions and we tend to think that those are predicated on object perception2:21:47it's not true it's not true, they're predicated on relevance conception does it help you? does it get in your way? or is it irrelevant?2:21:58that's what you wanna know; if it helps you, you're happy about it; if it gets in your way, you're negatively predisposed towards it; if it's irrelevant, it's invisible2:22:07and so, if your little scheme is functional, your little frame is functional then most of the things that you encounter are mildly positive2:22:16and that's how you know that you know what you're doing, that's how you validate the entire frame so okay, good0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 06: Story and Metastory (Part 2)
0:00:00 [Introductory music]0:00:13So I guess the case that I was making last time, at least in part, was that... You're one of...- One way of conceptualizing the fundamental problem0:00:24... that human beings face is... To conceptualize as an ongoing struggle with complexity. And...0:00:35Complexity... ... emerges as a consequence of...0:00:44The, sort of, finite boundedness of individual consciousness, and the... ... incredible excess of the unbounded everywhere else.0:00:56Even including underneath that consciousness. Because, of course, your individual consciousness depends on the function... ... or is related to the function of things that are so complex you can't even understand it.0:01:07So, there you are... Surrounded by some things that you understand... ... in an ocean of things that you don't understand at all. And, including things about yourself.0:01:18And it's not obvious at all how people solve that problem because... In some sense it's not solvable: the fact that you don't have the cognitive resources...0:01:28... or the conceptual resources to understand everything that you need to understand, in order to properly orient yourself in the world. Now, obviously, partly the way we deal with that, is that we cooperate with other people...0:01:39... and, so, that radically multiplies our resources ... incredibly multiplies our resources. So... It's something to consider, always when...0:01:49...you know, so much of the political dialogue that surrounds us now... ... consists of a critique of cooperative societies0:01:58... and an analysis of their oppressive nature. And, of course that's true, because any cooperative system... ... that specifies a certain end point.0:02:09... and produces a value hierarchy of some sort... ... also simoultaneously... ... forces things into that value system, and then rank orders...0:02:18... people, according to the value structure ...and so, there is an oppressive element to it, but... ... compared to... ... being naked in chaos...0:02:27... generally, it's better. Now, it doesn't always have to be, because it can get murderous... ...but generally speaking, well look, we're social animals, it doesn't matter.0:02:37Our evolutionary pathway has already taken us here. So, we're individuals, but we are unbelievably social. And so, that's that. As far as I can tell, we'd have to be completely different creatures not to...0:02:49... fall-... ... not to take advantage of and fall prey to the problems with social being. Alright, so...0:03:00I think the way that... ... the problem of complexity has been solved -- and this is the best argument I know of for... The truth of the Darwinian notion of evolution0:03:11Now, I don't think that our models of evolution are complete by any stretch of the imagination. I... I know they're not, partly because of recent work done in epigenetics, which suggest that you can...0:03:24...you can inherit acquired traits. And when I went to university - When I started going to university in the 1980's... ...that was heresy, really, like...0:03:34"No, you cannot inherit acquired traits" But actually, you can inherit acquired traits; that's the field of epigenetics that studies that, and0:03:43that... That's a radical shift in perspective. Because we also don't know exactly what that means across any length of time. When you're thinking about evolutionary lengths of time, you're thinking about three and a half billion years...0:03:54... because that's the span of time over which life evolved. So, even things that don't have a... ... overwhelmingly ... ... marked potency...0:04:04... for one generation, can be unbelievably powerful across time. And then there's also the issue of sexual selection, because... You know, you'll hear Darwinists continually describe the world, and the evolutionary world, as a place of randomness.0:04:18... and that's not true! And I don't know why they make that statement. The mutations are random, or quasi random.0:04:27... because we don't understand mutations that well yet either, and most mutations are deadly, right... Most mutations are deadly, there's a set of them that are harmful but not deadly, ... and then there's a tiny, tiny proportion...0:04:37...that could, in principle, produce some benefit. .. to the next generation, assuming... ...environmental shifts, say, in the direction of the mutation.0:04:47So.. There's a randomness element to that, we know that... I mean, part of the reason that... ... you mutate... ... or your cells mutate, your DNA mutates, is because...0:04:57... of background levels of radioactivity. And a lot of that is a consequence of solar activity. So, cosmic rays come zipping through the atmosphere... ... and they nail your DNA, and...0:05:06... produce minor alterations, and that's a mutation, and... ... if you crank up the background radiation rate, like say around Chernobyl, then the mutation rate rises and...0:05:15There's definitely a random element to that! It's necessary for there to be a random element because... As far as I can tell, the only way you can beat...0:05:24... a random environment, is by producing random changes. ...right, so.. You know the idea, basically, the... The environment isn't some static place that's selecting for higher and higher levels of fitness0:05:37Or not in any-... It's certainly not doing that in any static way. So, it's shifting around randomly And then... You know, you have a structure that's been-...0:05:47Your species has a structure that's a consequence of this immense evolutionary journey. ... and it's moderating itself randomly within certain parameters. The parameters being that most mutations will kill you.0:05:58Alterations in your fundamental form generally tend to kill you, so they're incremental. So the mutations are random, and they match -- hopefully -- ...they match the randomness in the environmental shift, so you can more or less keep up that way.0:06:10But then there's additional complicating factors, and they're not trivial. ... and one of them is what ever epigenetics does. We don't know anything about that yet. But the second one is sexual selection.0:06:20And sexual selection is no joke! It could be the primary thing- Certainly one of the primary things that has driven human evolution. And I think you can say that...0:06:32You think about the environment... Again, let's think about the environment. So... You have a dominance hierarchy. And that's really an old structure, ... the dominance hierarchy.0:06:41...it's three hundred million years old. Because it emerged, pretty much, whenever there was... Whenever there was an emergent nervous system ... and whenever animals had occupied the same territory...0:06:51...they automatically organized themselves into something approximating a dominance hierarchy. So... It's a very, very, very, very old structure. It's older than trees! It's older than flowers!0:07:01It's OLD! And, as far as "real" goes, from a Darwinian sense: Permanent is real! You can say, you know, our arboreal ancestors adapted themselves to trees...0:07:15So, the tree was around long enough to be a feature of the environment. But the dominance hierarchy has been around a lot longer than trees. And you can think of the dominance hierarchy both as an adaptation to the environment...0:07:27- because you'd kinda of think about the dominance hierarchy as a cultural construct... ... but if a cultural construct lasts long enough, then it becomes part of the environment. And, so...0:07:36The dominance hierarchy is part of the environment. And what seems to happen... ... roughly speaking... ... and this is an over simplification, but we'll go with it... Males have a dominance hierarchy0:07:47And there's a relatively small number of males that are relatively successful And those successful males have preferential access... ... to female reproductive capacity.0:07:57Either because the females actively choose the... ... the more dominant males, which is very, very common... ... or because the more dominant males chase all the less dominant males away, so that...0:08:09... even if the females don't exercise choice, which they often do, then the only... ... males left around, that can serve as reasonable mating partners, are the more powerful ones.0:08:21And so, you think, you've got two really radical... ... determiners of evolution as a consequence of that; One is that... ... each...0:08:30I'm not talking about female dominance hierarchies at the moment. I can talk about them, but... That's why this is an oversimplification, but... What happens is that... The males obviously are selected for their ability to move up dominance hierarchies.0:08:42Obviously! Because the ones that are at the top of the dominance hierarchy reproduce preferentially... So that means the male dominance hierarchy becomes a method of selection.0:08:52But then... Allied with that is the female proclivity for choice on whatever dimension... ...the dominance hierarchy happens to be arranged.0:09:01So then female sexual selection also becomes a radical... [ehm...] Non-random selector. ... of... ... of...0:09:10... of... ... what... ... what genetic material is going to move into the next generation. So, I fail to see how any of that can be separated from the emergence ...0:09:19... of complex nervous systems and mind, over the course of evolution. Because people aren't-... Creatures aren't making random choices. They're not random at all!0:09:28So... We even know such things like-... Imagine a peacocks tail. ... you know... It's covered with eyes, which is quite interesting... ... because eyes, of course, attract attention. And lot's of animals have evolved eye-like markings.0:09:41Like moths: There are moth's that, when they unfold their wings, they have two big eyes on the back of them... ... and that's to keep birds from eating them, right. Because the birds don't like being stared at. ... so they stay away from the moths.0:09:50A peacocks tail is nothing but eyes! So it's very attractive, and it shimmers, and... ... there's something about it that's beautiful, which is quite interesting too... The females have obviously been selecting the male peacocks for beauty;0:10:02They have this insane tail! Well, so... The evolutionary biologists have thought: "Well, what possible utility could that tail be?" Is it just: maybe the females got fixated on tail, so to speak, and..0:10:15You know, you've got a Baldwin effect loop going there... ... and the male peacocks just got bigger and bigger tails ... and it's just like an evolutionary dead end. You know, it's a positive feedback system that's gone out of control0:10:26But they have done things that look at... The symmetry and breadth, say, ... Or the symmetry and size... ... and the overall quality of the male peacocks tail...0:10:36... as a marker for physical health. Reduce parasite load, for example And it does turn out that the healthier male peacocks have better tail display.0:10:45and so what female seems to be doing is using some marker or some set of markers as a proxy indicator for for health.0:10:54And I think, I think you could say with reasonable ... You could say reasonable... ... reasonably that female ...human beings do the same to the male human beings.0:11:04And there's some of that vise versa, too. Like we evaluate each other for example, for symmetry, which is one of the element of beauty, because healthier people tend to be more symmetrical and0:11:13lots of animals use symmetry: Butterflies. If- Butterflies won't mate with another butterfly if it deviates from symmetry by the tiniest amounts. You can imagine.0:11:22So symmetry is a marker. And ... There's other markers, like... ...shoulder width to waist width is one, and... waist width to hip width is another. That's usually what - Males use that to evaluate another females in part.0:11:33So there's a lot of markers of health. Um, but... It also looks to me that the... the data world wide seems to indicate that women -0:11:42So imagine that- Women made across dominant hierarchy and up ,socioeconomically speaking, and on average across cultures women go for men who are four to five years older.0:11:51You know, it varies. In the Scandinavian countries that shrunk a little bit... but not that much. And in other countries it's bigger I would say that depends on some degree on...0:12:00difficulty of establishing economic independence. Right, because in richer countries it's easier to... have enough economic independence if you are a male, to be... to be a useful...0:12:09... participant in the process of having children. Um But, it doesn't matter cross culturally. It's still across and up where men made it across and down0:12:18They don't care about socioeconomic status- doesn't seem to be part of their... selection method... ...generally speaking. So,0:12:27So, I think that part of that is also that the ability of... ...women to select for male health. It's something like that, because- It is not only that...0:12:36because if you are healthy and energetic you are more like to be successful. Because it's hard to be successful if you are ill, obviously. I mean, so... Because the competition's just too high.0:12:46And both- both genders, both sexes... ...select each other for attractiveness, ...both selects for intelligence, ...both selects for personality. Although there are differences there,0:12:56... in terms of what's stressed. but So, So, I think you can derive a couple of things out of this. And this is where I think people are different than...0:13:06...than other animals. Importantly different, is that- So imagine that there's tremendous selection pressure... ...to... ... towards the production, let's say :0:13:16of men who are good at climbing male dominance hierarchies, ... or climbing the male dominance hierarchy. But the thing that so interesting about the people is that We've multiplied our dominace hierarchies.0:13:27You know, if you take an animal that's... ...got a rather static behavioral pattern then there's there is single hierarchy. Elephant seals are good example of that So, elephant seals, the males are absolutely massive.0:13:38They are way, way bigger than females. And they basically have harems, roughly speaking. And they use physical prowess as their marker of...0:13:47status, essentially. And obviously size, is a huge part of that... because otherwise male elephant seals wouldn't be as- They're massive these things. They're absolutely enormous. And so, it's just power.0:13:58.../health, you know. maybe aggression, something like that. It's whatever makes them more, um... ... suitable, ... for the kind of physical combat...0:14:08...that elephant seals engage in. So, And, the degree to its power is associated with dominance status in those sorts of situations seems to be0:14:18associated with the size differential between males and females. So, the more power is an issue with regards to male competence, the larger the males are compared to the females,0:14:28and the more likely, the males are gonna have harem relationships with the females. And you see that a little bit in the human beings, because men are bigger than women. They're not overwhelmingly bigger, that's sexual dimorphism.0:14:39And you know, there's some men that are smaller than some women. But on average men are taller and... ...they have more upper body strength, and so forth. So there is a power element to male competition.0:14:48But it's not as extended as it would be among animals... say, like elephant seals. So in the elephant seal, you see, maybe there is one...0:14:57stable set of traits, that's been selected for that makes the male more likely to reproduce. But human beings, we are very weird creatures, because we are so...0:15:06conceptually flexible. And so what seem to have happened, Maybe- We started... Male started selecting each other for d... , in dominance competition0:15:16for something like cognitive flexibility and and conscientiousness, something like that. So that would be... the ability to abstractly represent the world and then the ability to operate effectively within it,0:15:27to represent yourself socially in a way and then to carry through with that, because that enables people to trust you. So it's something like that. And so, that produced ...0:15:37cortical expansion and then women were selecting men who are good at that and that produces cortical expansion and then there's arms race between women and men0:15:46with regards to intelligence, so the women kept up or they certainly kept up with ... with intelligence as the evolutionary cycle continued.0:15:56But one of the consequences of ... ... selection for ... ... cortical expansion and increased cognitive flexibility was that ...0:16:05...the number of dominance hierarchies that... ... human beings could produce started to multiply. Right? Because there's all sorts of way that you can be successful. There's- You think about how many ways you can be successful in modern culture.0:16:16And you can be successful in dimensions that aren't really even associated with each other. So you can be successful socially, that's what an extrovert would do.0:16:25You could be successful in terms of intimate relationships, that's what an agreeable person would do, a disagreeable person would more successful with regard to competition, a person who's high in neuroticism would be...0:16:36... would be try to protect themselves to establish some sort of security, an open person would be looking for a flexible creative environment. And so there's this multiplicity of ...0:16:46... of ... ... ways that you can establish a dominance hierarchy ... ... and be successful in it. And if you are creative, you can come up with your own damn dominance hierarchy. Which is exactly what you are doing if you are creative. Right?0:16:56You spin up a game, that's your game. And then you make the rules. And that's hard, because if you make a new game with a new rules, it's hard to monetize it.0:17:05But you could be the best playing that game. So that's huge advantage of being creative if you can pull it off. So then you think, well, what's happened among human beings is...0:17:15... the multiplication of the set ... ... of possible dominance hierarchies has become very broad, and then you can say, well what's driving selection now is the ability to be successful across multiple set of dominance hierarchies.0:17:27And that accounts at least in part for our cognitive flexibility. So that's really what a human being is. A human being ... ... is a creature that has high potential for succeeding ...0:17:36... across a very wide range of potential human dominance hierarchies. And so that gives us our transformative phyche. That's the niche that, That's the niche that, we've both produced and occupy.0:17:48And I think it's out of that, that the hero mythology emerges, fundamentally. Because I think what the hero is, the mythological hero... ...is a representation of that part of the phyche...0:17:57...that's particularly good at being successful across sets of dominance hierarchies. That's very, very biological way of thinking about it. And I, I thought about this for a long time.0:18:08I can't see anyway that that just can't be the case. And how else could it work? If we had a fixed behavioral pattern,0:18:17like beavers, you know You are the most successful beaver if you build the best dam. It's like, fine. Then, you know what's going to be selected for. But, that isn't what people are like. And it's also why we're so multi-purposed.0:18:27You know. We have hands. What's a hand for? What's the evolutionary function of a hand? Well, you can't specify that. You could say-0:18:36It's something like- Well a hand is useful for doing a whole bunch of different things with. well And mouth, tongue, same thing. What are words for? Well it's the same thing.0:18:46They're for very, they're for communicating a very wide range of information. It's something like that. So we're, we're these weird general-purpose animals. You know, we're not great at any one thing.0:18:57But, we can swim better than most terrestrial animals, you know, we can run faster than most animals, and we can certainly run longer.0:19:07Like, a human being can run a horse to death over the course of a week. If they're in good shape. So, like we are really good at ... ... being multi-purpose entity. Like a rat, you know.0:19:17They call rats weedy species because they can be... anywhere. They don't have a specific niche like, you know, there's animals down in, in a...0:19:26...the amazon, they're specialized for like, one tree. You know. Or one type of tree, in one tiny little area. That's not what human beings like. We're, We're like cockroaches or rats.0:19:36Which is a nasty comparison, but... we can go anywhere and thrive. And so, And so being particularly good at that,0:19:45being particularly good at being able to go anywhere and thrive, also seems to me to be a canonical element of the hero mythology. So, So, okay, alright.0:19:55Now, I started to introduce all those topics because I was trying to address the issue of how it is that0:20:05we've come to deal with the fact that the things are so complex that we can't deal with them. And so, a huge part of the answer to that is that Darwinian answer.0:20:14So one is, well, you keep up with things you can't keep up with by changing unpredictably. So, here's an example. you know Sometimes if you are driving down the road0:20:24and there's a dear on the road. Maybe you run into it and it'll, instead of jumping out of the way, it sort of jumps randomly. And then you run into it. You think: Well that's a pretty stupid strategy, it's like, ...0:20:34Natural selection at work there, but it turns out that deer jump randomly when wolves are chasing them. Well, why would you do that? Well, because you can't predict it. Right?0:20:43If, If something horrible is after you, acting unpredictably is actually pretty good strategy. And that's basically what mutation does. Means: The horrible thing that's after you,0:20:53always is the rapid transformation of the environment. And the only thing you can possibly do in that case is capitalize on chance. Okay, so that's one thing.0:21:02So that's probably why Darwinian story -I think- has to be right. Because the environment does move unpredictably. And the only way you can keep up with the unpredictable is to generate variance.0:21:15And hope that one of them has drawn the lucky lottery card. But then there's these additional issues, which ... is that we also, we also seem to be tightly selected for...0:21:25...the capacity to cooperate and compete, so that multiplies our cognitive ability, that's a huge part of it. And then, we are also, We also seem to have constructed ourselves, so to speak, ...0:21:36... through sexual choice into this general problem- general purpose problem solving creatures. So we've internalized some of the Darwinian process.0:21:46So, you think, well Most animals will produce a variance of themselves physically. And then most of those variance die. But human beings have0:21:56Built a lands... built a mechanism, let's say... that's like a game engine. I think that's a really good, you know how there are game engines now, that people have devised...0:22:06their computational devises. And you can take a game engine and you can generate games with it. Like computer games. So...0:22:15The game engine is a mechanism for producing games. That's what our brains are like. Our brains are game engines for producing games. So, what happens is that ...0:22:24When you think, you produce an avatar of yourself, ... ...you produce a fictional world in that avatar inhabits, ... and maybe you produce a multiple fictional worlds and multiple avatars,0:22:34that's the you that could be tomorrow, which is what you are doing when you are planning, and you walk the avatar through its potential routes, and those who look good you keep, and those who look bad you kill.0:22:45And so, you can Then you can embody the ideas that you keep and act those out, and hopefully the idea is, when you embody them,0:22:54you are successful and you don't get killed. And so we're select- ... When we've been selecting each other for cognitive prowess, we've been selecting ourselves for the ability to generate avatars ...0:23:06... out of ourselves, and kill them instead of dying. Its unbeleivably brilliant And thats really akin to the human discovery of the future, right,0:23:15the future is a place where variants of you could exist. Its something like that. And other Animals don't seem to be able to do that. So, and we're very sneaky. And it doesnt seem to be working to badly, although we havn't been around for very long right.0:23:29Human beings of our particular sub species, about 150 thousand years, something like that. Which is from an evolutionary time frame its like, its nothing, you know, its 2000 80 year old men.0:23:44Its not very long, if you think about it that way. Ok, so0:23:56What I want to do is draw a relationship between that developmental process, that evolutionary process and the emergence of these underlying motivational systems0:24:07Its something like this, so, go back in time to the emergence of the development of nervous systems So, there's cells that creatures use to0:24:17to, produce motor output and there's cells that creatures use to map the patterns around them onto themselves And so those... thats sensory, thats the sensory layer, so to speak. Imagine.0:24:30Sensory Layer Nervous Layer Motor Layer In simpler animals you just have sensory motor cells. Then they diversify.0:24:40Sensory Layer. Nervous Layer Motor Layer. In fact thats actually what you consist of when you are first developing in utero. After the blastocyte stage when the cells differentiate.0:24:50Thats the differentiation, sensory layer, nervous layer, motor layer. So you think, theres a sensory layer Now what's that sensory layer doing?0:25:01Think about the world as consists, consisting of patterns. Of all sorts... like maybe theres an animal in the ocean and its being subjected to wave motion.0:25:10And so, Its sensory systems map the wave motion onto the motor output so, if you look at a sponge for example, sponges are good examples cause they're sort of half uni-cellular animals and half multi-cellular animals0:25:21You can take a sponge and run it though a collander and seperate it out into cells In say, salt water, and it'll assemble itself back into a sponge.0:25:31So its sorta at the, yeah, amazing eh! Its kinda what you do in utero. The cells somehow know enough to communicate with one another to organise themselves into an organism.0:25:44Its unbeleivable. We have no idea how people do that because When your in the initial form, the blastocyte form all those cells are identical, genetically and all of a sudden they differentiate and they move to the places they are suposed to go0:25:55we have no idea how that how the hell can that happen? These cells are all identical except for their position so they are obviously communicating with one another in some unbeleivably complicated way0:26:07and saying, well you're this sort of cell and you're going to differentiate that way god only knows but anyway, sponges can do this... now0:26:16a sponge isnt complicated enough to have the sensory layer and the nervous layer and the motor layer its just sensory motor cells if I remember correctly, but what the sponge is trying to figure out is..0:26:27It wants to get water through its pores inside because that's how it eats and so There's wave motion constantly and so what's happening is that the wave motion is a pattern and the sponge is reacting to that in a patterned way0:37:12Nothing like an error to make you conscious Then you do a high resolution analysis of the space in which the error e merged. You rematch your motor output, your perceptions and all of that0:37:23to make that error go away and away you go And so your consciousness is continually Your consciousness seems to continually building your unconscious0:37:33Your procedural unconscious And so to some degree the purpose of consciousness is to make you functional unconsciously Right? Because that's way better0:37:42You don't want to be conscious of most things because it's just...what are you gonna do, be conscious of your digestive processes? It's like, "no." If your good at something0:37:51you hardly have to be conscious of it at all So consciousness is something like an error detection and rectification system. Something like that. And so you could say, well you could practice being conscious0:38:02because what that means in some sense is you're always attending to your errors and that seems to be a really intelligent thing to do-- if you don't take it too far and collapse yourself0:38:11because if you're always attending to your errors you're always improving your automated adaptability Something like that, right? Pay attention! See if things are working out the way that you want them to0:38:22and if they're not modify your approach, your perceptions so you conserve these systems0:38:31and system emerges to solve the problems of emergent complexity and you end up at birth with all of these conserved systems so those would be proclavities that would enable you to..0:38:43manifest necessary realm of behaviours in social, natural human environment something like that... so you are basically prepared for that.0:38:52and i told you.... ah.. we went through what those were last time and.. and you can break them down into self maintanence motivations and self propagation motivations.. something like that0:39:02so now okay the question is how do those manifest themselves? and that's where we get.. that's where we can make a shift ..say from evolutionary ideas and biological ideas to narrative ideas.0:39:16so i made the case for you that you exist within this thing.. I never figured out exactly what to call it because you can call it a game or you can call it a frame of reference0:39:26it's a pretty good one or you can call it a story or you can call it unitive perception and that's not exactly right because it's more than perception0:39:35it's really.. what it is a micro personality it's your personality as it manifests itself0:39:44at the highest possible resolutions. That's what this is. and so.. if I am say I set myself to the task of moving those keys from there to here0:39:55so my perceptual frame is it's this thing.. i think well what's the world0:40:04everything else can be ignored I need to make an object out of my hand these keys that tiny spot on the table0:40:15and my goal is to transform this pattern into that pattern0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 07: Images of Story & Metastory
0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 08: Neuropsychology of Symbolic Representation
0:00:000:00:12So one of the propositions that I? Set forth for you last week was that the most real Things are0:00:23the things that are most permanent across time and and that Manifests themselves in the largest number of situations and those are the things that you have to map successfully in order to survive0:00:36survive of individuals that survive as a species over a very long period Of time and so the question is one question is what are the0:00:46constants of experience if you are a follower of the Evolutionary Psychologists and to some degree the evolutionary biologist, but I would say more the psychologists0:01:01like to be in close Metis They have a very afro centric view of Human evolution and the idea basically is that0:01:14After we diverged from the common ancestor between Chimpanzees Bonobos and human beings We spent a tremendous amount of time in the african environment0:01:26Mostly on the veldt although. We're not absolutely certain about that We're also very good in water human beings and we have some of the features of aquatic mammals0:01:37so while hairlessness being one of them Women have a subcutaneously They are fat or feeder quite nicely adapted for swimming and so buckminster fuller who I wouldn't call a mainstream0:01:50evolutionary psychologist Hypothesized back in the 70s that we spent some period of time in our evolutionary history living on beaches near the ocean0:01:59That idea really Echoes for me because we like beaches a lot, and it's a great place if you want to get easy food And we're pretty damn good at swimming for for Terrestrial mammals0:02:11And we are hairless And we do cry salt tears and there's a lot of evidence that we and our feet if you think about our feet They're quite flipper like I know we are stand up and all that and walk, so that's part of the adaptation0:02:22But we're pretty good at swimming so anyways The classical evolutionary psychology view is that we spent most of our time on the African veldt?0:02:32It in the critical period of our evolutionary development let's say after we diverged from this common ancestor, and that were adapted for that environment and one of the0:02:43consequences of that is the idea that we're that things have changed so much around us that we're really not adapted to the environment that we're in anymore, and I really believe that because I think that the idea that the0:02:56primary Forces that shaped our evolution shaped them during that period of time call it A Roughly a seven million period Year period of time something like that and0:03:08That that was somehow a special time for human evolution that set our nature. I don't believe that0:03:17I mean, it's true to some degree, but it's more useful to view the evolution of human cognitive processes over the entire span of0:03:26Evolutionary history and not necessarily give preference to any particular Epoch and I certainly believe that the idea that we're no longer adapted to the environment because of our rapid technological0:03:38Transformations is simply not true and the reason. I think that it's not true is because the fundamental constants of the Environment let's say or it's more of the fundamental constants constituent elements of being I think that's the right way to think about it0:03:50They're the same they haven't changed a bit and there is no way of changing them as far as I can tell without us being radically and0:04:00Incomprehensibly different than we are and you know with with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and robotics and all of that It's certainly possible then in five hundred years will be completely0:04:11Will be so like unlike the way we are now that we won't even be the same creatures I don't think that's a particularly great outcome, but it's certainly possible. So what are the fundamental?0:04:22constituent Elements Well, they're expressed in mythology, but they're not merely symbolic. I think it's the wrong way to think about it They're symbolic, but they reflect a very deep reality and they actually reflect a reality that's not easily apprehensible0:04:36Directly by the senses now your senses are tuned for a particular duration That's roughly excuse me0:04:48That's roughly the duration that you live let's say But more importantly it's the duration whatever that duration is across which meaningful actions take place0:04:57And we kind of have some idea of what that duration is. You know if you look at a computer screen if it has a Refresh rate of less than 60 Hertz you can see it's liquor abut above 60 Hertz you can't its uniform and with movies0:05:12Anywhere between 20 and 50 frames a second is enough to give you the illusion of continual motion so you know we live in a universe that's Above the tenth of a second domain or maybe the hundredth of a second somewhere in there anyways0:05:25And I mean it's not like time isn't almost infinitely subdivide At higher levels of resolution than that, but we don't operate generally speaking at higher temporary0:05:44A something approximating 1/2 a second to a second you know I mean, it's an estimate obviously but a second is a meaningful unit of time for a person and a hundredth of a second really isn't and certainly a billionth of a second isn't and then0:05:57You know we can think across hours and days and weeks and months But we really can't once you start getting out in two years it gets kind of sketchy and it's hard to think more than five0:06:07Years down the road and the reason for that is that the particulars upon which you're basing your predictions are likely to change Sufficiently over a five year period So that extending out your vision past that just exposes you to accelerating error0:06:21Right and that and of course that's the problem with predicting the future period So we live in a time range That's about say a tenth of a second to three three years something like that now0:06:30I know it can expand Beyond up But that's that's kind of where we're set and our senses seem to be tuned to those durations and and to be Operative so that we make proper0:06:41Decisions within those durations and and also from from a particular spatial position and so forth you know Your eyes see what's roughly0:06:52Maybe we could say a walkable distance in front of you something like that, so Then you get detect things and in the locale that enables you to immediately interact with things0:07:03But it isn't necessarily the case that senses that are tuned to do that are Also tuned to inform you directly about what the most permanent things about being itself are I think that those things have to be?0:07:15Inferred and there's some there's some supporting evidence for that kind of thing from from pSycholinguistics0:07:24there's a level of categorization that we seem to Manifest more or less automatically or implicitly so for example when children perceive?0:07:35Animals they they perceive at the level of cat or dog They don't they don't perceive at the level of subspecies like siamese cat or or?0:07:45Or or let's say samoyed you know there's this. There's a natural I can't remember what they call that base category something like that it's usually specified by very short words that are easily learn about and so the0:07:57Linguistic system seems to map right on to the to the object recognition Characteristics of the Sensory systems that are built right into it and and if they weren't built into it0:08:08We couldn't communicate easily because our natural categories. I think that's it, but it's probably wrong our natural categories They have to be the same for every one or it would be very difficult for us to communicate, okay?0:08:19So having said all that then the question is Well, what are the most? What are the most real categories? and I think there's there's a real division in ways to think about this because there's a scientific way of thinking about it and0:08:34And in in that case the most real categories are well mathematical equations certainly seem to be and in the top category there that equations that describe the0:08:45physical universe, but then then the hypothesis of the existence of such things as protons and and electrons, and you know that the material elements that make up everything that's every element of being the0:09:00possible exception of empty space But in the in the mythological world the categories, I think are more derived from Darwinian0:09:12by the effect of Darwinian processes on cognitive and perceptual function So which is to say that we have learned to perceive and then to infer those things that are most necessary?0:09:22For us in order to continue our existence Propagate live well all of those things and that would be true at the level of individual survival And maybe it's also true at the level of Growth survival although0:09:33You know the there's a tremendous debate among evolutionary biologists about whether or not selection can take place at the level of the group0:09:42Anyways there are these basic level categories that manifest themselves to you and then there's categories of the imagination that you have to infer up from the sensory domain and we do that partly in Science by0:09:54Comparing our sensory representations across people But we also do it by thinking abstractly conceptualizing abstractly And you know one of the things that's interesting about0:10:04Abstractions is it's not clear whether they're more or less real than the things they're abstracted from you know that this is a perennial debate among let's call them ontology who are0:10:14interested in that fundamental fundamental nature of reality itself in some sense independent of Conceptual structures are numbers more or less real than the things they represent it's a really hard question to answer because0:10:29Knowing like using numbers as a representational system gives you unbelievable power And there are mathematicians that believe that there isn't anything more real than mathematical0:10:38Representations now it depends to some degree of course on how you classify reality. That's the problem with the question like is a Equivalent to be the answer that always is well it depends on how you define a and it depends on how you define b0:10:52So generally it's not a very useful question, but you can still get the point that there's something very real about abstraction Incredibly real because otherwise why would you bother with them they wouldn't give you any handle on the world?0:11:04So what's the what's the most useful or what's the most? What's the broadest possible level of abstraction and is there any use of?0:11:13any utility in thinking in that manner and I tried to make the case last time that that in the Mythological world there are three categories or four depending on what you do with the strange fourth Category?0:11:26There's a fourth category sort of the category of on categories able entities and So it's sort of the category of everything that not only do you not know but you don't know you don't know it's it's or0:11:37You can think about it as the category of potential. I actually think that's the best way to think about it Is that it's the dragon of Chaos is the category of potential, and I do believe that0:11:48Where our materialist view is essentially wrong? I think that the proper way of looking at the at being is that being is? Potential and from that potential whatever consciousness is extracts out the reality that we inhabit anyways0:12:02that's certainly the mythological Viewpoint and and But it's not just a mythological Viewpoint. It's a it's a sequence of ideas for example that deeply underlies the thinking of young piaget and piaget by the way0:12:15it was very interested in reconciling the gap between religion and science that's really what he devoted his life to doing and So and there are other streams of philosophy and I would say heidegger the phenomenologist are are0:12:27Thinking along lines that are similar to this as well because heidegger was concerned not with the nature of material reality but with being as such and and and0:12:36so You can extract out the viewpoint that I just described from from Mythology, but it isn't the only source of such What would you call it?0:12:46Hi hypotheses is probably the right idea so the idea you can think about this as a bootstrapping process in some senses in order for anything to get going it has to bootstrap itself up and0:13:00Become more and more complex as it does that so it's it's like This is the answer to the chicken and egg problem Right which was first the chicken or the egg well neither0:13:09Something from which both the chicken and egg were derived right because the the ultimate The ultimate answer to that is the answer to how there are things at all who knows but at some point there were neither chickens nor eggs, but there were the things that were the precursors to those things and so they0:13:25spiraled upwards in some sense and those in the initial proto anta tease single celled animals for I Mean you can go back farther than that, but we could say well, single-cell animal is differentiated over time right, and there's this0:13:39Looping process that that differentiates out into both the chicken and the egg so but what the question is what do you need in order for that process to begin and0:13:50That's really the question of what the fundamental constituent elements of reality are and the mythological hypothesis. Is that there's or three or four? One is the fact that there has to be something that that that that manifests itself as an observer0:14:05It's something like that some kind of observer now where that process of observation Starts in the Phylogenetic chain is very very difficult to tell you know we might say well. There's certainly nothing0:14:17Of a conscious observer until there's a differentiated nervous system But then prior to the emergence of differentiated nervous systems there were Animals that were complex enough to react with the environment in a manner that well single-celled animals. They're quite complex0:14:31I mean some of them are unbelievably complicated. You know they can move themselves through space they can orient they can follow chemical trails They're not they're not stupid by any stretch of the imagination0:14:41now to what degree They have being you know as something they could represent well. We don't have to speculate on that, but the proto elements of0:14:52Conscious being are there so you need you need a being you need? that the structure of that being through which the0:15:02The entirety of being itself is interpreted and you need The surround it's something like that and so I conceptualize that as something that knows that's the knower0:15:13what it knows that's the interpretive structure and that which needs to be known or you could could conceptualize that as the0:15:22individual in explored territory nested inside unexplored territory That's another way of thinking about it or you can think about it as the individual0:15:33Inside culture and the individual culture has nested inside nature that's another way of looking at it, or you can think of it but as the knower and in order surrounded by Chaos0:15:44That's another way of thinking about it, but all these things you know, they're all attempts to Articulate the same underlying structure you see that in narratives continually0:15:54And I think pinocchio is a very good example of that because in pinocchio you have the culture, that's Geppetto and Geppetto is obviously creative, but also0:16:04insufficient and dead Which is why he ends up in the belly of the whale you have the blue fairy whose mother Nature for all intents and purposes the Negative feminine doesn't manifest itself much in the pinocchio story except implicitly in the form of the whale the thing at the bottom that0:16:19which is more like the dragon of Chaos than something feminine that swallows up the swallows Up culture, but you have Nature or culture Geppetto Nature the blue Fairy and then the puppet pinocchio and0:16:33You know from a strictly scientific perspective. We think of human beings as nothing, but the children of nature and culture and that Pushes You Towards a kind of deterministic view what causes your behavior?0:16:45Well, it's either nature or culture because there isn't anything else But that isn't how the mythological story lays itself out because it says there is something else And that's whatever your consciousness is and that consciousness seems to be able to work with nature and culture in a non0:16:59deterministic Manner in order to bring Well in order for what? In order to bring itself forward I mean and that's really and what's interesting about that0:17:12I think is that it isn't obviously just the plot of pinocchio It's virtually the plot of any story is the story of the development of the individual now the Story is0:17:22order Chaos Higher order Roughly speaking so you can get variants of that you can get order collapses into disorder and nothing is0:17:32Resolved that's a tragedy right and and you can get so so you don't have to have the entire story Represented in this story, but you get fragments of it0:17:42It's a classic u-shaped story And what it is is the story of the development of the individual across time as a consequence of his or her? adventures in time and space and every story is exactly that and0:17:55Those are representations of the manner in which you come to be in the world for better or for worse It's differentiated so the individual has a negative and a pause development and culture has a negative and a positive0:18:08Element the Nature does as well and that makes the potential for plots much broader but and I think it's also very useful to know that entire story because I think it's one of the things that protects you against0:18:20Ideology it's like okay Where if someone tells you a political story or a story of any sort you can always ask well? Where are the missing characters human beings are terrible?0:18:29They directed a culture that's destroying the planet and nature is been if you know benevolent and and pristine It's like yeah fair enough accurate, but you missing half the characters0:18:40Because humans are not just terrible rapacious creatures and culture is not just a destructive force and nature is by no means on our side, so0:18:49Where's the missing characters you need all the characters in the representation to get it right? And I really believe this to be true. So for example0:18:58If you want to protect yourself against trauma as you move forward in life You have to be very aware of the three three negative characters you have to know that the human individual has an adversarial element0:19:09That's malevolent right to the core and if you don't know that and you run across someone who's malevolent you will end up damaged So because first you won't be able to defend yourself0:19:19You'll just be like a ripe fruit tree for the plucking and second the mere existence of someone like that will pose such a threat to the way that you've organized the world that it might collapse on you that happens to people all the0:19:31Time so it really matters whether you know these categories and it matters that you know that culture can become Tyrannical it really But that it's also you're the father that's given you everything and it matters that you know0:19:41Everything good comes from nature and that we need to live in harmony with Nature to some degree But that it's also hell bent on our destruction Every second and it's very paradoxical0:19:51It's a hard thing to reconcile with with with a with a thought structure like modern science That's based on a strict logic that always says something can't be itself and it's opposite at the same time0:20:02But you know human beings can certainly be something and it's opposite at the same time and anything truly complex can have the0:20:11And does have that nature if someone offers you a new job you think well? That's positive. It's like no, it's not It's positive and negative and complex it might be the solution to your problem, but at the same set time0:20:23It's going to generate a whole host of other problems so lots of times We're encountering entities in some sense that have an internally paradoxical structure and we have to deal with that entire set of0:20:35Paradoxes or or we don't survive it's really a matter of survival okay, so So on and then you know there's this overarching symbol which is the dragon of Chaos which is potential itself0:20:47and it's the potential from which all of these categories Emerge and so the The most abstract category of our imagination is that which is beyond our understanding the category of that which is Beyond our understanding?0:21:01and that seems to me to be represented because we can only use the representational structures that we evolved is that it's0:21:10represented in our paradoxical representation of the predator and the treasure that lies Beyond the perimeter is the perimeters of our safe0:21:20Societies, so what's out there Beyond well? We don't know, but we need to know because we need always to deal with what we don't know so weirdly enough We have to come up with a category of what we don't know in order to start formalizing a theory about how we might0:21:35Progress towards it and interact with it. It's a very paradoxical idea, and there's a paradoxical answer, right? It's the terrible predator that lurks in the unknown that also harbors something of great value0:21:46perfect Perfect that's exactly right that's exactly right and and I think that that is a reflection of the fact that human beings are Predator animal and prey animals at the same time so what's out there in the terrible darkness something that can destroy you?0:22:02But also something that you absolutely need so how do you how do you? Prepare yourself for that, and that's the ultimate question of life It's not how do you deal with death although death is a sub component of the terrible unknown I would say it's how do you0:22:15Deal with that which is Beyond your understanding which is constantly Manifesting itself in the world and that and that manifests itself every time you0:22:24categorize something and the thing escapes from the category and that happens most interpersonal relationships because people are so damn complicated you get them figured out boxed in you can make a0:22:34Contract that neither of you will jump outside the box, but you jump outside the box continually And that's why a relationship requires constant negotiation and reconceptualize ation because you do not exhaust the person with your perceptual categories and0:22:49Of course you don't exhaust the world with your perceptual categories ever This is partly. Why the Existentialist, or they have this concept called alienation and the idea was that human beings become alienated from their creative products?0:23:02so and that is and here's why it happens, so Imagine Henry Ford makes the assembly line right so ford has no idea what's going to happen when he makes the assembly line like because he's0:23:13Just trying to figure out a fast way to make cars or he thinks that what he's making his cars So he thinks he's making an assembly line for cars, and he thinks he's making cars, and you think well0:23:23What's wrong with that? Well first of all the assembly line absolutely? Transformed the entire planet right because it Brought in that the era of mass cheap manufacturing. It's like0:23:33It's just it was way more than he thought it was and then did he make a car well a car is something that Hypothetically takes you relatively effectively from point a to point b. It was really a replacement for the horse and buggy0:23:47I mean if the first cars looked like that they were horseless carriages well Did he make a car well God it's God it's hard to tell what Henry ford made0:23:56He made a very effective way for transforming the atmosphere, right? And the fact that it also happened to take you from point a to point B might be just completely irrelevant0:24:05compared to the fact that it was the internal combustion engine and its rapid distribution completely changed the Constituent that you know the fundamental0:24:14Chemical structure of the atmosphere itself it Completely transformed cities it Blew out the rural community everyone moved to the cities right it made all the cities built around the automobile0:24:26But then it had this tremendous political and economic significance, too So I mean part of the reason that because you think well is A car is a way to get from point a to point B. But no no it's not a machine0:24:38It's also the embodiment of an idea. It's a very strange idea a collectivist society would have never invented the car because the car is predicated on the idea that you could own a0:24:49Conveyance that would get only you and only you from somewhere to somewhere else without ever asking anybody for any permission and So the funny thing is is when you build something like that those presuppositions are built into it0:25:02and then when you export that say to soviet Russia You don't get to they can't just take the car and leave the political implications behind The car the foot Mere fact that you stepped into one and drive it is an indication that you're accepting the political ideological0:25:19Presuppositions that are part of the fact that that thing even exists and so well that's alienation, it's like Even something you make you think well you have control over what you make because you've made it you understand0:25:32It's like no, you don't you understand a tiny fraction of it you launch it out in the world man And the snakes inside of it the hydra Xinhai inside of it multiply their heads massively0:25:42Constantly and you can you can't really keep track of it and so So even even in your relationship with create identities. You still see the re-emergence of this underlying0:25:54Fundamental sub structure right even inside it's the it's the garden of eden there's always a snake inside the thing this wall did always Always all even God himself could not get rid of the snakes in the garden and partly what that means is that?0:26:08You know the garden is a conceptual system. It's the conceptual system within which people Exist that Eden is a is a walled Garden Paradise means walled Garden0:26:17And it's walls because a walled garden is where people live because the wall is culture and the garden is nature And we always live in a structure that's an amalgam of nature and culture so we set it up0:26:28So it's paradisal as long as we're unconscious But we can't manage it because there's always something Chaotic that's coming in that we will interact with that's human beings you put a snake in the garden. It's the first bloody thing0:26:39We're going to talk to and for better, or worse. It makes us conscious and awake It makes us aware of our mortality It does all sorts of terrible things to us, but it doesn't matter because that's that's the path that human beings have what chosen?0:26:53Because that's the implication in that story and and it's very difficult. It's a very difficult thing to answer because We certainly choose each other for self-awareness and consciousness and intelligence, and I don't you know if you're if you're choosing a mate0:27:10There's an arms race in human beings. We're choosing intelligent mate, especially that's especially the case for women in relationship to men, so0:27:19So that the idea is that that's a choice Well, that's partly why it's Eva that makes Adam self-conscious in the garden of Eden right she offers him the apple She's the one that makes him self-conscious. I think that's actually accurate because the evidence from the evolutionary biologist0:27:32Is that human sexual females sexual selection was one of the driving factors that differentiated us for Chimpanzees? It's a major factor0:27:41Chimpanzee females are not selective Mater's they go into Estrus. They'll mate with anything What happens is the dominant Males Chase the Subordinate males away? And so they end up leaving more offspring0:27:52but it's not a consequence of selection on the part of the females and human beings it's completely different concealed ovulation and Intense selection pressure from women on men you have twice as many female ancestors as you have male ancestors0:28:05People can never have a hard time working that oh, there is medically, but it's not that Problematic you just think on average every woman had one child0:28:14half of men had none and the other half had two and That's approximately correct if you average across the entire history of human sexuality0:28:23So human males in particular are subject to vicious selection pressure on the part of females And I also think that's partly why nature is represented0:28:34Symbolically as female among human beings because after all nature is what selects There's no better definition of Nature than that which selects0:28:44so now so so here's here's what I want to talk to you about the brain a little bit because if you make the radical case let's say that these are actually the categories of reality and0:28:55We're going to say well reality is what select for the for the sake of for this for the sake of argument? then the then are our neurological struck our physical structure should be adapted to that reality it's it's a0:29:10necessary conclusion from that So then the question is well are they and as far as I can tell the answer to that is yes? and so we'll go through the0:29:20What would Neuro psychological evidence quite rapidly the first bit of evidence? Is that you have two hemispheres? Why? One deals with unknown and the other deals with the known that's Alcona and goldberg. That's that0:29:33hypothesize completely independently of any of this underlying mythological substructure which is really important thing to note because if You're trying to determine whether or not something is true valid if it's the construct upon. Which you base your thinking are0:29:47valid and true There's rules for doing that and one of the rules is you have to be able to detect the existence of the categories? using multiple methods of of0:29:59What using multiple methods, it's the Multi method Multi trait Matrix, technically speaking It was established as a technique by two psychologists named cronbach, cro0:30:09Nb a ch, and me'll Ma eh L Paul Mele back in the 1950s which pSychologists were trying to figure out? How do you determine if something actually has an existence like anger or anxiety that's something that you could study?0:30:22Scientifically, and the answer is well you have to be able to measure it Multiple ways and all those measurements have to read the same way and then the question is well0:30:31what do you mean by multiple ways because it's sight and vision in sight and hearing different or Somewhat and somewhat to say, but you know you make them as different as you can manage0:30:43Let's say and our sensory systems are quite different smell molecular signature sound is auditory print or you know auditory pressure you need a0:30:53gas around you or some liquid in order for that to occur sight uses light you know we're using different inputs that converge and Allow us to say well if we get convergence information across these multiple measurements, then we'll assume that the thing we're perceiving is real0:31:07We even extend that in science because we say if you take your multiple measurement system And you take your multiple multiple measurement system and then you compare them will only allow what's corn to cross both those comparisons to be real and0:31:21so that's the Multi method multi trait Matrix process essentially and My sense is that you know I think that the pattern that I'm describing to you is manifested itself0:31:33evolutionarily it manifests itself at the neural in the neurological space and it manifests itself in the conceptual space and the probabilities of all three of those things happening at the same time0:31:44without there being something valid there is Lessons with each level of interpretation you managed to stack on top of one another So that's that's the method well, so0:31:55Let's think about the brain a little bit, and I'll tell you a little bit about how the brain works and and0:32:04You know a lot of the stuff. I'm telling you right now is quite Old actually most of it was worked out in the nineteen in the 1980s But it's been remarkably stable as far as I can tell in some sense0:32:14We're filling in the details and not in every sense, but in some sense, we're filling in the details, okay So you take this is from Alexander, Luria who was the the greatest perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist who ever lived?0:32:27He was a russian What worked mostly up to the second world war mostly on people who had brain damage and he was interested in? trying to outline the the0:32:38Overarching picture of brain function, and so he did that partly by looking at its function But also partly by looking at its structure trying to get both of those things working simultaneously0:32:48And so we'll go through a brief picture of how the brain works and so one of the ways of so You can you can look at the brain from front to back and you can divide it roughly into two?0:32:59Sections in one section has to do with sensory processing and that's roughly the back half and one section has to do with motor Output now those things aren't as clearly0:33:09Differentiated as you might think because you there's very little sensation without motor output. Maybe the The part that closest to an exception is smell I would say but you at least have to breathe in0:33:20You know and when an animal is actively searching on a scent trail its breathing in so it's using its motor output constantly to modify the Sensory Stream It's really difficult to dissociate the two it when you're looking at some you know it kind of feels to you like you're a passive0:33:35recipient of sense data But you're no such thing your eyes are moving back and forth in Multiple ways all the time including the ways that you can control voluntarily0:33:46so there's multiple involuntary systems that are moving your eyes in multiple ways and really what you're doing is feeling the the array of Electro-Magnetic of the electromagnetic spectrum with your eyes you're feeling it you're actively exploring if you're not a passive recipient at all0:34:02so even in Sensation you can't purely pull sensation out for motor Processing and say I'm getting untrammeled unbiased sense data because you can't0:34:13Look at something without focusing and you can't focus without wanting to look at something You know you can't just lie there with it. Well you could with your eyes have cross, but you know that's sort of like0:34:26Imagine you dropped a video recorder from an airplane, and it just spun around in an unfocused Manner. Well, that's the world Sampled randomly, you know what are you going to do with that nothing?0:34:36and you know you're you're concentrating on the on on the auditory stream constantly and Segregating out some things and suppressing others like if you listen in the classroom0:34:50you can hear Probably four or five different types of mechanical noise going on at the same time most of the time in the classroom0:35:00That's silent You don't hear it like you don't hear your fridge except when it turns on or off right you zero that out And so you're very selective in your perception0:35:09So you can't really technically separate out motor output from Sensory input And that's really useful to know because it destroys the idea that you're just a pet you know that there's a world of0:35:21Sensation out there, that's imprinting itself on you, and that's how you get your information. Which is really the that's the fundamental Presupposition of the empiricists of the raw empiricists there's a world of sense data out there you sample it randomly0:35:34And that's what informs like yes Except that you're always an active harvester of the information so you can't get rid of the interpretive structure a priori that was a manual cat by the0:35:45Who first established out in his critique of pure reason you can't get away from the fact that you're actively harvesting the data So you can say well where is human structure come from defense data. That's sort of the blank slate idea0:35:57It's like no wrong because a blank slate cannot process information You're actively engaged right at the beginning. So that's another example of the knower and the unknown you know0:36:09Working in the cyclical Manner because you interact with something you divide it up into You you and the world Roughly speaking, and I mean you really make it that way because you build yourself out of the information0:36:22And then of course that makes you a more Differentiated processor with a broader range of skills then you interact with the unknown again you Gather more information It differentiates the world it makes you a more differentiated0:36:34Harvester, and then so it's just continually cycling and that consciousness the logos the knower is that thing that's doing that Harvesting and you can never say it's not there now0:36:46what happens is that it's in its nascent form to begin with Low resolution nascent form Low resolution or Low resolution Category system Low resolution world0:36:56But that's enough to kick started and to started differentiating and that happens as you develop as an individual Because you start out as a single-celled organism for all intents and purposes a very low resolution0:37:10Thing in a very low resolution world and that differentiates itself across time, but exactly the same thing happened over evolutionary time so0:37:19So there isn't a time when those three elements aren't there for all intents and purposes. They're always there They're permanent okay, so anyways back to the brain since sensory unit. That's the that's the0:37:32Back half Roughly speaking huge chunk of that is devoted to visual processing in human beings right most animals Organized around smells not us some what still can smell is a very powerful evoker of memories0:37:46And it has a direct relationship with Emotional systems because you need to know if something is edible or inedible terrible or or good very very rapidly0:37:55But human beings are organized around vision so we have a map of massive amounts of our Cortex devoted to Differentiated visual processing now the motor unit so what you have is each of these little zones here, so for example0:38:09Look at the back here that's the Primary visual area and the Secondary visual area and then this is the primary auditory area in the middle of the brain here on the outside and the secondary auditory area and then the0:38:24the This is for body representation the primary area in the secondary area and you can think about those those areas of primary0:38:33primary Secondary and then tertiary primary does the base level processing tertiary expands that up into more abstract represent a Secondary expands it up into more abstract representations and tertiary are the areas where the senses come together?0:38:47And that's really what what you seem to be most conscious of right? it's action in the tertiary areas because you don't really see the world as a0:38:57Separate you can think about the auditory streams separate from the visual stream and all of that And you can think about touch separately, but you tend to consciously experience things as a unity0:39:09As a comprehensive unity of all the senses simultaneously So consciousness seems to occur only at that most of the time at the highest level of integration And you'll area would have associated consciousness more with the tertiary areas where this where the senses are talking to one another now0:39:24It's more complicated than that because there's obviously subcortical structures all the way down to the spine that are involved heavily in what consciousness is it's not merely a0:39:34consequence of cortical Activity you know we tend to think that because human beings have massively expanded Cortical structures, and we think of ourselves as the most conscious creatures, and that's reasonable0:39:46But you can take an awful lot of cortex off someone and they're still conscious In fact you can leave them with almost no brain at all, and they're still conscious So we really have a rough time trying to figure out what consciousness is and how it's related to brain structure0:40:00so Anyway, so that's the sensory and then the motor unit you have the primary0:40:10Unit the secondary unit and the primo or the prefrontal Cortex and prefrontal Cortex is particularly a huge and human being so imagine that It's this primary and secondary areas that allow you to0:40:22- first of all to Act voluntarily, and then - and then to play around in some sense with your actions you know like Imagine that imagine that you're a child building with legos and you can sync with the legos without without really having to think abstractly0:40:38right because you can play around and build different sorts of structures until you can think at the level at A Level of motor output without having to depend on abstraction0:40:47but if you develop the Prefrontal Cortex here which emerged out of the motor and premotor areas over the course of evolution so it's a0:40:56Differentiation of those structures, so this is dealing with the real world This is dealing mostly with the real world But starting to abstract and experiment a little bit and then this what this part deals with abstractions pure and simple so you0:41:10know I can I can I can lift this and then I can play with lifting it and then I can put it aside and Think about it0:41:19Abstractly I can think about all the different things that I might do with it. I say well, I could throw it I could take it apart. I could throw I could toss it in the air. I could juggle it I could use it as a doorstop right I could kick it across the room and so basically what I'm doing there is I'm0:41:32Using my prefrontal Cortex to generate an abstract Representation of the world and then to plot out motor strategies before implementing them and that's basically what abstract thought is0:41:43very very fundamentally, it's it's it's the hypothesis of abstract action and then the analysis of the outcome and then the implementation into action and0:41:55I think that there's something about that that actually defines the difference between intelligence and conscientiousness Because weirdly enough you know the correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness is zero0:42:08No relationship whatsoever. It's quite strange because conscientious people plan and and so forth but I think what it is is that?0:42:17intelligence is an indicator of the effectiveness of abstraction and Conscientiousness is an indicator of the probability of implementation, and those are very very different problems0:42:27And you don't just go from abstraction to implementation because if you did you wouldn't be able to think right the thinking has to be Torn away from the implementation, or what you're doing isn't thinking it's just acting0:42:40So and so I think that accounts for the psychometric independence of those two phenomena It's annoying because you can think of something that you should do, and you won't do it because there's no deterministic0:42:53causal pathway from the conception to the action so that's kind of annoying it seems to take something like willpower in order to Transform the abstraction into an implementation and0:43:05We don't understand that very well it's easy to understand the resistance to doing it because Moke the default position of your body should be something like no it never do anything0:43:16except eat, you know because Doing something requires the expenditure of energy and resources and so unless you have a really good rationale for it0:43:25You should probably not do it and so the body is sort of Intransigent by Nature it's an oversimplification. You have to come up with a good reason to impel it into motion and you should because0:43:37You have to pay for action you have to pay for it with energy and resources, so there should be resistance against it but it's still annoying so ok so that's one way of thinking about the world the world something to sense and0:43:49the world something to act upon and so the brain has fundamental divisions of Sensing and acting upon, but there, it's a constantly interacting loop. You. Can't separate them really0:44:01Any more than we are separating them conceptually now on the Motor strip0:44:13here The body is represented and this was discovered at the Montreal neurological institute0:44:23When when when brain surgery was been doing was being done on on on people generally who had epilepsy or some other? Terrible Brain illness0:44:32You have brain surgery when you're awake Which is a rather horrifying thing to know about but the reason for that generally speaking is so that?0:44:42Something isn't taken out that you need Now one of the things that happened while people were having brain surgery done, and this would have been I believe I0:44:51Don't remember the exact time between the 30s and the 50s, I believe And I think it was hab if I remember properly who was one of Canada's great neuropsychologist?0:45:03We do brain stimulation while people were having brain surgery and they could map out the way the body was Represented on the cortical surface, and so you imagine. There's two representations. There's there's a0:45:15Sensory representation of your body on the cortical Surface, and there's a motor Representation of your body on the cortical surface those are both called the representations are called homunculus0:45:25They're like the body has been laid out on this strange strip, or this strip of tissue you can look up the homunculi and see what they're like, but I'll show you uh0:45:34They're sort of stretched out weirdly along here That would be the motor one and then along here that would be the sensory one and you can kind of0:45:47you can kind of detect with your own consciousness how your body is represented in your brain, so For example can I get you to stand up if you would?0:45:58Let's turn around Okay, so how many fingers on your back? Okay, all right. Why low resolution. He's like a rope on the honor. His back is like a low resolution0:46:14Array of pixels right and so it's virtually impossible. You just don't have enough Sensory tissue on your back to make that you could tell I was pushing But it could have been a bath it could have been five fingers. It doesn't matter0:46:26maybe your pixel is this big or something like that right and so, but if I put a Finger on your lip like that man. You've got it right now or on your tongue because your tongue0:46:38there's more representative representation of your tongue than your entire trunk and Well, why well you don't to bite your tongue? That's a big problem. You have to be able to talk you0:46:49You want to really differentiate what you're eating if you're eating fish? You don't want to eat the bone so and you know when your tongue is unbelievably crazily sensitive, and you know that to that if you have a tooth pulled0:47:03Your tongue will investigate that area for like six months what you're sitting there your attention Wanes and your tongue is in there like mapping like mad mapping that little hole to update your body representation, right?0:47:15And it's just this crazy thing that is unbelievably well Represented set from the sensory perspective and also from the motor perspective because you could manipulate your tongue like crazy. It's it's like a0:47:28quarter of your motor output system is devoted to tongue manipulation, right and so here's a Here's a picture of the homunculus, this is a motor homunculus0:47:40So that's how that's what your brain thinks of your body that that's a good way of thinking about it And so that's what a human being is like in terms of his or her Output and so what you see if you look at a sensory homunculus, it's quite similar except the feet are bigger the genitalia are bigger0:47:55Logically they don't have much motor utility but they have a lot of sensory utility, but the rest of its quite similar So there's you know the motor and the sensory homunculus are quite similar0:48:04But I'm going to talk about the motor homunculus because it's sort of the action Representation well so what are human beings like? well0:48:13We're all hands that's the first thing you know and if you do that There's no, it's unbelievably high resolution your fingertips and and and the and the that sensory0:48:24But we can manipulate our hands like crazy like they're unbelievably articulated, right? And that's the thing that makes us able to change the world it makes us What dolphins aren't and so a huge part of our brain is devoted?0:48:37Towards being able to move our hands that enables us to take things apart put them together And then once we learn to take things apart and put them together We can talk about how we do that0:48:47And that's a lot of what we're doing and that's the hands and the mouth and the tongue Roughly speaking Here's how I took something to get apart Chaos here's what I made out of it order0:48:57Here's how I did it, and then you receive that and you're happy about it, and then you can do the same thing that's invitation0:49:06Facilitated by language like here's what I did with my body. I'm propagating the cross space You're taking it mapping it onto your body now0:49:15You can do the same thing. Yeah And that's you know it might be simple like this is how you pick up a rock? But it might be complicated like here's how you go after the dragon of Chaos0:49:25Right and so that's it sort of maps on to that hierarchy this thing That we talked about in some detail this0:49:34when you're telling a story to people when you're informing them about something you can talk to them at a very high level of Resolution what you do with your child Here's, how you slice up some broccoli right, but then you move up the obstruction0:49:47So here's how you act like a civilized person at the dinner table Right and that's part of being a good person so you can tell stories about I just went and saw logan0:49:56I really like by the way, it's super violent, but I really did like it. It's Got a very elegant mythological structure. Which is not surprising, but0:50:05There's a scene in this logan movie. He It's not a spoiler he has this child with him who has not been I was being raised Roughly in a laboratory and0:50:16She has absolutely no table Manners and so they're sitting at The dinner with some people that they run into and she's you know eating like a total barbarian and of course everybody's0:50:26Eyebrows are raised like where did this person come from so the fact that that high order behavior isn't there is Something that's of extraordinary interest to everyone and so you know you teach your children0:50:40Microstrategy's, and you teach the macro strategies some of the macro strategies you're teaching them you don't even understand Because you know you know the strategies. They're built into you0:50:50Because of an evolutionary process roughly speaking, and you say things like it doesn't matter whether you win Or lose it matters you play the game And you don't understand what that means although you know it's right0:51:00And you try to act that out for your children and they incorporate it in their action even though they can't represent it They cannot come up with a fully articulated0:51:10Representation of what that means and so they're like children piagetian children Children can only play by themselves to begin with while they're integrating themselves internally then they start to play in parallel with other children0:51:22So you'll your - you play your game that child plays his or her game a little interaction, but you can't unite the games then you're0:51:31Between 2 & 4 you start to be able to unite the games and you can either do that by acting them out you can Do this even with the younger child they can catch Peekaboo very rapidly?0:51:40But once you're between 2 & 4 and you start getting linguistic You can start saying well, let's play this game, and that means we're going to unite our attention towards a particular goal0:51:51We're going to unite our motor activity and maybe cooperate and compete towards that goal the beginning of the social structure The beginning of the social structure and you get really good at that between 2 & 4 but you don't necessarily?0:52:04Know what you're doing, you can't say it so PJs experiments indicated that if you take children Maybe they've got to the point where they can play quite a social game0:52:13Maybe they're 5 or 6 they're playing marbles you take them out of the game and you say okay? Tell me the rules of the game of marbles they give incoherent representations0:52:22Why because their behavior is more sophisticated than their? Representation you see as soon as you understand that that is a wild thing to understand because it answers the question for example0:52:34How can you have dreams that tell you things you don't know? You think well how the hell can that possibly be you're coming up with the damn dream? How can the dream tell you things you don't know or?0:52:45analogously, how can people tell stories that contain information that they don't understand an Answer is the information is coded in our behavior okay, so we'll go back to a chimpanzee troop0:52:57All the chimpanzees in the troop know the dominant Hierarchy structure, but if you take a chimpanzee out From the troop and say what's the dominant structure the chimpanzee is going to?0:53:10Do whatever a chimpanzee does it's not going to have a little conversation with you about the nature of the dominant Hierarchy So it can act out its knowledge, and it might even be able to represent it an image0:53:23but it can't articulate it well, why would we be any different we aren't obviously because we're more complex than we understand so the fact that we're more complex than0:53:34We understand means that we contain information that we cannot articulate. Why can't that reveal itself? It does all the time you have a revelation0:53:43Aha, I get it. Well. What is that? It's maybe you're in psychotherapy, and we talk about some things about your past We say well this happened then this hop and then this happened look there's a pattern wow and it's overwhelming. It's like now0:53:57There's a concordance between your knowledge and the things that you're acting out, and that's what comes as a revelation So one of the things that happens in Exodus moses is leading his people through the desert classic u-shaped story0:54:10They're in eternity to begin with right, so that's the that's the insufficient present That's the old order then they cross the water the destructive water. That's Chaos like the flood then they're out in the desert0:54:22Wandering without direction they start worshipping idols. They're wandering without direction and then Moses goes up on the mountain0:54:31Which is by the way, what happens in Logan? Just because if you're going to go see it, you might as well know that because it's a journey up a mountain he goes up the mountain and he gets rules revealed to them well the way the story is structured is just ordinary interesting because0:54:47moses takes his people away from this peer net tyrannical structure, but they don't go from Tyranny to Paradise to the promised land in one move that isn't how it works they have to they go from eternity to0:54:59Absolute Chaos where everyone is fighting and killing each other and having a terrible time of it in half starving and and having to pass Through the red sea like it's they go from Tyranny to catastrophe0:55:11Before they go to higher order and moses doesn't even make it to the place of higher order He dies before he gets there so it's quite the catastrophe and the israelites are all confused when they're out in the desert because0:55:23Even though they were in a tyranny and they were slaves now. They're nowhere, and they don't know anything It's not good and so a lot of them actually start thinking about how good the damn tyranny was0:55:33Compared to wandering around in the desert. Which is exactly what happened in the soviet union right in Russia now. There's huge Nostalgia for the Stalinist, Era So these stories. They're always true. They're always happening0:55:46So anyways what happens to moses is that the story is quite interesting so the israelites start to fight amongst themselves which of course they do because there's no higher order authority and so then moses sits and0:56:00Judges the like literally like a judge He sits for hours every day and the squabbling israelites come up, and say you know he did this to me And oh you did this to me and and so then moses has to figure out who's right and who's wrong0:56:12And he's doing this for like hours and hours for days and days for weeks and weeks for months It's like the origin of English common law it's exactly what happened with common law because in common law what happens is that?0:56:24you have all the rights there are if you to have a dispute you go before the Judiciary you sort out the dispute that becomes the precedent now That's part of the body of laws the body of laws is what you act out. That's why it's a body well0:56:38That's what moses does so he's sitting there making judgments very very finely tuned discreet Moral judgments You know how difficult that is when two people have a dispute to try to figure out how to mediate between that you don't know?0:56:51Who's lying who's telling the truth? You don't know exactly what an acceptable solution would be like it's really ridiculously hard work So he walks through this entire process of continual judicial intermediation then he goes up the mountain and what does he get?0:57:06tablet a rule well, why Well he spent his ten thousand hours Investigating the structure of morality in a practical way, and it goes bang0:57:18This is what we've been doing these are the rules It's not like there's no rules to begin with and those those are opposed because that wouldn't work0:57:27It doesn't work that way you have to take how people are extract out what the pattern of what they are is Reflect that back to the well. That's that's the story of moses, and it's it's it's a myth. It's a meta story0:57:41It's a story about how rules come to be We act a certain way we have certain kinds of expectations We have certain kinds of disputes out of that a pattern a pattern way of being0:57:53Emerges then we map the pattern way of being we say well look here's the rules. There's ten of them Or however many you want to extract right? I mean, it's a moving target in some sense don't kill other people. That's a bad idea0:58:06Don't steal what other people have order your parents, ETc, Etc I mean either you could come up with a different basic set of rules But there'd be some overlap and those aren't bad to begin with course there were far more rules than that0:58:19but those were the central ones and so then you might say Hey, if you took all ten of those rules, and you try to extract out one rule from them0:58:29That would be at the top of the hierarchy what would that be and in western Culture the idea there? Is that do you want others as you would have them do unto you is the rule that0:58:38it's the meta rule that guides all other rules sort of like the one ring in the in the lord of the rings and so it's this consistent Pattern of abstraction of ethical Guidelines, so0:58:50okay, so Well until that maps on - well. There's a there's a micro There's a micro level That you instruct people at and that then there's a more abstract level that you would struck them out0:59:02And then there's a more abstract level well. Maybe at that point you can't exactly Directly instruct them remember in the pinocchio story Geppetto sits pinoke or the cricket Jiminy sits0:59:14Pinocchio down and tries to lecture to him about what the highest level of Moral virtue is he sounds like a complete Fraud he sounds like a propaganda artist. He's a Soapbox0:59:25preacher and Pinocchio doesn't understand them at all why has to be acted out? now maybe as a parent you can be a model for0:59:34Emulation which is so you're a model for imitation what you say matters But it doesn't say as much matter as much as what you do Maybe it would if what you said and what you did were the same0:59:45that's the ideal situation like that's what you want to do if you're a parent if you say one act differently your kids will torture you to death and their right to do it -0:59:54Because you're confused and confusing them makes them anxious and aggressive, and they will go after you Consistency consistency consistency and if you can't provide it, you'll drive them crazy1:00:05So you want to bring your words and your actions into alignment right? And that's part of the development of wisdom so okay, so1:00:14back to the Brain All right, so this is there it's the motor homunculus1:00:23So now what I want to tell you about that is you just just think about what this thing is like It's taking the world apart And it's talking about it1:00:33So that's what a human being is like and that to me that's kind of an image of the mythological hero It's the thing that can speak Magic words and take the worlds apart take the world apart now in one of the stories1:00:45I'm going to tell you today Which is the story of the anu Mulisch which is the oldest written story that we have it's a mesopotamian story And it's from the same pool of stories that the creation account in Genesis was extracted1:00:58It isn't obvious what the temporal sequence was but imagine there was a pool of stories in the middle east that were of indefinite age Tens of thousands of years and and each of them were developed in a slightly different way although the themes underneath were were similar1:01:13There are great parallels between the mesopotamian creation account and the first part of the creation account in Genesis So it was discovered in the late1:01:221900s and isis just destroyed a huge Treasure trove of that sort of manuscripts, so just so you know so at Nineveh1:01:32so we can we can thank the war in the middle east for the destruction of huge a huge treasure house of irreplaceable Human knowledge and a lot of that's happening that's happening very very frequently it's an absolute bloody1:01:46disgraceful Catastrophe, so Anyway, so you know that that's the human being lips tongues hands and the face your face is also extraordinarily1:01:58amenable to Voluntary manipulation so you can learn to move Neurons in the tissue underneath your eyes that's how that's how high-resolution your face is and that's part because it's a broadcast1:02:10Screen, which is why people are always looking at it right? And that's why if you watch a movie It's always concentrating on people's faces because they're just broadcasting what?1:02:20They're broadcasting their stories Constantly and we're looking at their faces. What are you looking at? What are your eyes pointing at? What are you up to? What's your emotional expression? What are you going to do next? What do you think about me? Where are you going? And you're?1:02:33Brought like you find someone who has had too much plastic surgery uncanny Because their face is dead because you cannot tell what they're up to there. They've got this is aam. Be like aspect1:02:43That's terrifying and people like that. Look people like that got killed That's why we're not like that or they didn't make like you want to know what that other person is up to I told you?1:02:53Already that's how the whites of our eyes evolve right I don't you remember that story? gorillas don't have that distinction between the Iris and the white not like human beings and our eyes are very sharp and1:03:04One thing we really want to know is What are you looking at? And why what are you up to? And if I can tell what you're looking at I can infer? What you're going to do, and you want a broadcast dot well except when you don't want to broadcast it1:03:17But you know most of the time you want to be pretty Transparent to other people because otherwise they won't trust you and if they don't trust you they won't cooperate with you they won't compete with you and the probability that they'll come after you is extraordinarily high because you'll be1:03:30Evil predator in no time flat so okay, so We'll take a look at the brain from another perspective1:03:43Now a lot of this I got from Alcone and Goldberg Well, that's not exactly right I had laid I laid this out before that but I found Alcone and Goldberg's writings afterwards1:03:55and he was a student of larious, and he was trying to account for The why we had different hemispheres roughly speaking because it's not self-evident that we should they're actually somewhat two separate1:04:06consciousnesses and they Communicate but the communication isn't complete. It's like our brain is modularized and Unified at the same time and you can think about it like a me of people. Why do you want it mod your1:04:20Modularized well, so if one person goes down all of them. Don't that's one One reason so it's some separation of function1:04:29Why else well? each little module can do its own creative thing independently of the others and that's useful and then there can be communication between them and1:04:39so There's there's utility and modularity and there's utility and integration and part of what we're trying to work out on the global political scene right now is how modular things should be and how integrated they should be and the European community rushed into integration and1:04:54That's bothering people dreadfully because they feel that the advantages of modularization have been washed away You saw that maybe they're right because you saw what happened with Greece collapsed1:05:05right and Greece is very very corrupt incredibly corrupt and germany whatever else you might think about Germany is not corrupt and So the EEC tried to bring Greece and Germany together that didn't work there was no unity there the modularity was actually1:05:20Useful and the fact that Greece was so destabilized and Italy also very corrupt and spain also very corrupt Was very shaky just about brought the whole thing down it the argument is the modularity would have been better1:05:34conserved well who knows right because modularity is useful and so is integration, but Full integration seems to be a mistake and so does full modularity, how do you get that right?1:05:45We don't know that's why we're arguing about it and right now. There's a backlash. We're pulling away from the integration and you you can see why - because in1:05:542008 was the American economy collapsed the world economy just about collapsed that seems like a bad idea. You know you might want some some separateness so that if one system1:06:05malfunctions and goes down the whole bloody thing doesn't go into flames and So we don't know we don't know how to manage that it's a really really1:06:14complicated problem, so Anyways ok so how does the how does the brain work? Well the left? Roughly speaking in right handed mail and the reason that I'm concentrating on Right-handed males is because1:06:27they're simpler in their neurological structure when have a more complicated neurological structure and Left-Handed People tend to have a more complicated neurological structure1:06:36So we'll just say that we'll just go with the standard model to begin with and you can assume that the same systems are there in every person1:06:45But they're not laid out on the hemispheric structure quite as neatly but they're still there so it's sort of like these are tendencies so for example if you're a1:06:54so there's a tendency for the right hemisphere to specialize for what's relatively unknown and the left hemisphere to specialize for what's Relatively mastered and you could think about it this way, too1:07:08left right it's something like that okay, so large-scale Low-resolution1:07:17abstractions tend to be the province of the right high Resolution Detailed knowledge structures tend to be the province of the left the left is linguistic That's where the detailed structures manifest themselves in articulation1:07:28But the fundamental difference between the left and right isn't language versus non language the fundamental distinction is1:07:37Relatively explored and mastered versus relatively unexplored and not mastered And that's both in terms of structure the right hemisphere has a less granular structure. It's less differentiated1:07:48It's also responsible mostly for negative emotion especially in the prefrontal part and the reason for that is well. How do you encounter? What's absolutely unknown?1:07:58Imagination and emotion right I told you that little experiment that you could do if you're alone in a house And you hear a strange noise at night? in A room1:08:07Turn off the lights and put your hand in the room like your brain will just flash off monsters like mad You know you'll be nervous Because that what's in that room something to make you nervous. That's a very low resolution category, right?1:08:20It's like it's a it's some indeterminate Manifestation of the Category of things that might hurt you very low resolution, but a very smart category1:08:30It's like don't put your hand in there you put your hand in there, and you watch your imagination. It's like monsters It'll generate monsters like mat and that's what the right hemisphere is doing it's saying1:08:39What's in there is an exemplar of the category of things that are dangerous? Here's a bunch of images of those things and that thing in there is going to partake of that essence1:08:48That's and that's a very low resolution Hypothesis that's kind of what horror movies do with people you know they sort of lead them through that initial process and so1:08:58and so that's what the right the right hemisphere seems to me to be dominated by Dominated by subcortical processes or the left hemisphere is reversed the Cortex is more or less got dominion and so1:09:10The right hemisphere well we'll walk through this neurologically, but the right hemisphere is Responds Rapidly to what's unknown, and that's that subcortical the hippocampus is doing an awful lot of that1:09:22noting a Mismatch, and then it's using the right hemisphere to to abstractly represent what the possibility space is1:09:31In relationship to unexpected things and then the right hemisphere is tracking that Continually what those unexpected things are and coming up with1:09:41models of what you haven't yet, Mastered and That's kept separate from the left hemisphere which already has functional models And you don't want to blast the left hemisphere continually with anomalous information because you blow out its structure1:09:53And then you don't know what to do so the right hemisphere generates New models in some sense out of nothing and then when the time is right taps1:10:03Information into the left hemisphere slowly so that it doesn't disrupt its function too much And that's a lot of that seems to happen when you're dreaming by the way it happens at night1:10:13So and what happens with the dreams you think about how dreams work you might think of dreams as part of that process where? ideas come to be so they're low resolution to begin with mostly a majestic really highly emotional and1:10:25Incoherent less Coherent, why You can't be coherent unless you know what to do Abcdef if that's working you've got coherent, but if you're dealing with something1:10:37You don't know you have to muck about with your category structures And that's what dreams do and you know when you're interpreting a dream one of the things you watch for is the dream1:10:46the dream presents this and then this that's called metonymy by the way from a literary perspective and What that implies is this is related to this in some way why else would they be co activated?1:10:57You know people say well dreams are random. That's the stupidest theory I've ever heard like white noise is random dreams are not random They're hard to understand, but they're anything but random. They're more random than real-life1:11:11Well, that's because what you don't understand is really random and You're organized and there has to be an intermediary that sort of quasi random between them or you never get from one to the other and1:11:22Dreams and fantasies myths all of that is part of that process that That stretches you out beyond what you know into the absolute unknown and so1:11:34And your hemispheres are differentially specialized for that, so roughly speaking right hemisphere1:11:43Operation and unexplored territory. That's a really good way of thinking about it you need a system that tells you what to do when you don't know what to do a huge part of the subcortical structure is doing that too1:11:53unknown freeze then what Imagine right freeze emotions imagine Then explore then differentiate then Master1:12:04That's the process that's the process of learning and what you're doing is you're you're transforming low resolution representations of what's frightening into high resolution representations that1:12:15Enable you to master it to take the world apart and to make ingenious things out of it So there's this very cool part of the mesopotamian creation myth. So that the major hero whose name is Marduk1:12:27Confronts the dragon of Chaos Tiamat whose feminine and he cuts her into pieces And he makes the world out of her pieces and one of his name's there's he had 50 60 names1:12:37and I think that was those were amalgams of tribal gods and one of the names was he who makes ingenious things out of the conflict with Tiamat1:12:47Absolutely perfect because that's exactly what human beings do right we confront that terrible predatory Potential that lies outside our domain of experience, and we make ingenious things out of it1:12:59And then we talk about how we did it and then we model How we did it and that's the basis of our ethics and our morality and the way that that ties in to think about1:13:08one of the things we talked about was that the mythological hero was a Representation not of the being that was at the top of the dominance hierarchy But of the being that was at the top of the set of all possible dominance hierarchies okay, so here's a cool equation1:13:21the Hero who goes out into the unknown to make contact with the dragon and to bring back the treasure is the same thing that wins the battle across sets of dominance hierarchies and1:13:32That's how the two things come together right? It's so brilliant it's so absolutely brilliant and so it's the mythological hero the mythological Hero is the1:13:41Representation of what's again not at the top of one dominance hierarchy, but at the top of all of them. That's the eye That's above the pyramid why the eye because it pays attention, and that's what you do none of this is this is not1:13:55fiction It's meta truth. It's the right way to think about it look Let's say you're socially anxious okay? So what happens when you're socially anxious?1:14:07You go to a party your heart's beating. Why the party is a monster Why because it's judging you and it's judging you? It's putting you low down the dominance hierarchy because that's what a negative judgement is and that interferes with your sexual1:14:21success and that means that you're being harshly evaluated by Nature itself Right so you are confronting that the dragon of Chaos when you go into the social situation and so1:14:33What do you do? You like this like you hunched over and that's low dominance. I'm no threat. It's like well That's not going to get you very far You know, but that's a logical thing to do in the in the face of a tyrant so I'm no threat1:14:46You know you look at the king, and you're dead I'm no threat. I'm hunched over and then what's happening internally How are what are people thinking about me? What are people thinking about me or am I looking stupid am I looking foolish jeez I'm awkward. I hate being here man1:14:59I'm sweating too much, it's all Internalized right, it's all self focused the the eye isn't worked the eye isn't working. What do you tell people?1:15:10Stop don't stop thinking about yourself because you can't it's like don't think of a white elephant White elephant white elephant white elephant you can't tell someone to stop thinking about something because they get caught in a loop1:15:23What you do with socially anxious people is you say look at other people Look at them right why because if you look at them, you can tell what they're thinking and then you1:15:35Unless you're unless you're terribly socialized and some people are some people have no social skills and so the reason they can't go to a party is because they don't even know how to introduce themselves like they're just1:15:45No one ever taught them how to behave and so they're really good Candidates for Behavior therapy because you walk them through the process of how you actually1:15:56Manifest the procedures that are associated with social acceptability, but most people aren't like that They have the ability so if they're really introverted and high in neuroticism. They can usually talk quite well to someone one-on-one1:16:08Why because they look at them well if I look at you? It's another thing to do if you're ever speaking to a group of people never speak to the group of people1:16:17that doesn't exist you talk to Individuals and then they reflect for you the entire group because they're all entrained. If you look at one person1:16:27They've broadcast to you what everyone's thinking and you know how to talk to one person, so it's easy So as soon as you focus on the person (not you) you push your attention outward use your eye push your attention Outward1:16:41And you start watching well Then all your automatic mechanisms kick in and you stop being awkward because if we're talking, and I'm looking here I don't know what you're going to do next and I'm going to put1:16:53Disjunctions into the like they're like bad chords in the melody of our of our conversation because the reason is I'm not paying attention1:17:02So that's why the eye is the thing at the top of the pyramid it's like The thing that enables you to win the set of all possible dominance hierarchies is the eye. Pay attention.1:17:11Pay attention. That's the critical issue. That's why the Egyptians worshiped Horus That's why Horus was the thing that rescued Osiris from the from the depths. It's the capacity to pay attention1:17:22What do you pay attention to most? What your right hemisphere signals as anomalous. It attracts your attention it's like this isn't going quite right? I'm not looking at that.1:17:33Wrong! That's what you look at. That's what you look at. What not going right because that's see that's the terrible monster that might eat you but it's also the place you get all the information, so1:17:46That's why it's useful to have discussions with your enemies Because they will tell you things you do not know and that's such a great thing because if you don't know them well1:17:55You're not very smart are you you know there may be a time when you go somewhere. That's the thing you need to know and maybe your enemy will tell you why you're such a fool1:18:04You know and a bunch of other things that aren't true, too But even one thing that's accurate it's like yeah, thanks very much man. Maybe I'll do some work on that I won't have to carry that forward so and that's part of the reason again. Why the terrible predator,1:18:18It's always the terrible predator that has the gold it's like the person who delivers the message you do not want to hear So it's rough, it's rough But it doesn't matter who life is rough1:18:29okay, so How are these specialized? The right hemisphere operation and unexplored territory and that unexplored territory1:18:40Emerges when ever what you're doing doesn't work you know you can conceptualize it as that which is Beyond the walls of the city But the City is a category structure1:18:50abstractly... abstractly put. There's no difference between the barbarians that invade the walled city and the things that happen in the world that damage your category structure1:19:02They're, they're the same thing from up from a practical perspective Okay, right hemisphere operation and unexplored territory negative emotion inhibition of Behavior1:19:17That's this that's anxiety that's what happens when the Medusa looks at you you turn the stone, right? That's the basilisk in Harry Potter. It freezes you why you're moving forward according to a schema. If you're moving1:19:30forward properly you're getting to where you want to go and the schema is being validated. Simultaneously, I'm moving for it and the map is correct something happens that's unexpected. What should you do?1:19:41Stop. What else you going to do? You stop first then the predator can't see you, right? That's the freezing reaction of a prey animal1:19:50So it's it's it built very very deeply into very very old circuits do that. Fact if it's a real orienting reflex to something that's a anomalous you'll go like this1:20:00And that's to stop the thing that will jump on your back from carrying out your throat, and that's really really fast It's almost as fast as spinal sneak Reflex circuitry extraordinarily fast and but you know that's conserved over an evolutionary span that predator1:20:16Defense system is at the bottom of your cognitive apparatus everything be built on that like it's a low-resolution pattern a1:20:27Higher-resolution pattern that's the same pattern is built on top of that. Then a higher-resolution pattern that's the same pattern is built on top of that so on. But that initial architecture is1:20:38duplicated across the levels of differentiation of the nervous system That's partly why these symbols can be so archaic and still be accurate it's still the way the world works.1:20:48Negative emotion inhibition of behavior image processing right because image thing about images is they're fast You know a picture is worth a thousand words. Okay, you get the picture1:21:00You know get the picture is actually something you say to someone if you say; Do you understand? Right if you get the picture is very very fast so the right hemisphere manages that1:21:10Holistic thinking that's that low resolution thinking that generalizes across instances. Pattern recognition, pattern generation, and gross motor action. yeah.1:21:19Freeze and get the hell out of there that's gross motor action right hemispheres very good at that. That's why if you're Right-Handed User if you're right-handed you use your left hemisphere to manage the really fine motor details1:21:35Right you write with it you write with it and because that's very very If you're right-handed you tend to use your left hand to open the top of jars1:21:46Right you're use your left hand. That's a gross motor action I mean sometimes people are more lateralized than that, but the left hemisphere is specialized for the fine-grain things that you know very well1:21:56That's that's exactly it. Okay the left hemisphere while the left hemisphere which is associated with positive emotion by the way that's1:22:05specialized for operation in explored territory. So now what we might say is that you spend your whole life try not to have your right hemisphere turn on Because why would you want that that's where the monsters pop up. So you stay in explored territory, but maybe you also1:22:21tentatively expand its borders and the left hemisphere seems to be involved in that too. So if you're curious about something It's usually something usually1:22:30Something minor enough so that it won't blow your entire Category structure if you explore it now sometimes you get unlucky and you're like Eve in the garden of Eden. You go have a little1:22:40chat with this little snake that seems to be of no significance whatsoever and it feeds you something the apple, it feeds you something and bang1:22:50Everything falls apart. Right. You collapse and you're out there in history. You're no longer in your old paradise so activation of behavior yeah, well that's because1:23:01Positive emotion is associated with movement forward like if you're where you want to be and things are going well then your behavior should be activated so that you go and get things now one of the1:23:11Negative consequences of that is that if you're really in a good mood really happy you're going to be impulsive and make mistakes You know because you hear these doe headed1:23:20That's a very minor word People who are always pushing happiness as the as the key measure for for successful existence. It's so1:23:31Ill informed that it's embarrassing that that even happens Positive emotion makes people impulsive. Maniacs for example. Which is really if you that's mania, right?1:23:42Bipolar disorder if you're manic you're one happy person Way to happy everything is great nothing But wonderful things that are beyond your imagination are going to happen to you1:23:53And they're going to happen fast and so you're down to the mall to buy everything You can possibly get your hands on because you have a hundred uses for everything and then a week later1:24:02You know you crash into your depressive Episode and you realize that you're 150 thousand dollars in debt And you've alienated everyone that you know it's like that's untrammeled positive emotion. So how about no. a1:24:18peer index of positive emotion is no way of determining whether or not a system is working properly even your own system You need a balance between positive and negative emotions plus positive emotions are absolutely exhausting1:24:31Because if you're in a manic episode, it's like, it's time to get everything good right now fine But you won't sleep for a week, and then you die because you just burned yourself to a crisp and so to be1:24:43overwhelmingly Enthusiastic about everything sounds like a real blast and I've seen full-blown manic, so they're having plenty of fun But it is not a pleasant thing to behold. They're just all over the place and1:24:54ya know Yeah, it's really not to it. It's really not good, it's really not good you need a balance between these two systems because the whole world isn't1:25:04Explored territory bursting with nothing but promise that's not the world. The world is that in the bounded space a little bit with that absolute horror show going out1:25:16around the periphery and both of your both systems need to be active in order to keep you balanced people do unfortunately sustained damage sometimes to the left Prefrontal Cortex1:25:28responsible for positive emotion or the right Prefrontal Cortex responsible for negative emotion and if you sustained right hemisphere prefrontal damage It makes you inappropriately happy and impulsive and you and your life1:25:39Just goes you just spiral Downhill because you make nothing but impulsive decisions And you know what the real world consequence of that is you know?1:25:48Get drunk and be impulsive for one night You can learn what the bloody consequences of that are you try living like that for a month? Independently of IQ that's the other thing that's so interesting you can blow out your left prefrontal1:26:01Cortex and not suffer much of a decrease especially in crystallized intelligence but the fact that you're running on nothing but Sorry, you're right hemisphere you're running on nothing, but positive emotion. It's going to order you right into the ground and then if you're1:26:15Perhaps even more unlucky and you lose the left prefrontal Cortex, then you're permanently depressed because there's nothing but1:26:27the unexplored manifesting itself we know that if you take depressive depressed people and you Do EEG analysis that they have predominant lefting1:26:36predominant resting right hemisphere EEG activation and so So that's roughly. So why is this? Well,1:26:46unknown territory known territory you think well is that real? Well, It's real enough So that's how your brain evolved that seems pretty damn real So then we could think about it subcortically and we might as well do that1:26:59This is mapped out on the hippocampus more most particularly by Jeffrey Gray who is influenced by? Sokolov and vinegared Ova1:27:08who are also students of Luria. Jeffrey Gray used cybernetic theory that was developed by Norbert Wiener and which is an AI1:27:17which he is the father of artificial intelligence and Some of that was actually integrated as well in to Piagetian thought because Piaget and Wiener, Er Norbert Wiener and1:27:28Luria if I remember correctly all went to the same conference back in the early 1920s Mid 1920s and heard Norbert Wiener speak so that's how cybernetics theory got built into some of these underlying1:27:41Theories and sort of manifested itself everywhere so Gray Gray uses a model very much like this derived from cybernetic theory and so here's the idea How does the brain work you have a target in mind?1:27:53and you act to to manifest the target you act to transform the world into the target and Then you compare the consequence of your actions to the target and if they matched and that's a good thing and if they don't match1:28:05Then that's what where negative emotion comes from. Okay, So how does that work the hippocampus seems to be central to that, so it detects Mismatch so so in the classic1:28:15Behavioral theory, so this would be Gray's theory you have your expectations of the world that would be your model And you have your sensory input which is the real world and then the hippocampus is mapping one on to the other1:28:29One from a top-down stream one from the bottom up stream and saying Match Match Match match And as long as everything matches then the hippocampus (this is an oversimplification) keeps the subcortical1:28:42emotional systems inhibited because you don't need them except for maybe mi mild positive emotion to keep you moving forward if there's a mismatch1:28:51That's anxiety the anxiety system gets Disinhibited because it's so on it doesn't get activated gets disinhibited that freezes you and all the other motivational systems are primed because God only knows what you're going to have to do next okay, so1:29:04then if You make a mistake Given that scheme you have to modify the world in order to rectify the mistake you have to modify your motor output so that you1:29:13Put the world back in order, and that's basically Gray's model But Gray's model is insufficient because Gray presumes that what you're comparing1:29:23Your expectation with is the real world but you don't have access to the real world what really happens is that your brain compares the model of1:29:34the World That you want to have happen so it's desired and not expected with the model of the world that you think is happening They're both models1:29:43There's no direct contact with the truth And so what that means and this is what's horrible about this is that if your model fails.. it doesn't only mean that you have to adjust1:29:54your expectation and change your motor activity it means you might have to bloody well retool your perceptions. Well that's a lot more horrifying than just having to change your motor output if you betray me1:30:06Then I have to see you differently, and you know if we've interacted a long time I've built up a hell of a model of you You know it's taken a tremendous amount of effort to generate1:30:17And I may have used that model as a predicate for all sorts of other plans Which is what you do with an intimate relationship, and so then if you do something that indicates a true mismatch1:30:29It isn't only that I have to adjust my actions God only knows what I'm going to have to retool. I may even have to retool my perceptions of myself I'm a lot more gullible than I thought I was for example1:30:40And God only knows what the implications of that are if you're close to me, and you could do this to me Is that my flaw and environment am I carrying that into other relationships? It's an absolute catastrophe, and so Gray actually1:30:55underestimated the degree of severity of Mismatch because he only said well it was motor output and and re re-world adjusting that would have to be1:31:05Repaired not perception because like most behavior see the behaviorist had this idea of stimulus, right? The stimulus produces the response it's like okay1:31:14What stimulus well they never went there? They just assumed that the stimulus spoke for itself But it doesn't that's the fundamental weakness of behavioral1:31:23Theory is that the reason they could get rid of the mind was because they hid it Invisibly inside the idea of the stimulus which is all of a sudden not just something that was a sense1:31:33Like a piece of sense data, but that had motivations built into it well no. No. You can't do that. The Motivation you can put the motivation in the object, but then it's no longer an object. It's something completely different1:31:49Ok good. Let's stop there when you come back I'm going to tell you a bunch of stories ok so it will break for 15 minutes so imagine what happens when a civilization develops and it develops out of an amalgam of tribal organizations and1:32:05so each of those tribes has their own god which is their own sort of imaginative universe and their attempt to make sense out of the Moral landscape of being and1:32:15underneath all of those representations is a pattern and the reason there's a pattern there is because all of those tribes are made up of people and so there's going to be it's like there's a domain within which variation is going to occur so if we're going to set up a1:32:30Structure that works across time it's going to at least be roughly Predicated on the same structures that a dominance hierarchy is predicated on it's going to be1:32:39Predicated on the same patterns of interactions that would characterize a chimpanzee troop you know. There's this basic biological1:32:48What would you call it? There's a realm of biological necessity that constitutes the boundary space within which human interactions that have to take place I mean, I can't be so violent that I kill everyone in my tribe1:33:00That's not to be very helpful because I'm a tribal creature so without the tribe what am I going to do and? So I have to be vaguely Acceptable to other people because otherwise they'll kill me even if I'm really really powerful. They'll take me down and so1:33:15Because I have to deal with you and you and you and you and you? we're going to modify each other continually and and within parameters now the parameters are wide but they're not non-existent and1:33:25You know you can see what those parameters are Genuinely if you look at a something like a wolf pack or a chimpanzee troop because those are stable across really1:33:34The structure itself is stable across at least hundreds of thousands of years if not millions of years And so there's a there's a so1:33:44Frans De Waal shows for example that with the chimpanzee troops if you have a He studied them mostly at the Arnhem Zoo, and I would recommend his writings. Highly De Waal. De1:33:56Waal He's interested in the in prototypical Moral, behavior among Chimpanzees. It's a very interesting study and1:34:05what he showed for example is that if you have a particularly the Dominant dominance Hierarchy in Chimpanzees is male there's a female dominance Hierarchy to that overlaps the male and some of the females are more dominant1:34:17than many of the males But the fundamental structure looks like it's patriarchal roughly speaking among chimpanzees if you put a really rough tough1:34:26Barbaric Brutal dictator Chimpanzee at the top his his reign tends to be unstable and violent because he isn't good at negotiating1:34:36Social support and so he doesn't have any and so that means two chimpanzees that are friends can take him out and so that's what happens and so the1:34:46Despot Chimp is an unstable leader and De Waal has shown that the more stable chimp leaders are more Chimpanitarian? I guess would be the right word. It's not humanitarian. They they do1:35:00They have friends and you know Friendship is predicated on reciprocity even among Chimpanzees, and so if a1:35:09Predicate of power is reciprocity then that's one of the things that alleviates the dictatorial tendency so anyways so my point is1:35:19when a great civilization Emerges Emerges from the amalgam of tribal groups, but and each of the tribal groups has their ethic, but that ethic1:35:28Isn't the ethics aren't entirely separate from one another that's why tribes can trade because they do trade They interact with one another. It's kind of half...1:35:38I remember here's how heretofore Separated tribes begin to trade because you don't know you meet each other across the river1:35:48It's like you got your bows and arrows and someone makes a mistake And it's like warfare and so but you don't want to start the damn war because maybe you'll die1:35:57so you're sitting there with your bow and arrows watching these guys and now you know they're there and So then you go back to your tribe And you think oh man what the hell are we going to do about this and one solution is well1:36:08Let's find out where they are and then we'll go in there at night Well like well kill a bunch of them or we'll wipe them out or something like that another solution might be did you see all the neat stuff they had and so then what do you do is you find a border area and1:36:20You go, and you put some things out there that are valuable and you run away And then you watch from the trees And you see what happens when these other people discover these valuable things that you left there1:36:31And if they're like little on the psychopathic side they pick it all up and giggle and run away And that's the end of that, but if they have any sense what they do is1:36:40They leave some cool stuff on the ground, too And then they run off and then you can go pick up their cool stuff and leave And then it's like step one in the trust process And then maybe you do that you know for a year and it starts to fall into a cadence1:36:54And then maybe you know you get a little closer when you're watching watching in the bush And then maybe one day you have enough courage to kind of come you send your biggest ugliest guy out there1:37:03And you know they'd do the same And you know they look at each other and finally they shake hands or something like that and trade? And then well then you've got a trading relationship established and so you can see in that1:37:13The emergence of a what would you call it negotiated? Consensual Moral structure that allows trading to take place, and there's going to be rules Emerge right away1:37:24Which is well, you better leave me Something that's of approximately equal value, or are not going to play the game again. That's the thing. That's so cool1:37:34is that if we only play a game once I can do whatever I want and So that's that's what psychopaths do they play with game once and then they go play with someone else1:37:44But if we're going to play the same game over and over and over it's like the dominance hierarchy across time there's a different rule for playing a game once than there is for playing a game a thousand times and1:37:56if we're in a relationship The game we want to play is one that can be duplicated a thousand times, and there's really tight constraints on that And so that's the origin that you could consider that1:38:07the Biological It's not even biological exactly. It's predicated in biology, but it's a consequence of continual interaction the ethic emerges1:38:16it's like the rats that I told you about that you know the Rats that play with each other the big rat has to let the little rat win Thirty percent of the time or the little rat won't play anymore and so because the little that that's the biological1:38:29The biological framing the limitation is the little rat doesn't want to lose all the time that just produces negative emotion. It's not fun It's not motivating. So why would the little rats go play again? So the the constraint on our interactions are our biological?1:38:45Constraints, and they manifest themselves in the patterns way across time and there isn't any difference between you and me interacting across time Then there is between you and me acting say in the next hour so with everyone in this room. It's the same thing1:38:59It's just continual human interactions, and ethic emerges from that. Now different groups are going to code that ethic differently So they're going to come up with different imagistic1:39:09representations and different stories Now one of the things they're trying to figure out is Well, let's do it. Let's do it in the tribal way you have to do this inside the tribe, too1:39:22You have a hundred people and 10 of them are Leaders in one way or another and then out of that 10 you think well Who's the who's the best person?1:39:31So you have to have a hierarchy of value to determine what the most important aspect of the ethic is it's going to be something like trust because that's the predicate for1:39:41continued interaction Trustworthiness, it's not any really really any different than honesty. It's not really any different from telling the truth. So there's a really powerful1:39:52Necessity for honesty to merge as a as a canonical value caring might Emerge Power might Emerge right the ability to Exert physical power especially in places1:40:05Where war is a continual is continually likely and in lots of tribal landscapes? It's just non-stop Tribal trade and warfare so but but you can see how different ethics would emerge as canonical1:40:18Depending to some degree on the situation, but trust is a really crucial one because without that there's no relationships Ok so you've got tribe A, and it's got its tribal gods, and it's and its traditions and all of that1:40:30It's representation of the being in its images and stories And then you've got tribe B and you've got tried C and you've got tribe D and now they're all coming together1:40:40So what happens? Exactly well the tribes can go to war or they can talk and we're we're thinking about a communication that might be extending across a1:40:53Thousand years you have your beliefs I have my beliefs I can overwhelm you I can subsume you but even then I'm likely just to get indigestion from doing it1:41:03it's very very difficult to wipe out a set of beliefs without wiping out all of the people and that kind of Nullifies the utility of unification the1:41:13More there are of you the better you can defend yourself against other organizations that are trying to be larger so there's a powerful self preservation impetus to1:41:25Cooperation and So one of the things you see happening in the development of the stories in the old testament for example we know this about genesis in particular that there were at least1:41:34this is this is relatively recently so say for 3,000 years ago Not 50,000 years ago there were two different stories. There's two different stories in the genesis account told by two different1:41:48Storytellers and people who are very good at textual analysis of being able to separate them and they were put together... I don't remember when. Again it's probably about1:41:59Something between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago they were put together by what appeared to be a single editor and so he took these disparate accounts and Try to organize them into something that looked like a logical narrative, and that was part of the process by which different tribal1:42:16Representations of the world were brought into something under which the tribes as you as a unit could Simultaneously exist so you can think about it as a competition between imagistic1:42:27representations across time and then the emergence of some unifying narratives that that Captures the key elements of all of them well enough to bring them into some sort of union1:42:37And it has to be a story with motivational power Because otherwise no one will caught on to it and it has to be a story that keeps Uncertainty at Bay because otherwise it doesn't have any utility it has to be a functional story1:42:50so I'm going to tell you a story like that in the story of Marduk, and it's the mesopotamian story and Mesopotamia is one of the earliest Civilizations, and it emerged as a consequence of the amalgam of of Middle Eastern tribes1:43:03so that over a very long period of time You could think that the gods of all of these tribes were warring in an abstract space in a conceptual space and that would be the space of argumentation and conflict and out of that a meta story emerged and1:43:18This is the Meta story And it's one of a host of similar meta stories that came out of the Middle East one of which is the account in Genesis Okay, so here's the story1:43:28So there are two primary deities to begin with Apsu and Tiamat now in order to understand that well here's how the mesopotamians conceptualized the world1:43:45there was a let's call it a disc that's saltwater Why? Well what happens when you go to the end of the continent and saw water everywhere, right?1:43:56So wherever you go you run into saltwater, so that's the disc that surrounds everything now Why is it a disc the world is a dome on a disc. Why?1:44:06Well say you're standing in the middle of the field what does the world look like? dome On a disc so it's a phenomenological1:44:17Representation so the bottom of the dome is the ground which you stand what happens if you dig You hit water fresh water1:44:27So the dome of the land is on a disk of fresh water What happens if you go to the edge of the land you run into salt water? The dome of the land is on a disk of fresh water on a disk of salt water1:44:40Okay, those are the two gods Tiamat is God of salt water and Apsu fresh water And it's it's happenstance in some sense because that's the masculine and the feminine and they could be attributed all sorts of different1:44:54geographical areas so for example see if I can think of a good example1:45:06Doesn't matter. I'll just leave that for now Okay, so the two primary gods are Apsu and Tiamat. Tiamat is female and Apsu is male and they're locked1:45:18Together in an inseparable embrace Okay, so how do you understand that? Easy. Yin and Yang? It's the same idea here's here's another representation. This is a cool one. I've got a couple of them here. That are really cool1:45:32this is from China, so this is so this is fuxi and You I think I've got that right, but I just love that reference.1:45:44It's so insanely cool this representation, so you see the sort of the primary mother and father of humanity emerging from this underlying Snake-like1:45:55entity with its tails tangled together. I think that's a rep.. I really do believe this although. It's very complicated to explain why I really believe that's a representation of DNA1:46:06So and that that representation that entwined Double helix that is everywhere you can see it in Australian Aboriginal art and I'm using the Australians as an example because they were isolated in Australia for like 50,000 years1:46:20There's the most archaic people that were ever discovered and they have clear representations of these double helix structures in their art So and those are the two giant serpents out of which the world is made roughly speaking1:46:31It's the same thing you see that in the Staff of Asclepius Which is the healing symbol that the physicians use although usually that's only one snake but sometimes it's two so so1:46:41So that's a that's a Chinese representation, and then there's a there's this That's the Egyptian representation1:46:51We talked about the Egyptian story the other day right we talked about Isis and Osiris So there they are cobras their tails are twined together see they emerge out of that. That's the dragon of Chaos1:47:04That manifests itself as culture in nature. That's the representation That's unbelievably cool So okay so anyways back to back to1:47:15to the mesopotamian story, so Apsu and Tiamat are their primordial deities nature and culture. They're entwined together and they give rise to the1:47:26to their first Category of children and those are the I think you could think about them as the elder gods now I1:47:35What do they represent well the question is what did the gods represent and they represent? They represent sort of like primary modes of being it's something like that So think about Ares or Mars the god of war well, that's that's a representation of single-Minded aggression1:47:50And then you can think about Eros or Venus which is a primary Representation of sexuality and you might say well, why are those deities? Well that's simple. They live forever and1:48:02They control you and their personalities, so that's that for that. It's like yes, obviously you know and you know that you're under the sway of anger you're not in control of yourself if you're under the sway of1:48:14Erotic possession you make a fool out of yourself. You're a tool of the power that drives the Continuation of the species forward. Hunger is the same thing. Any primordial1:48:26motivational drive. We've conceptualized in this class as a personality. But those are transcendent personalities and their eternal their forever And so that's why the Greeks for example thought that human beings were just the playthings of the gods1:48:39this idea is echoed in the mesopotamian story, so then you can think about it, sort of neural developmentally as well is that out of out of nothing1:48:48of culture nature emerges say the two-year-old the two-year-old is a battleground of primary motivational forces and something like that is being hinted at in the1:48:58mesopotamian creation story the first the first Progeny of the fundamental union of chaos and order Apsu and Tiamat is the proliferation of these1:49:11primary motivational forces, they're sort of like the Titans or the or the what it wasn't the Greek gods kept in the1:49:20Underneath the Mountain that's Zeus What's the name of that? They're like prime.. they're earthquakes and fires and that sort of thing. They're primordial forces.1:49:29Okay anyways, so these children are produced and what happens.? They're very noisy. They run around doing all sorts of things you can think about them as grown-up1:49:39two-year-olds causing all sorts of trouble the first thing they do is kill Apsu and And make their homeowners corpse that's brilliant now1:49:48the Story doesn't say much about Apsu other than that the the culture deity the Primary Culture deity is not elaborated up that much in the mesopotamian story1:49:58And I think that's probably because at the time of the mesopotamian civilization was new enough so that we really hadn't mapped1:50:07The mythology of culture the Egyptians did that much more and I know I told you that story first. But that's just how it goes. So the the elder gods make their their home on the corpse of Apsu.1:50:19Well, what does that mean? Well, that's that's sort of how it is. You inhabit the corpse of culture, right? it's the dead past and1:50:28but But it's not just the dead past one of the things that's very cool about the mesopotamian story Is that the elder gods are foolish enough to kill it. It's the death of God by the way.1:50:39It's no different from what Nietzsche pronounced. This has been going on for a very very long time. This collapse of belief systems1:50:48They kill it carelessly. Because they don't understand what it is that they need to survive. They kill it careless carelessly, and then they try to live on the corpse.1:50:58I think that's what the postmodernists is do by the way. Because they assume we have this tremendous system of value that's being built up across time and it1:51:08sustains us and Everyone is criticizing it and criticizing it and trying to destroy it. Well we live in its corpse and that will nourish us forever it has to be replenished.1:51:21And there's nothing in the postmodernist philosophy that can act to replenish. Anyways They kill Apsu. What happens when you kill order?1:51:33Chaos comes back. Tiamat. Now this Tiamat. Here. Feminine, but also the dragon, so it's it's it's...1:51:46You think out of this fundamental reptilian treasure bearer Culture and Nature emerge and they can pull back into that very rapidly. So here's an example,1:51:57You've all seen Sleeping Beauty. I presumed. How many of you have seen Sleeping Beauty? The Disney film. How many of you haven't? Okay, so there's a couple that haven't. There's a scene in Sleeping Beauty where the evil queen has has imprisoned the prince who's1:52:11going to wake sleeping beauty up So he's the logos or he's that he's the heroic individual or he's that element of her consciousness that wakes her up. You can read it either way.1:52:20She's got him trapped in a dungeon So she's the kind of ultable ultimate Oedipal mother you know. She's the mother that has her 40 year-old son in the basement who is like1:52:29Overweight and unhealthy and watched and watching video games and being covered with cheeto dust and she always like feeds him sandwiches so he won't leave you know. And she says oh, it's good thing1:52:38You didn't go out the world make some poor woman miserable. So anyway So that's the evil queen he's got the hero trapped in the dungeon. So he goes out he escapes and then1:52:49She goes after him to try to bring him back and turns into the dragon that's what happens in Sleeping Beauty, so that's that reversion of the of the archetype into it's even more primordial force. So1:52:59anyway, so Tiamat kind of an amalgam of feminine, nature, and also this more underlying primordial symbol. So anyway She is not happy She is not happy that these her children killed her husband and so she thinks oh well enough of these creatures we're gonna1:53:14we're gonna do them in. It's the flood myth. The same idea. So what happens in the story of Noah this happens worldwide is that Human beings get all corrupt and make a lot of racket and break all sorts of rules and God thinks oh, well, you know1:53:27Enough of you, we'll just bring in a flood and wipe y'all out. That's chaos returning you destabilize order too badly. There's a flood and that brings with it1:53:37all Sorts of new things because it's water, but it just drowns you it drowns you. Now Noah is a good man so he can ride out the flood. He's the hero that can go down into the Chaos and then back up because he hasn't let go of his1:53:51Morality despite the fact that the entire society has disintegrated. So he saves everything so it's it's like Moses crossing the Red Sea and then coming out the other side same same sort of idea.1:54:03Anyways, so Tiamat she's uh she's not happy and these gods are careless too and impulsive. They're making a lot of noise and their activity disturbs her. You know and you can see echoes of that fear1:54:17that mythological fear in modern consciousness because we tell ourselves the same story. Right? The story is if we keep running around making enough1:54:26racket mother Nature is going to take offense and wipe us out, and that's the story that's at the bottom of the Sort of Apocalyptic element of the Global warming1:54:38Apocalypse it's like if we if we mock about badly enough nature will take its revenge, okay fine. It's true. It's true It's so it's a story that's always been true. So anyways1:54:49The Gods are making a lot of noise They're being impulsive, and then they make the fatal error of killing Apsu And that's a big mistake, and so Tiamat thinks alright enough of this. She wakes up1:54:58and she thinks I'm going to wipe them all out. Now that these gods their gods eh I mean, they're not trivial Characters, but they're pretty worried because their gods, but Tiamat is their mother she gave birth to them she's mother nature, and if she's angry1:55:13About it then the Jig's up so what Timat does is she prepares this army of monsters and That they're described there's I think 13 different kinds of Monsters, and they're chimeric1:55:25Images, they're images of you know They're like dragons. They're half snake and half bird and half animal and they're monstrous images, and they're sort of the1:55:36Mesopotamians attempt to imagisticly represent those things that might come forward as an onslaught and so generates a whole 13 major1:55:46Monsters and then puts a whole army behind them and she elects one of them Qingu is his name as head Monster so he's for all intents and purposes. He's an early1:55:56representation of Satan he's Like King of the bad guys and it's important to know about him because if something happens later in the story, so so Tiamat's preparing her army of monsters to1:56:09chimeras to wipe out, the Gods, and so they're like shorting out about this but while they're doing it, they're still making a lot of racket and living the highlife in Apsu's corpse and and1:56:22Propagating and while they're doing that they send out one God after another to combat Tiamat and they all come back failed.1:56:31So whatever these elder gods are whatever they represent. They're not Whatever it is that can confront Chaos successfully and prevail their powers1:56:41But they're not whatever that is that ultimate power and that's what the mesopotamians are trying to figure out who or what is king of the gods and king of the gods is the thing that confront Chaos and1:56:52regenerate order, so So they keep producing new gods and one day they produce Marduk He's born,1:57:01and marduk he he's a whole new Category of God and every one of the gods knows it and he's got some very strange attributes one of them is He could speak Magic words and so when Marduk speaks the night sky transforms into the day sky and vice versa.1:57:14So he's he's the verbal capacity it's a massive discovery. It's a massive discovery by the mesopotamians because it's the first time we know of that the idea that it's the capacity for communicative speech as the1:57:26Primary deity should be at the top of the dominance hierarchy. It's one of the most remarkable discoveries of the ages and he also has eyes all the way around his head1:57:36So Marduk is the thing that can speak and see and it's the thing that's so all the gods Think wow well this is a whole new thing man. How about you go out and1:57:46combat Tiamat. Well it doesn't sound like much of a picnic. You know the logical thing for any sensible god to say is how about no, but Marduk doesn't say that he says look. I'll make you guys a deal1:57:57You get yourself together in a whole you know and you have a vote for all intents and purposes and you vote me king of the gods and1:58:07Allow me from here on in to Determine destinies That's exactly what the mesopotamian say he gets the tablet of destiny and he's now in control of it So the mesopotamians are working out this idea that1:58:17It's the thing that can see and that can talk that should be the thing that guides destiny especially if destiny involves having to go into combat with Chaos itself and1:58:28Restructure the world and so Marduk says those are the terms. I'll do it but I'm king of the gods, and they all think well at the fools can quote didn't get killed anyway1:58:37so you know what do we have to lose and so they agreed and so Marduk goes out to combat Tiamat and he takes a net and a sword and1:58:46he if I remember correctly he fills her with a wind which is I believe part of the Manifestation of this voice this voice idea he fills her with a wind he encapsulate her in a net now think about what that means1:58:59you know psychologists even used this word phrase nomological net and a nomological net is this is the1:59:08Network of concepts that you use to encapsulate Something new in an ideational structure and so the idea of putting something in a net is to Put boundaries around it right and to constrain it and so some of that's actually well1:59:21You can capture a predator in a net and then cut it up, but there's no difference between that There's a there's a tight analogy between that and cat encapsulating something novel in a conceptual1:59:34Network which then enables you to cut it up into something useful okay, so that's what happens Marduk goes out. He confronts Tiamat he overcomes the monsters and he kills Qingu and1:59:46So and then he makes he cuts Tiamat into pieces and he makes the world and that's the world that human beings live On and he makes the human beings to serve the gods1:59:58okay, so that's the first part of the story now he also kills Qingu and he makes human beings out of the blood of Qingu now That's a hell of a story right because Qingu is king of the demons and human beings are the creature2:00:09That's made out of the blood of the king of the demons it's a very similar idea to the idea the later sort of egyptian and Judeo-Christian ideas that there's a Satanic element to being that's also characteristic of human beings and part of that is well2:00:24What's the difference between human beings and every other element of being and the answer that is human beings can deceive you? Right, we're the only creatures that can do that2:00:34We're capable of deception. Voluntary deception, we're capable of malevolence. And so that's echoed as well in the story in genesis because when Adam and Eve eat the apple2:00:45They wake up the scales fall from their eyes they recognize that they're naked and they know the difference between good and evil which means they can do evil and it took me a long time to figure that out what that meant so imagine because there's a2:00:57Causal sequence eh. The snake offers you something that you ingest it wakes you up the scales fall from your eyes So now you can see the first thing you do is you realize that you're naked what does that mean well human being stand upright?2:01:11The most vulnerable part of us is front and center to be hurt But also to be judged right to be naked is to be that's terrifying you want to not die2:01:21You want to cover yourself up, and so that's the recognition of nakedness, but then you might say well Why does the knowledge of good and evil emerge from that? As soon as you know you're naked and vulnerable2:01:31you know how to hurt other people. You're not a predator anymore, because they'll just tear you apart and eat you like they don't want you to suffer although They don't care they don't want you to suffer. They just want to eat you but once I know what hurts me.2:01:45I know what hurts you and then I can turn that into an art and people have done that and so that's that's why the knowledge of evil comes immediately as a consequence of the knowledge of of2:01:55Nakedness, and that's associated with the same idea that human beings are made out of the blood of Qingu. Nasty stories, but very you know they're messing with the fundamental structure reality they want to get this right.2:02:08Ok so one of the cool things about this story, so okay, so that's Marduk. Now here's what's so interesting about that. The mesopotamians they've got this story about the deities and how they organize themselves to2:02:22Respond to the emergence of Chaos and how to master it. You you go after it you you declare yourself the thing at the top Of the dominance hierarchy, your eyes and speech you, go out there voluntarily, you2:02:34encapsulate the Chaos, you cut it into pieces and you make the world. That makes you top god. Brilliant bloody absolutely Phenomenally brilliant, so what happens that's what's happening in the heavenly domain. Let's say what happens in the earthly domain2:02:48The emperor of the mesopotamians is Marduk. He's a manifestation of Marduk on Earth, and he has to be a good Marduk That's because you might say well, why should you be king?2:02:59Well the answer to that is while you're most powerful. No, that's not going to work some other weasels will take you out Why should you be king well because you pay attention? And you speak properly and you keep Chaos at bay, and you make ingenious things happen as a consequence2:03:12So that's what the bloody mesopotamians were trying to work out. What should be sovereign and why. Okay, so what did they do in the new year ceremony, so2:03:22Imagine that they're there. They're the king is in a walled city, right? So that's the kings at the top of the dominance hierarchy He's the eye at the top of the pyramid in a walled city with Chaos outside. Chaos is outside2:03:34That's the domain of Tiamat at the New Year ceremony The old year we know about that We still have this idea the old year is an old man The New Year is about to be born there's an intermediary period of Chaos that's New Year's Eve2:03:47right that's the intermediate period of Chaos where all the rules are temporarily suspended which is why you can go out and Party like there's no tomorrow New Year's Eve and before the New Year is born2:03:58The mesopotamian emperor and all of his retinue and the people go outside the city on New Year's Eve And they take statues that represent the gods and they act out2:04:08the Story that I just told you with the statues and as part of that the2:04:17Emperor has to take off all his Garb his garments that make him king and me in front of the priest and the priest If I remember correctly slaps him with a glove it's something like that and2:04:27Tells him that he has to tell everyone why in the last year he wasn't a very good Marduk And how he's going to do better in the future Which is exactly by the way, what do you do when you make your New Year's?2:04:37What do you call those? Yes, the ones you immediately break the next day But it's the same it's this renewal idea that happens that it happens in the depth of darkness in the middle of the winter before2:04:48the light comes back right that's why it's set up that way, so so anyways and so that so as long as The emperor is a good Marduk then that's why he gets to be emperor, and if he's not a good Marduk2:05:00Then well someone else should the emperor so so that's how that works2:05:09and there's some representations of it, so there's There's Tiamat there Sort of spirit matter combination winged dragon right the thing that we've seen so many times and there is Marduk. He's got angel wings2:05:25Why the wings I don't know exactly why the wings I mean he's obviously being assimilated to the idea of a bird I don't know if the idea of the far-seeing capacity of the bird was there for the mesopotamians highly probable2:05:40But also the bird is something that flies up above everything else and that can see for long distances, so it's an aerial spirit It's close to God and all of that So so there's a very primordial representation of the same thing look how much imagination does it take to see2:05:55That that's the story of human beings encountering the unknown You know when you know the code it just seems self-evident. Yes2:06:04well there is he's got his bow and arrow you know and he's out there fighting the monsters of the unknown and that's Part that how human beings have survived yeah, yeah, that's and then here2:06:15He's riding this great big snake. So that's another representation of the same kind of thing Okay, so let me just think for a minute you'll figure out what I want to do next if I want to go somewhere next2:06:27I guess what I'll do right. Now is I'll just show you some additional pictures So we've laid out the conceptual world to some degree, right? mentioned that you can think about it as the2:06:38Potential itself, that's the dragon of Chaos and then nature which has a positive and a negative element Creation and destruction and culture which has a positive and negative emotion2:06:48element there reverse day because it's the positive element of culture that protects you against the negative element of nature and the negative element of Culture can be destroyed by the new coming in from the from the natural world and then the archetypal individual2:07:03Positive and negative as well. That's the that's the entire story roughly speaking, and I showed you its manifestations and figures like this2:07:12So you have this is called the open virgin The opening virgin because that those two halves can be closed So there's mother nature roughly speaking or the mother of God depending on how you look at it2:07:26and inside her nature Culture the Patriarchy the culture supports the suffering individual who? Voluntarily accepts death and mortality as the price to be paid for being that's what that image represents2:07:40It's absolutely Unbelievable, and then you see all these people that decide here are gazing uncontrollably at this image which is of course exactly what's happened over the last two thousand years at least in part of the world because2:07:52There's there's a tremendous idea encapsulated inside that image and the image the idea is something like the voluntary acceptance of2:08:01Suffering is key to its transcendence, and that's that's a that's a crucial psychotherapeutic truth, right Things that bother you need to be confronted voluntarily you have to accept them you have to accept them you think well how far does?2:08:13That go well we don't know It works in small things it works with phobias It works with traumas traumas are usually associated with death or disease or malevolence. So that's pushing it pretty far2:08:25There doesn't seem to be a limit to the to the idea that the voluntary Confrontation with the things that are terrifying is curative there doesn't seem to be a limit to that2:08:34There's an example in the story of Exodus when Moses is leading the Israelites through the desert They fragment because while they're out of tyranny so they don't know what to do. It's all chaotic, and you know this Moses character2:08:47Yeah, you got them out of Egypt but now They're in the desert And there's nothing to eat and like why should they listen to him and so they start worshipping all sorts of idols and that's kind2:08:56Of like the fragmentation of what holds them centrally together and so what does God do he's not very happy about that Whoo so he sends a bunch of poisonous snakes into the desert to bite them all2:09:07He thinks enough of these people. And that's chaos returning right in the form of these poisonous snakes and so The Israelites are kind of sick and tired of being bitten by poisonous snakes so they go back to Moses2:09:18And they say well, you know I know we've wandered off the path here And we didn't think you were the greatest guy there for a while but you know maybe who could have a little chat with God and see what he could do about these poisonous snakes and so so2:09:29Moses entreats God to do something about the snakes and what God tells people to do the strangest thing he says make a snake in the image make a bronze snake and put it on a post and2:09:41Have everyone look at it. And everyone who goes to look at the snake won't be bitten by the poisonous snakes anymore I just saw this it's it just2:09:51Crazy that idea. It's crazy so and I'll tell you something else else. That's very interesting so in that in the Christian story Christ assimilates himself to that snake that was put on the post in the desert says exactly the same thing that2:10:05That that has to be looked at because that's the pathway to salvation Roughly speaking. It's exactly the same idea. It's the worst thing that can possibly happen2:10:15So you look upon it and meditate upon it, and that's the key to transcending it well So that's the idea that's encapsulated in that image So it's you know. It's no wonder that these ideas had to be expressed in images because they're so unbelievably2:10:30Complicated that they're almost incomprehensible So they come out first in the image they come out first in the story because they're just and plus They're so difficult to believe2:10:40What the last thing you would think if you were being bitten by poisonous snakes was that you should make a bronze image of one And put it on a stick so that you could go look at it I mean, there's a magical element to that, but it's psycho therapeutically2:10:53exactly, right so I had this client and She had a dream about what what she was she was having a really rough time, and she she was a pretty good dreamer.2:11:02She had this dream that she was walking down a road by there was a ocean on one side and there was a sort of sand dunes on the other side and She looked up, and there's this guy with a huge python2:11:14that had that had been out there showing it to everyone and she took a look and he invited her to come take a look at the snake, but she refused and walked on and2:11:24So she told me that dream. She was also quite imaginative, so I said look let's let's try something First of all tell me about the snake handler, and she said well. He's kind of a Charlatan. He's a show-off2:11:37he's a he's a fake and I'm afraid that if I went up to the crowd and Where the snake was that they would force me to touch it and so I thought okay?2:11:46So that's why you walked by I said okay, so let's play a game. So you Sit there and bring that dream image to mind close your eyes bring the dream image to mind But let's play with a little bit like Jung's technique of active imagination. Let's play with it a little bit so go up2:12:00There you know imagine that you go up there, and you kind of have to do this like you're daydreaming You know you can't force it. You have to play with it like you would when you're daydreaming2:12:09Which is you're kind of half doing it voluntarily and it's half Manifesting itself. It's kind of a gateway between you and the collective unconscious. That's another way of thinking about it and2:12:20Anyways, I said okay, so go up there and the first thing we're going to do is figure out What are you going to do if the crowd tells you that you have to touch the snake or get close to it?2:12:29Because she needed a defense because it isn't up to other people to force her to do that So we we practiced what she might say like no, I'm I'm comfortable here I'm just going to stand in the background. Just going to look at it and get accustomed to it2:12:40I don't need you to push me forward so she felt pretty good about that So I kind of armed her with a defense so then she could Pretend to go up and take a look at the snake and I said well the first thing2:12:49You should do is take a look at the snake handler and see if he's who you think he is and so she did that? In her imagination she said no, he doesn't seem to be the Charlatan at all2:12:58He's got this snake that is his you know something he takes care of and he just has come out here to show The people and let people look at the snake and so she said yes2:13:08I said was he someone that you could trust or someone you shouldn't trust you have to ask both those questions because otherwise you're leading Witness right you don't want to tell people what to think you have to let them figure it out for themselves2:13:21So and she said no, I think he's somebody that should be trusted, and I said, okay well so what do you think that you could go up there and and and you know maybe lay your hands on the snake and touch the2:13:31Snake and she said she wasn't sure about it, but we went through it and she was able to do it and so It's the same So she had to she had to make contact she had to voluntarily make2:13:42Contact with with the this terrible snake that's at the bottom of being that's at the bottom of the tree of existence Right that's where the snake is it's wrapped around the tree2:13:52Well, why well partly because we lived in trees, and that's where the damn snakes were down there on the ground where we didn't know Right and that's the divine tree of being that and so2:14:03Well you have to get the hell out of the tree and go Confront the snakes and then that's the that's the way out at least in principle. So that's kind of what that means2:14:13um Show you here's another image of the same thing2:14:22what I like about this you see the fact that the culture the Patriarchy God the father will say here is holding the2:14:32Suffering individual in his arms, and that's encapsulated by nature it's it's very much like the story in Pinocchio, where Geppetto Pinocchio wasn't able to go down2:14:42Into the depths and confront the terrible monster at the bottom of being without having support from his father even though his father ended up Trapped inside the whale if he wouldn't have been supported to begin with he wouldn't have been able to do it2:14:53And you know I've really seen this and I really seen this in people It's a hell of a thing not to have the confidence of your father. It's really really hard on people2:15:02You know if your father is someone who says to you you can do it. I really believe that you can do it I'll support you in what you're doing I think that you can sort it out and then acts towards you in that way2:15:12That's a gift that really almost no one else can provide you with mothers obviously provide I think they provide the same kind of gift but earlier you know because the mother has to take care of the infant when the2:15:22Infant has just completely dependent and so and this is Erickson's idea too Eric Erickson is the mother is is The person establishes the relationship that allows the developing person to manifest trust real trust while you're being2:15:35carried for crying out loud You know you can be dropped and the mother is also the source of food But the father seems to be something like the and I'm being2:15:44I'm obviously parsing these things farther apart than they can be need to be because The Father can play a nurturing role and the mother can play an encouraging role But we'll keep it simple for now the father seems to be the thing that supports and encourages it says well2:15:57Yeah, you know your little as small and all of that And you're subject to destruction and and and bullying and social pressure and all that but I know you can do it2:16:06I know you can do it and there's a force in that that's Unbelievable and people who don't have that have a have a hell of a time It's actually one of the things that's quite fun about doing psychotherapy because you get people who have damaged father figures2:16:19It's harder with the damaged mother Figure a because it's so bloody deep you know I had a client who I just I just thought she was a remarkable person But her relationship with her mother was really disrupted2:16:30It was really really hard to she says she would she Told me it was like something had been torn out of her at an early age that couldn't be replaced It's real because he just can't be someone's mother you know it's really hard2:16:42you're just not there enough for that, but you can sort of be someone's surrogate father that's a That's a role. You can play later, and that's what educators do at least to some degree although now2:16:51They're trying to be mothers and providing safe spaces and all of that Which is not really all that appropriate so that so the father is an encouraging figure and allows the individual at least in principle to support the2:17:03Catastrophe of being Voluntarily and so Anyway, so those you know those images are just be a brilliant beyond belief absolutely brilliant beyond belief2:17:15ok well, that's probably a good place to stop and so So we've got through the the two front these two fundamental stories remember in the Egyptian story2:17:25you have much more development of the figure of Osiris whose equivalent to Apsu and the Egyptians sort of walked through how this state becomes corrupt and2:17:34deteriorates and what the individual has to do in relationship to the state as well as in relationship to the Chaos itself, so in the mesopotamians story. It's mostly2:17:45Apsu's dead and Marduk makes a new society out of the pieces, but it's pretty damn implicit You know it's not detailed whereas by the time the Egyptians come along they say well. Osiris was great2:17:56He's corrupted by Seth he has an evil brother. So that's the tyrannical element of the state He's overcome by the evil brother. Which is the tendency of every bureaucratic system everywhere.2:18:07Things fall apart chaos comes back up the hero is born takes on the corruption of the state and Goes into the underworld which is like confronting Tiamat, but there I like to have the stories in parallel because one of it is2:18:19The confrontation with absolute unknown Tiamat and the other is the revivification of the state even though the stories also overlap and so in the Egyptian story2:18:29the and so just like Marduk was the the model for the Emperor the combination of Osiris and Horus was the model for the pharaoh and then there was an2:18:40Idea that emerged out of Egypt this was called the democratization of Osiris, and it's I think part of what gave rise to the entire Judeo-Christian idea set of ideas because the Jews2:18:52Hypothetically came out of Egypt right so their thinking is very deeply influenced by Egyptian ideas the Pharaoh Was the amalgam of Osiris and Horus and the amalgam of Osiris and Horus was his2:19:05Immortal soul the pharaohs immortal soul and the Pharaoh was allowed to use the symbolism of the conjunction of Osiris and Horus But as the Egyptian societies developed the aristocracy started to get to use that symbol2:19:17So it started moving down the hierarchy the idea that it wasn't only that the pharaoh was Osiris and Horus It was been it with the aristocracy and then by the time the Greeks came along it was all2:19:29Men who were part of the political structure and Then by the time the Christians came along it was no no wait a minute this applies to everyone men women and not only2:19:40male and female alike, but also not just stalwart upholders of the State but criminals, tax collectors, prostitutes,2:19:50outcasts, everyone had this Osiris/Horus soul inside of them and were entitled to be treated as2:20:00If they were intrinsically valuable as a consequence of that, and that's the bedrock as far as I'm concerned That's the bedrock idea upon which western civilization is predicated2:20:09It's the sovereignty of the individual and the individual sovereign. Why? The individual is the eye that's up above the pyramid.2:20:18The individual is the thing that can dominate sets of dominance hierarchies. The individual is the thing that play is not the game but the metagame. The individual is the thing that revivify the dead culture. The individuals the thing that that goes out to2:20:33combat chaos and generate something valuable as a consequence, and that's why it's sovereign and valuable. That's the foundation of our legal system and our culture, so2:20:45so think about it as the Emergence as an emergent property of enlightenment ideals is dangerous because that's four hundred years2:20:54Who cares about four hundred years? This is forever and forever is a lot more firm grounding than four hundred years. It's not a set of rational ideas2:21:03It's way way deeper than that so Okay Good enough. We'll see you in a week0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 09: Patterns of Symbolic Representation
0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 10: Genesis and the Buddha
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:11I told you at the beginning of the class that I started working on this material0:00:22partly because I was interested in why people were so inclined to to go to any0:00:33lengths to protect their belief systems I wanted to understand and I knew that those were systems of value right that the belief system is something that0:00:42enables you to ascribe value to things so that so that you can act in the world towards things and away from things0:00:51roughly speaking and I've already made a case to you that belief systems regulate people's own emotions but not not as a0:01:04consequence of decreasing their death anxiety or anything like that or even directly decreasing their their threat0:01:13sensitivity or uncertainty but more specifically by helping them orient themselves in the world so that what0:01:22they do matches what they want in the social environment and it's an important set of distinctions because the emotional control that belief systems0:01:33allow is mediated by success in the social environment that's the crucial thing it's not it's not directly it's0:01:42not as if you're holding a belief system and that's directly inhibiting somehow your emotional response Civet II it's more that you share you have a mode of0:01:53orienting yourself in the world so that other people can understand what you're up to so that you can cooperate and compete with them without conflict and0:02:03the fact that you can do that without conflict and maybe even with cooperation that's what regulates your emotion so it's not only the fact of the beliefs belief system it's the fact that it's0:02:13shared with everyone else and so people are willing to defend their belief systems because they're defending the0:02:25territorial structure that enables them to make sense of the world and then to act out making sense of the world with0:02:34everyone else around them now then the question arises what if two different0:02:43groups of people have different belief systems what do you do in a situation like that and one answer is you capitulate another answer is that you0:02:53fight another answer might be that you come to some consensus about how the difference between those different belief systems might be mediated so that0:03:02you can inhabit the same territory without subordination or without conflict but if you're going to come0:03:11together in an agreement you can't do that simply by abandoning the belief system because the belief system is what Orient's you in the world and so the0:03:22negotiation is very tricky and because of that it often ends up in subordination or conflict another0:03:33question that might arise out of that rat's nest of questions is if you have belief system a and you have belief0:03:42system B and they're in conflict is there any principles that you can use or any guidelines you can use to take the belief systems apart to understand what0:03:53might be of central value in either of them are both so that if you do bring them together or even if one supersedes the other that there's some evidence0:04:03that they're predicated on principles that are actually viable and of course that brings up the question of what constitutes viable principles and I got0:04:12interested in that more particular question because when the Cold War was raging there were two ideological0:04:21systems set up in the world roughly speaking there were of course more but we can simplify it for the sake of argument down to two and one was predicated on the communitarian0:04:32principles that were put forward by Marx and the other was a consequence of the well I would say Western individualistic free-market capitalist0:04:42democracies roughly speaking and then you might ask yourself well were those only it was that only a difference of opinion right because that's the central question it was just a difference of0:04:52opinion if what's underneath it is arbitrary then a it doesn't matter which system wins roughly speaking B there's no right and wrong in the discussion0:05:03right it's and that that would be something that would be more akin to a postmodern claim it's just Group a puts forward their claims to power and Group B puts form their claims to power and0:05:12they're both equally valid and well have adder fundamentally because there's no way of solving the problem but it struck0:05:21me that that I didn't think that we should leap to that conclusion so rapidly and so I started to investigate I think I started to investigate the sub0:05:31structure of Western thought not so much communist thought because I thought of communism as an interloper on the scene it was a system that wasn't0:05:40devised and formalized until the late 1900s late 1800s and I didn't see it as part of what you might describe as0:05:49organic development there's no mythology so to speak at the basis of of the communist perspective and one of the things that's very interesting is that although those ideas were roundly0:05:59defeated by the end of the 20th century they're making a comeback so rapidly that it's almost unbelievable you know I got an email from a medical student yesterday at the University of Toronto0:06:09and now they're the course is that they have to take the mandatory these are social justice courses include modules on equity and equity is equality of0:06:18outcome it they're pushing people are having the equality of outcome notion pushed on them in mandatory training in universities everywhere again an equity0:06:27isn't equality of opportunity its equality of outcome you know that was the central dictum of the communist states in the 20th century it's like what the hell how how did we get back to0:06:37that again already so and the idea being is if there isn't absolute equality of outcome within an organization that the0:06:46thing is corrupt and needs to be restructured from the bottom up and then the question of course is who decides that outcomes are equal by what means and with what groups because you can you can0:06:56produce an infinite number of groups of people with equally validly in some sense and you're never going to get equality of outcome across the infinite0:07:06number of ways that you can parse up society into groups it's not even technically possible unless everyone has nothing so anyways these are obviously very0:07:16powerful ideas and the mere fact that they killed a hundred million people already or more in the 20th century wasn't enough to put them to rest anyways so back to the main theme is0:07:28there something this is the main question is there something is there a set of ideas that Western civilization is predicated on that are more than just0:07:39bloody opinion that's the question because if there isn't well then what do you what do you do about that it's0:07:49arbitrary you're just holding it for no reason whatsoever it could be a different system there's no reason to stick with it all of those things like it takes the it takes the core out of it0:07:59when that was Nietzsche's claim right he said you take the core metaphysical presupposition out from underneath western civilization or any civilization0:08:09for that matter and the whole thing loosens shake ins shakes and crumbles well for Nietzsche the metaphysical presupposition was God0:08:19well and then the question of course well what even does that mean and in on one hand it means I suppose adherence to0:08:28a dogmatic set of beliefs but then you might ask yourself well is there something else that it means it means at least the hypothesis of some transcendent value it means at least0:08:38that so you know Nietzsche announced the death of God and0:08:48so one of the consequences of that note Dostoevsky was working on exactly the same set of ideas and in crime and punishment in particular which is a book like it's a necessary book that's the0:08:58thing is there's a number of books that were written in the last hundred and twenty years that you really have to read and crime and punishment is one of them and I think the Gulag Archipelago is another0:09:07and probably beyond good and evil is another but you know Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche were writing in parallel it's remarkable how much their their lives0:09:16intertwined and Nietzsche knew more about Dostoyevsky then then is generally known there's been some recent scholarship indicating that but in0:09:25Dostoyevsky's book crime and punishment he has a his main character Raskolnikov decides that he's going to commit a murder and he has very good0:09:34justification for the murder and Dostoyevsky is very good at this he he puts his characters into very very difficult moral situations and gives0:09:43them full justification for pursuing the the0:09:58pursuing the pathway that they're pursuing and so Raskolnikov he's broke and starving he wants to go to law school his sister's about to prostitute herself ruff roughly speaking by0:10:08marrying a guy that that hates her that she hates and that and he has contempt for her at least acts in that manner he's trying to rescue his mother as well who's also in dire financial straits he0:10:18he goes to a pawn broker to pawn his meagre position so that he can continue to scrape by and she has this nice I0:10:27believe it's her niece that's not very bright who she basically treats as a slave and is horrible too and and so the character the pawnbroker has this money0:10:37Raskolnikov is in dire need he thinks look I'll just kill her because why the hell not I'll take her money she's not0:10:46doing any good with it anyways I'll free your niece who's just lurking as a slave she's got all these other people tangled up in her pawnbroker schemes all that'll0:10:55happen is the world will be a better place and the only thing that's holding me back is conventional moral cowardice and you know Dostoyevsky has his0:11:04character in Crime and Punishment go through days hours hours and days and weeks of intense imagination about this0:11:13rationalization about this trying to justify himself placing a male outside placing himself outside the law so that he can perpetrate this act and telling0:11:23himself with all the best nihilistic arguments that the only possible thing that could be holding him back is an an arbitrary sense of indoctrinated0:11:32morality and so Dostoyevsky explores that he does commit the murder and then of course all hell breaks loose because things don't necessarily turn out the way that you want he gets away with it0:11:41however well he gets away with it technically because no one knows he did it but he doesn't get away with it in relationship to his own conscience and so that the rest of the book explores0:11:51that well Dostoyevsky I believe it was in crime and punishment although he makes the same point in many of his books he makes a very fundamental point and this is the kind of point that that0:12:01I think that people who haven't investigated these matters down this particularly little particular literary and philosophical pathway never grapple0:12:10with dusty Sookie said straightforwardly if there's no God so if there's no higher value let's say if there's no transcendent value then you can do whatever you want0:12:20and that's the question that he's investigating and you see this is why I have such frustration say with people like Sam Harris this sort of radical atheists because they seem to think that0:12:31once human beings abandoned their their grounding in the transcendent that the the plausible way forward is with a kind of purist rationality that automatically0:12:42attributes to other people equivalent value it's like I just don't understand that they believe that that's the rational pathway what the hell is irrational about me getting exactly what0:12:52I want from every one of you whenever I want it at every possible second why is that irrational and how possibly is that more irrational than us cooperating so0:13:03we can both have a good time of it I don't understand that I mean it's as if the the psychopathic tendency is irrational0:13:12there's nothing irrational about it it's pure naked self-interest how is that irrational I don't understand that where where's the pathway from rationality to0:13:22to an egalitarian virtue why the hell not every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost it's a perfectly coherent philosophy and it's actually0:13:33one that you can Institute in the world with a fair bit of material success if you want to do it so I don't understa0:13:42Dawkins and Harris I inhabit is so intensely conditioned by mythological presuppositions that they take for0:13:52granted the ethic that emerges out of that as if it's just a given a rational given and this of course precisely ditch0:14:01his observation as well as Dostoyevsky's that's Nietzsche's observation you don't get it the ethic that you think is normative is a consequence of its of its0:14:10writ of its nesting inside this tremendously lengthy history much of which was expressed in mythological formulation you wipe that out you don't0:14:20get to keep all the presuppositions and just assume that they're rationally axiomatic they're the rationale to make a rational argument you have to start with an0:14:30initial proposition well the proposition that underlies Western culture is that there's a transcendent morality now you could say0:14:39that's a transcendent morality and Stan she ated in the figure of God that's fine you could even call that a personification of the morality if you want to if you if you don't want to move0:14:48into a metaphysical space I'm not arguing for the existence of God I'm arguing that the ethic that drives our0:14:57culture is predicated on the idea of God and that you can't just take that idea away and expect the thing to remain intact midair without any foundational0:15:07support now you don't have to buy that but if you're interested in the idea then you can read Nietzsche because that's what he was trying to sort out and it wasn't only Nietzsche he came to0:15:17that conclusion because many people have come to that conclusion but I think the two who've outlined it most spectacularly were Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and each is an unbelievably0:15:28influential philosopher you know I don't think there was any one that was more influential during the entire course of0:15:37the 20th century accepting a very very tiny handful of other people accepting the scientists we won't bother with their with their discussion you could put Marx in that category you could put0:15:47Freud in that category partly but after that the list starts to get a lot thinner you know so maybe there's ten people up in that level and Dostoyevsky0:15:57of course I think I mean if if you ever if anybody ever prepares a list of the top ten greatest literary figures in the world he would be in the top ten list0:16:07you know I think he's perhaps second to Shakespeare and maybe above Shakespeare in my estimation so these aren't trivial people we're talking about and they0:16:16weren't dealing with trivial issues well so then the question might be what's at the bottom of the idea of a transcendent0:16:26value and I want to wanted to approach that staying out of the metaphysical domain as much as possible because you0:16:37can claim anything you want from a minute physical perspective and that's a big problem and so people will say well why come up with a hypothesis of God for example God could be anything there's a0:16:46satire the Flying Spaghetti Monster right is a classic satirical representation of a deity that the Atheist types used to buttress their0:16:55arguments and fair enough you know as a satirical idea it's pretty damn funny but there's things about this that aren't the least bit of music and the0:17:04thing that's not amusing is well what if anything is our culture predicated on okay so what happened well Nietzsche and Dostoevsky put this forth this set of0:17:14propositions and out of Dostoyevsky's line of thinking to some degree grew Solzhenitsyn Solzhenitsyn documented the absolute horrors of equity predicated0:17:24Soviet society you know and we don't teach we don't learn about that right this I don't understand is that what0:17:33happened in the 20th century on the radical left end of the spectrum is not well documented students don't learn about it why the hell is that we learn about World War two we learn about what0:17:42happened in the Holocaust and fair enough we absolutely should but nobody knows it's mystery to everyone when I talk about what happened in the Soviet Union and that's absolutely appalling0:17:52and that's to say nothing about what happened in China which was equally horrible the system didn't work it was0:18:03predicated on the wrong values unless you think that that sort of thing means worked you know because you have to define that as well but it collapsed under its own weight after it killed0:18:13tens of millions of people that doesn't really instill R it's not like Russia has recovered it doesn't seem to me like that's a very good definition of worked now whatever we're doing in the West0:18:23seems to work for all of its flaws and the question is are we just deceiving ourselves is it just arbitrary power politics an opinion or is there something at the bottom of it so when0:18:39Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago he believed that the Russians would have to return to Orthodox Christianity to find their pathway forward and that's of course has made him into a reactionary in the eyes of many of his critics but0:18:49that is perhaps what is happening in Russia although it's very difficult tell because Putin also seems to be using his affiliation with the Orthodox Christian Church as a means to0:18:59consolidate power so the situation in Russia is unclear but a religious revival if that's happening in Russia and perhaps it isn't but if it is happening is something that0:19:08unfolds over decades and even centuries so it's not an easy thing to evaluate when it first starts to happen but Solzhenitsyn drew the same conclusions0:19:18that Dostoevsky did fundamentally I'm not not in exactly the same way but very very close he believed as far as I could tell that unless people were willing to0:19:27adhere to some sort of transcendent value that they had no protection against pathological ideologies and no protection against the murderous impulses that came along with them and I0:19:37found his work in unbelievably I found his right incredible powerful incredible I don't know how you can read that book and not draw that kind of conclusion I0:19:47think people who criticize soul Janette's and have never read the damn book because that book is like it's like going into the ring with Muhammad Ali and being pummeled to death for half an0:19:56hour you know you don't recover from it that easily so then Jung branched off of0:20:05Nietzsche and so Nietzsche's idea was that people would have to create their own values roughly speaking and I think that's where Nietzsche's is.we is his0:20:14weakest because it isn't obvious to me that people can create their own values and I think he fell into and I don't want to be a casual critic of Nietzsche0:20:23because that's always dangerous given that he probably had an IQ of 260 you know I mean he was way the hell out there in the stratosphere and just when you think you've understood what he was0:20:32talking about you can be bloody well sure that you didn't but it does seem to me and he was running out of time he died young you know and he was trying to solve this problem in a rush I would say and he hypothesized that people would0:20:43have to become Superman over men roughly speaking in order to deal with the death of God and that idea sort of branched off into Nazi propaganda because that's0:20:53in some sense what the Nazis were trying to do with their promotion of the of the perfect Aryan you know now it's a mystery it's a missile of media in my estimation and it was partly because his0:21:04sister who is a perverse creature um what would you say doctored his work in such a way so that it was more easily0:21:13appropriated by the Nazis but there is some danger in what he said too because the question is well if you're going to transform yourself into the into the0:21:22giver of values what stops you from inflating yourself into something like a demigod and just pronouncing what the values are going to be so that's a0:21:32problem you know you're gonna replace tradition with yourself well there's dangers in that because0:21:44there's nothing to keep you humble that's that's the most appropriate objection there's nothing to keep you humble and those things can spiral out of control very rapidly and they did say0:21:53in the case of Hitler I mean it's easy to blame what happened in Germany on Hitler but that's a that's a big mistake because it was a dialogue between Hitler and the German people right Hitler0:22:03didn't create himself it was co-creation he said things people listened and told him back what to say and then he said them and they listened and they told him back what to say and0:22:13it looped until he was the mouthpiece of their darkest desires now that's a that's a game he was willing to play but you can't think about that as it isn't like Hitler0:22:23created Nazi Germany Hitler and the Germans co-created Nazi Germany you know when a leader gives articulation to the0:22:33imagination of the population that's what a leader does and you know you could say that while Hitler maybe Hitler filtered what the Germans were telling0:22:42him through a particular lens because he had no shortage of resentment and desire for revenge in his own heart you know it's not like his life was a spectacular0:22:52success before he became a political activist and he was brutalized very badly in World War one and he didn't get to pursue his primary dream which was to be an art student in Vienna and he had0:23:03applied three times and got rejected all three times and so he was bitter about that he was basically living on the streets after World War one it wasn't the world's happiest person and I'm sure0:23:13he carried a fair bit of resentment in his heart when he was in the trenches in World War one in experience that he had all of his friends were killed by a mortar when he0:23:23had wandered off to go do something else so you know it's hard to even imagine what something like that would do to you but I can tell you when you're the only survivor out of 20 people that's also0:23:33going to give you an enhanced sense of your own specialness because the alternative is just to think about how goddamn arbitrary the universe really is so so Jung studied Nietzsche in in great0:23:48detail and he was particularly interested because Jung had his finger on the central problems all the time right because he was a great psychologist and he was listening to0:23:58what people said and he was a staggering genius as well and so like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn he was that kind of prophetic type I would say and0:24:08he understood as well perhaps what was wrong with Nietzsche's formulation the idea that people could only create their new their own values and that's what0:24:18would replace the lacking fountain the foundation that was now lacking under Western civilization itself and he came to his conclusion I would say through0:24:28Freud because Freud started analyzing parts of the human cognitive process and0:24:37content that people hadn't attended to before in any in any great detail and that was primarily dreams you know the idea of dream analysis I suppose is one of Freud's perhaps Freud's major0:24:47contribution to modern Western thought the idea was there was something to dreams and I suppose what but for I did0:24:56has said hey look isn't it strange we have this whole other form of thought that we engage in at night it and it speaks in language that we don't really0:25:06understand and so what the hell is that and you can say and many modern people do dreams are of no significance or even that they're random processes which is0:25:15an absurd proposition obviously because they're by ferrell whatever they are they're obviously not random so so Freud's idea was that there was some0:25:24something in dreams that was informative so that's as now he had a method for described for extracting out from the dream0:25:33what the dream purported to represent and he outlined that in great detail in the interpretation of dreams and if you want to read one book by Freud I would0:25:43highly recommend that when it's a very long book and it's very detailed but Freud does an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of the way that dreams work now he made the because0:25:53because he had brought a theoretical framework to bear even on his investigation into dream structure he concluded that dreams were essentially0:26:02wish fulfillment and that's where Jung and Freud disagreed he also believed that the primary motivating factor of human beings was sexual and now that's a0:26:13tougher one to toss aside because even if you're a Darwinian rather than a Freudian you're going to obviously support the proposition that sexual0:26:23motivation among any living creature is going to be one of the highest order motivations because otherwise creatures don't repre0:26:32so the question is is that is that the ultimate source of motivation and in some sense the answer to that has to be yes well Freud wanted to make that in0:26:41some ways the sole source of motivation and I'm oversimplifying and I hate to do that in relationship to Freud because he was not a simple-minded character Young0:26:50had a dream once if I remember correctly that Freud and you were excavating a basement and so Freud had outlined in0:26:59the Freud had already discovered the basement let's say so that would be the unconscious structure of the psyche and Jung broke through into another basement that was a multi-chambered place so many0:27:09many many rooms and I suppose what drove Jung and Freud apart was Jung's proposition that there was a hell of a lot more going down going on down there0:27:19than had already met the eye and they broke on the idea that the sexual impulse was primary roughly speaking they broke when Jung wrote a book called symbols of transformation which is0:27:29actually there's there's three books that I know of that are sort of like maps of meaning one is symbols of transformation one is a book by Eric Newman called the origins and history of0:27:38consciousness and the third and the third one while his maps of meaning they're the same book they're just like they're trying to saw0:27:47the same problem from three different directions they're all attempts to address the same problem and so symbols of transformation was a book that Jung wrote about the fantasies of a0:27:56schizophrenic American woman and he was he was trying to relate her fantasies to these old mythological ideas and Jung's0:28:05idea essentially and this is an idea that was shared by people like Piaget so we're not going to say that you and Laura Freud just pulled this idea out of the air was that the the birthplace of0:28:17myth mythology and literature for that matter was the dream that that that they share structural that they share they0:28:28they share what mode of information presentation and it's a relatively radical hypothesis but but given that0:28:44they both they both represent dreams dreams and mythological representations0:28:53share an essentially narrative structure and they use their literary like you know I mean it's not so unreasonable to notice that a dream at night is like the0:29:02movie that you play in your head and it's not unreasonable to note as well that the dreams that you have at night bear a relationship to the daydreams that you have during the day it's a form0:29:12of cognition it seems like an involuntary form of cognition no and that's a very strange thing so Jung thought about the dream as nature speaking of its own accord roughly0:29:21speaking and so his idea was well when you when you sleep you dream but the dream happens to you it's not something that you create the way that and you don't even think about creating it0:29:31because I might say well what are you thinking about and you'll say I'm thinking about whatever it is and you'll take credit in some sense for thinking that because it seems like a voluntary0:29:40activity but what happens at night is that you think but you think involuntarily and so what Jung would say is that means that something is thinking in you and that's a perfectly reasonable0:29:51way of looking at it and this is one of the things that's uncanny about the psychoanalysts is they they were willing to take their observations to their logical conclusion0:30:00there are things that think in you what are those things and what are they thinking and why are they thinking it0:30:09now if you do dream analysis and this is a tricky thing because who's to say if you're dam analysis is correct right it's very difficult to understand that0:30:20if you if you do dream analysis with someone you generally have them lay out their dream and then you ask them when they're going through the dream a second time you lay out the dream and you can0:30:30kind of get a picture of it and then they lay out their dream a second time and as they go through it every time they mention a detail or character you ask them what that reminds them of and0:30:39the hypothesis is that the dream is presenting an image or an idea that's associated with a network of ideas and that if you can expand on the network of0:30:49ideas as you go through the dream you can elaborate on the dream you can expand it upwards and you can start to see what it might be attempting to put0:30:58forward now Freud's idea was that the dream knew what it was doing but that its content was being suppressed and oppressed by an internal sensor so the dream had to be sneaky about what it was0:31:09saying because it was going to deliver a message that the person didn't want to hear and that that was tied up with his idea of repression but that's not Jung's0:31:18idea see Jung's idea was different he said no no the dream is trying to tell you what is trying to tell you as clear as it can that's just the best it can do0:31:28and so you could think of the dream and this is I believe the right way to think about it the dream is the birthplace of thought the same way that artists are the birthplace of culture it's exactly0:31:39the same process it's that your mind is groping outward to try to comprehend what it has not yet comprehended and it does that first by trying to map it on0:31:49to image and it's doing that in the dream and it's somewhat incoherent and and and well let's stick with incoherent because it's not yet a full-fledged0:31:58thought it's the birthplace of thought it's a fantasy about what might be and then if you can grip the fantasy and0:32:07share it with other people then maybe they can elaborate upon it and bring it into being with more clarity than it would be a merely existed as the precursor of a0:32:18thought in your imagination now because Jung's idea too was ok you think you think in words where the hell do those thoughts come from well they just spring into my head well that's not much of an0:32:28answer they just what pop out of the void is there some sort of precursor to the development of the ideas is there a developmental pathway so here's an image0:32:37this is the Buddha there's calm water there's a lotus the roots go all the way down to the bottom of the lake it's dark down there the0:32:46roots are embedded in the dark substrata at the bottom of the lake the plant moves upwards towards the light that the water gets lighter and lighter as you0:32:55move upward with the root the flower manifests itself on the surface and the buddha sits in the middle that's an image about how ideas develop they come0:33:05out from the bottom of reality and they push themselves up towards the light and they blast forward and something emerges as a consequence that's what that image0:33:14means and it's an image the gold Buddha that's sitting in the middle of the Lotus is an image of the perfect person you could think about the gold Buddha who sits in a triangle as exactly the0:33:24same thing that's the eye on the top of the pyramid these are all the same ideas there's and what's the idea that's trying to burst forward how to be in the0:33:33world well what other idea would burst forward because it's the only problem that you really have right how should you manifest yourself properly in the world it's everyone's question it's the0:33:43ultimate question it's been the ultimate question since the beginning of time and we've been working out that idea forever first of all merely by acting it out and0:33:54then by representing the actions and then by representing the representations and spiraling all that together so I started looking developmentally I0:34:04thought okay maybe these idea have roots and this was partly predicated on the observation from Dostoyevsky and Neches and and and so forth that there did seem0:34:14to be a necessary pattern in moral in in morality there seemed to be a necessary pattern it wasn't arbitrary it was a it was a representation of the specific0:34:25mode of human being and it isn't some that's just imposed on you by your cultures not something that's just learned its intrinsic in you and it's manifest in the culture at the same time0:34:36and there's a dial and met and and there's a dialogue between those two things the culture in nature where both where the idea is embedded trying to make make make the proper articulation0:34:47of that spring forward in each individual and that's only to say these aren't these aren't radical propositions0:34:57your nature strives so that you can manifest yourself properly in the world culture strives to aid you in that endeavor is that is there something0:35:06about that that's that's that's of dubious validity what else would it be doing working for your death hardly working for your destruction well you0:35:15could see that maybe when culture becomes pathologized but to the degree that it's able to maintain itself across long periods of time it obviously has to be striving in some way for the mana for0:35:26your individual manifestation so that you can survive and flourish so there's a there's a there's a co-creation of the human being going on through nature and0:35:36through culture and well and then perhaps with your own with your own voluntary will participating whatever the hell that is something we don't0:35:46understand at all and are prone to dismiss because of that so then I learned about PHA and PHA had some very0:35:57interesting ideas and I think I've told you already what Piaget was up to he wasn't a developmental psychologist he didn't even regard himself as a psychologist he wanted to reconcile0:36:06science and religion that's what he was doing through his entire bloody life because it would drove him crazy when he was in adolescent and he didn't think0:36:15that he would be able to survive unless he could bring those two things together so he's working on the same problem and so one of the things that Piaget who was0:36:24very prone to observation he was an ethologist of human beings that's a good way of thinking about an ethologist is a scientist who studies animals by0:36:33watching their behavior rather than studying them under laboratory conditions and he got very interested in the spontaneous emergence of morality in play of children that was so smart0:36:43that's so smart that idea that you know when kids come together and unify themselves towards a particular goal so in play that a morality emerges out0:36:53of that and that that morality and I've mentioned this before there's a morality in game one there's a morality in game two there's a morality in game three0:37:02what's common across all those morality ziz a meta morality and so the meta morality emerges from the particular morality x' that are embedded in particular cooperative situations we0:37:13could say cooperative and competitive situations you can expand that out today you can expand that out biologically to some degree to the idea of the dominance hierarchy right every social animal and0:37:24even many animals who aren't social are embedded in a dominance hierarchy the dominance hierarchy has a structure we couldn't call it a dominance hierarchy dominance hierarchy a b c d e thousands0:37:36of them across thousands of years you extract out from all of them what's central to all of them that's the pyramid of value what's the what's the0:37:46question do you need answered about the pyramid of value what's at the top because that's the ideal that's the eye at the top of the pyramid or the golden0:37:55buddha in the in the lotus it's the same thing it's the same thing as the crucifix paradoxically enough and that has to do it has to do with something0:38:04like the voluntary acceptance and therefore transcendence of suffering it's something like that these are not arbitrary ideas they're deeply that's my0:38:15case anyways they're deeply deeply deeply rooted in biology and culture they're they're as deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is0:38:24rooted in biology and we already know the answer to that the dominance hierarchies been around for 350 million years it's a long time you don't get to0:38:33just brush that off and say well morality some sort of second-order cognitive problem it's like no it's not I can't I can tell you something about0:38:44its instantiation in your nervous system you have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps track of where you are in terms of your status and it bloody0:38:53well regulates the sensitivity of your mo so if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy barely clinging on to the world everything overwhelms you and that's because you're damn near dead and0:39:03so everything should overwhelm you you've got no extra resources any more threat you're sunk so you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion0:39:12and maybe also impulsive so that you grab well the grabbing is good and if you're near the top in the dominance hierarchy and your counter tells you that then your serotonin levels go up0:39:23you're less sensitive to negative emotion you're less impulsive you live longer like everything works in your favor your immune system functions better and you're oriented at least to0:39:33some degree towards the medium and long term future and you can afford that because all hell isn't breaking loose around you all the time and so then the0:39:42question is is there a way of being that increases the probability that you're going to move up dominance hierarchies well that doesn't seem to be a particularly provocative proposition0:39:52unless you think that it's completely arbitrary and random and that you can think that if you want but I don't think0:40:01there's any evidence for that whatsoever I mean we certainly have even for sexual selection we impose criteria they're not rammed random and arbitrary so okay so0:40:13back to young so what was young trying to do well he was trying to see see young believed that once we had stopped populating the cosmos with gods that0:40:24they went inside that's a good way of thinking well think think about it this way you know mm-hmm an archaic person0:40:33looks at the sky and uses his imagination to populate the sky what's the sky well it's the0:40:42constellations it's the domain of the gods well why well because the gods are what RB are out there beyond your understanding well that's what you see when you look up at the sky so you0:40:51populate the night sky with figures of your imagination so the gods are the things that you broadcast out of your imagination and see spread0:41:01over the world it's like the contents of your unconscious are manifesting themselves when you encounter the unknown it's exactly what it is that's how how else could it be right you're0:41:12projecting your fantasy onto what you don't understand that's how you start to cope with what you don't understand you populate the unknown with deities where0:41:21did they come from they came from your imagination well what happens when you take them out of the world do they disappear no they just go back into your0:41:30imagination so that's where young dug down to find them that's the same motif as rescuing your dead father from the-from or rescuing your father from0:41:39the belly of the whale it's the same idea is that the corpses of the gods inhabit your imagination so where do you go if you need to revivify them you go0:41:49into your imagination and that's exactly what Jung did and that mean it this is no secret if you read Jung he tells you that's what he did he tells you that's why he did it it's not an interpretation0:42:00on my part well so then then the question is what's down there is it just mass and catastrophe or is there something in it that's patterned well0:42:11Jung's proposition was that Yuri did you really discover the great archetypes that guide human being by investigating the0:42:20structure of your imagination when he thought about the imagination in some sense at least in part as a manifestation of your of your biology well yes0:42:29what else would it be you know when I told you that story about my nephew I believe right about him running around as a knight and then going off to have a0:42:38combat with the dwarves and the Dragons it's like well where did that come from well partly it came from his culture right because if he was a knight and and0:42:47so obviously that's a cultural construct but the thing is is that his imagination is it's this structure that's looking for things to fill itself with just like0:42:56your predisposition to language you have a predisposition to language what is that we don't know what does it do it looks for things in the world to fill0:43:06itself with right and if you're if you first of all wouldn't you start to learn how to speak you babble every phoneme did you know that there's there's lot0:43:15there's if I was learning to speak an Asian language there would be phonemes I couldn't pronounce and vice-versa an infant all of they babble all the phonemes and then as0:43:25they start to learn the language they lose the ability to say a bunch of them and only retain the ones that are relevant to that language so a baby babbles all laying all possible0:43:35languages that's a way of thinking about it and then loses the ability so that's a man if that's you can see there so you could say well you manifest the0:43:44potential to be possessed by all the set of all possible archetypes it's built into your biology and then as your enculturated in your own culture the set0:43:54of archetypes that manifest its manifest themselves in that culture are the ones that you pull in for your own use so my my nephew's running around like a knight0:44:03well you know if he would have been born in the middle of the Amazon he would be running around with a bow and you know a poisoned arrow and a bow it's the same thing it's the same idea it's just0:44:15trapped out in different cultural dress and he his little imagination was trying to solve the problem how do you deal with the unknown well what's the unknown0:44:25it's these little devils that keep biting jumping up on you and biting you and they come out without end so just killing them it's like cutting0:44:34the head off the Hydra right seven more grow well what the hell good is it to solve one problem when there's just a bunch more problems that are come gonna0:44:44come after you and that's everyone's question that's the ultimate question of nihilism right why bother solving a problem if all that's going to happen is that twenty0:44:53more problems are going to come your way why not just give up and die well right it's a good question it's that it's a good question right is this suffering so0:45:02intense that the whole game should just be brought to an end that's another fundamental question of existence and people who've become truly malevolent answer that question in the0:45:13affirmative they say it's too much we should destroy it now I wouldn't say they're precisely doing it only for humanitarian reasons0:45:23but you have to understand and appreciate the logic it's not irrational that's the other thing it's not irrational to work for the destruction of being it's not irrational in fact it0:45:36might be the most rational thing you could come up with depends on your initial initial set of presuppositions so you down into the0:45:45belly of the beast so to speak to to to to to see what lurks in the imagination he sees the birthplace of archetypal0:45:54ideas well what are archetypal ideas there there are patterns of it you could think about them as as representations of patterns of adaptive behavior and so0:46:05then you might ask well where did they come from well that's part of what I've been trying to to to teach you about they evolved as far as I can tell right0:46:17they evolved collectively is that our society and this is the dominance hierarchy idea doormen desire key set themselves up as a matter of course they're the standard way that animals0:46:27organize themselves in a territory well ok human beings are watching those dominance hierarchies since we became self-aware thinking what the hell are we0:46:36up to what the hell are we up to what's and and there's a question that lurks in there what constitutes acceptable power what constitutes acceptable sovereignty0:46:47who should lead who should rule what should be at the top well we talked about that the Mesopotamians figured that out speech and vision that's Marduk0:46:56speech vision and the willingness to confront the terrible unknown that's what should rule well what's that an arbitrary idea or is that a great idea0:47:05how could it be any other way well that's what human beings are like and I don't think that you can read the Mesopotamian story and understand the0:47:15reference which isn't an easy thing to do and fail to draw that conclusion Marduk has eyes all the way around his head he speaks magic words he goes off to fight timeout the dragon of chaos0:47:26well what's that that's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown well is any of that is there anything about0:47:35any of that that stands in opposition to what you would presume if you were just analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective we're prey0:47:45animals were predators we'd be threatened by reptiles forever why wouldn't we use the predator that lurks in the dark forest or the water as a0:47:54representative of the unknown why wouldn't we harness that circuitry we already have it at hand and even more to the point how could we do anything else0:48:04it's it makes perfect sense well so then what you might say well what would you want to be king you could say king of the world or king0:48:13of your own soul what do you want to subordinate yourself to how about your heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share that0:48:22with people there's no nobler vision than that and I don't see that it's merely arbitrary and so and it's not merely arbitrary -0:48:32because if you do that to the degree that you do that assuming your society isn't entirely corrupt you will be successful it will actually aid you0:48:42practically you'll rise up above men you'll be selected by women you'll be admirable you'll be valued and and you know that because if you look at0:48:52the people that you admire and value again unless you've taken a detour into dark places and are possessed with0:49:02admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes and for destruction you just have to watch the people that you admire and try to figure out what's common across them and draw0:49:12your own conclusions and you can ask yourself - when you're torturing yourself with your conscience because you're not doing what you should be and you know it what is it that you're torturing0:49:22yourself in relationship to you have a vision of your own ideal and you torment yourself if you're not matching it what's the ideal well you don't know0:49:31right it's it's kind of incoherent and and poorly articulated but that doesn't mean it isn't trying to manifest itself and and make itself known to you it's0:49:41really the purpose of religious education is to make that ideal articulated well we've lost that it's not a good thing okay so I talked to you0:49:53about the Mesopotamian story and I talked to you about the Egyptian story and what I thought it meant and it's a bit of an elaboration on the same theme because it says well the hero isn't only0:50:02the the deity transcendant pattern let's say that goes out into the unknown cuts it into pieces and makes the world that's not good0:50:11enough because it only deals with the terrible mother that's one way of thinking about it but there's a terrible father too once culture gets instantiated in in in large scale and0:50:21the Egyptians had that problem too problems chaos second problem pathological order well structures tend0:50:31towards pathological order the Egyptians laid out why that Seth right Seth is the evil advisor of the king who's lurking in the background all the time trying to0:50:40tear the structure down for his own malevolent purposes so now and then that overcomes the structure and destroys the and and what rigidify Xand makes0:50:50malevolent the entire social structures so it degenerates and to say fascist totalitarianism something like that and that's being a threat since we've had highly organized societies then the hero0:51:02ends up in the underworld and has to come back and and do direct combat with that malevolent force at the price of his own consciousness right because the0:51:11Horus gets one of his eyes destroyed it's no bloody joke to face the forces that make a culture rigid and malevolent so there's an addition to the hero0:51:21archetype two things happen one you go out and you conquer chaos and you make order out of it but the second is you take pathological order recast it into0:51:30chaos and then allow it to reemerge and you do that not in some arbitrary sense but in tandem with your rescued father and that's I guess in part what0:51:39Nietzsche Mik missed as far as I can tell is he didn't he knew that he knew of the death of God perhaps he didn't know that it had happened many times0:51:48Myrcella had documented that across many cultures but what Nietzsche didn't seem to lay out at least in his vision of the Superman or the over man was that it was0:51:58a responsibility of the person who wants to revivify the culture to go down and rescue the damn culture which is what you're supposed to be doing in university because your father is lying0:52:08dead in the libraries right so you're supposed to be going in there and taking that spirit out of the books and manifesting it in your own being that's0:52:17what the university's were for although I don't think that's what they're for anymore so we talked0:52:26about the Mesopotamians story and we talked about the Egyptian story and other people have documented the emergence of hero mythology in cultures0:52:35far more diverse than the ones that I'm exposing you to that was done most popularly by Joseph Campbell but Campbell's like I don't think Campbell had a single idea that he didn't derive0:52:45from Jung and I'm not saying that in a in a critical manner because Campbell was good at standing as a mediator between Union and a more general0:52:54population he did and that's that's a non-trivial accomplishment seriously but but but Jung is still the source of0:53:03those ideas and if you're serious about them that's the person that you have to go to for that kind of knowledge so now I wanted to tell you some other stories0:53:12that are that are in some sense closer to Western culture they're the stories upon which Western cultures actually predicated so I'm going to tell you well I'm not only Western story today I'm0:53:22going to tell you a couple of stories from Genesis and I'm going to tell you about the story of the Buddha I'm going to do that at the same time because the story of the Buddha is almost a perfect0:53:32parallel structurally speaking to the story of Adam and Eve and so I want to show you that we can you can decide for yourself if I'm imposing a pattern on it0:53:41because god only knows right or whether or not once you have the key to understanding the stories which I hope I provided you with with the you know the0:53:50idea of the dragon of chaos and the great mother and the great father in the individual it gives you a schema that you can use to understand the0:53:59characterizations of great stories and as far as I can tell it works pretty much universally across stories so so I want to read I want to walk you through0:54:08those foundational stories and I would say one of the things to know about the way the Bible is structured there's a couple of things you want to know about it is that it was authored by multiple0:54:17people across extraordinarily vast spans of time and then aggregated by other people and sorted into something that seemed to make sense and so you can0:54:28really think about it as a because Bible is is a library it's library of books it's not a book the library is organized a certain way that makes a kind of sense but it's not0:54:38exactly as if anyone decided what that sense would be it's the collaborative work of hundreds and thousands of people across thousands of years attempting to0:54:49organize a collective story into something that something out of which the sense emerges it's like human beings0:54:58acted and then they dream dreamed about how they acted and then they wrote down what they dreamed about how they acted and then they organized what they wrote0:55:08about how they dreamed they acted and that's how that book came into being and the information that's within it emerged from the behavioral level upward right0:55:17rather than being imposed top down no there's a there's a feedback right because if you understand how you act and that changes how you act and so you0:55:26can't you can't avoid the top-down feedback but a tremendous amount of the information in there and this is why it's revelatory information we don't know it's in there because how we act is0:55:38informative and then if you represent how we act that's informative but the information came from how we act not from the representation of how we act0:55:47and then you might think well how did we learn how to act and the answer is we've been trying to figure out how to do that for 3.5 billion years there's a lots of0:55:58information encoded in our actions and in our social interactions way more than we understand so we're acting something out we don't understand what it is but0:56:07we're doing our best to pull that information upward partly by dreaming about it that's what you're doing at night you're trying to figure out what the hell you're up to well you don't0:56:16know because you don't know yourself in totality how could you possibly know best you can do is dream yourself up and then speak yourself into some sort of0:56:25articulated existence it's just an approximation because you who whatever you is whatever you are rapidly supersedes whatever you think you are0:56:36that's why people constantly shock themselves you know if you were only what you thought of yourself all wouldn't life be simple you'd know exactly what you were doing all the time and you could0:56:45even control your own behavior well good luck with that you can't do that for yourself much less for other people so0:56:54let's go through these stories so they're sequenced people are trying to0:57:03make sense out of them they're aggregating these stories from all sorts of different places all sorts of different tribes all sorts of different times and then trying to make them coherent without losing the content and0:57:14without doing arbitrary editing and so part of the reason that the Bible is full of internal contradictions it's for the same reason that a dream is full of internal contradictions is if you impose0:57:24too much coherence on it you start losing the look imagine you have an imagine that you have a impressionist0:57:34painting well it's messy and and and the the image emerges and you might say well we could replace that with a nice clean0:57:43line drawing or even a sequence of stick figures and get the basic point across it's like well you would but you'd lose the the richness the unarticulated be0:57:56lost in the premature attempt to bring logical closure to the phenomena and so in fact we know already that that's maybe the difference between dreams and0:58:06waking thought so waking thoughts sacrifices completeness for coherence right so whereas dream thought0:58:16sacrifices coherence for completeness and that's that's that's not something I'm saying arbitrarily this is something that has been thought through by people who've been thinking this sort of thing0:58:25through for a long time precise thought excludes too much an imprecise thought0:58:35is not sufficiently coherent so we do both precise thought left-hemisphere linguistically mediate it's sequential logical incoherent but complete thought0:58:46imagistic emotion based right hemisphere the right hemisphere even has a more diffuse structure it's like the right hemisphere is trying to get a picture of everything now it's not going to be a0:58:57very detailed picture because it's a picture of everything of contradictions but at least it's a picture of everything and the left says that's not good enough for precise action and it's not so we'll narrow that0:59:07to precision but we lose the richness but you need both so there's an interplay well the documents that the Bible is composed of are half dream and0:59:18half articulated thought and they have the advantages of articulated thought and the advantages of the dream but also the disadvantages of both so it's a the0:59:28to the degree that it's articulated it's in a dogmatic box to the degree that it's a dream it's still incoherent but it's the problem is you have to you have0:59:38to move through the entire world even though you don't know it in detail so you need detailed knowledge where detailed knowledge is necessary and you need vague but complete knowledge where0:59:48that's necessary it's an it's a very uncomfortable balance but we have to face everything even though we don't understand anything completely now0:59:59Genesis the first stories in Genesis are what would you say unn unn identifiably1:00:10ancient god only knows how old they are and the story of noah here's an interesting thing I know this guy who's1:00:19a he's a quak quak quak tribal member and an artist who lives on the tip of northern of Vancouver Island and the1:00:29culture he comes from is about fourteen thousand years old something like that and maybe it's not being unbroken for fourteen thousand years very long period of time and he he's not literate this1:00:39guy although he's very intelligent has a great memory and is also a great artist and he's told me some of the stories that that have come down through the quark Wacka Wacka tradition and he was1:00:50educated by his grandparents who were original language speakers and he's an original language speakers there are many people like that left to think there's only 3,000 in his particular tribal group they have a story that's1:01:01the flood story that this except it's canoes and it isn't a dove it's a crow but the damn story is exactly the same it's like well what the hell is up with1:01:10that in fact at the end it's not a canoe it's a bunch of canoe that are tied together and at the end the canoes all break apart and that's why there are people all over the world it's like the story of the Tower of1:01:20Babel which I'm going to talk to you about today it's so the reason I'm1:01:29telling you that is because the stories at the beginning of Genesis are extraordinarily old now so maybe he tells the same story that we tell you1:01:39know making the presumption that we are the people who who are part of this judeo-christian tradition and I know that that's not the case for everyone1:01:49either he's telling the same damn story and it emerged from a central point so long ago that it's 20,000 years or1:01:5830,000 years or maybe 50,000 years since we moved out of Africa something like that and this story has survived which is certainly possible because oral do you think can an oral traditions survive1:02:08that long that's the wrong question oral traditions always survived that long what's radical is that they disappear were the radicals the oral tradition is1:02:20something that stays the same generation after generation so how much innovation do you think there isn't a small tribal group none that's why they don't have1:02:29advanced technologies they stay the same the stories stay the same so the idea that they can be transmitted unchanged over thousands and tens of thousands of1:02:39years is really not a debatable proposition it's the norm so either the stories emerge from a central source and have never been lost so that you can1:02:48pick them up everywhere or there's something about the stories that automatically regenerates themselves and I suppose it's a little bit of column a and a little bit of column B it's like1:02:57my my nephew when he perceived himself as a dragon slaying Knight it's like well was that the continuation of an1:03:06oral tradition or was it something that he spontaneously come up with and the answer is both both the pattern was there he just had to see it and he saw it and synthesized1:03:16it and and encapsulated it in his own imagination well that's not much different than the oral tradition being unbroken it's it's just a variant of the1:03:25same thing I mean if you lose a story but everyone acts it out you can reconstruct the story right and if everyone doesn't act1:03:34it out then the culture dies because there's some things about the story that you have to act out if your culture is going to survive that's the hypothesis and then that would be well that would1:03:43be where you would search for ultimate values the stories that enable you as an individual to flourish in such a manner that your culture flourishes in a way to1:03:53enhance your flourishing right that's the right way that you want to organize things you know that's what you do inside a family if it's functioning well right the family functions so that every1:04:03individual benefits from being in the family and that strengthens the family that's what Piaget called an equilibrated solution technically1:04:12speaking when he was looking for the origin of moral ideas he came up with the idea of equilibrate equilibrate 'add state and then equilibrated state is one1:04:21the three of you are in an equilibrated state if you all want to be in that state and while you're in that state the things that you're doing together work1:04:30better and they facilitate each of your development right so it's the stacking of an ethical of a set of ethical propositions so that the individual1:04:41benefits at the same time as the group and you could you can increase that stacking we could say well it's not only that you want to organize yourself so that all three of you get what you want1:04:50better than you would if you were alone and so that you're healthy and so the stacking also occurs all the way down the physiological chain you want to be1:05:00manifesting yourself in the world so that you remain as physiologically healthy as you possibly can so your stress responses are properly balanced and all of that and then maybe your1:05:09equilibrate at state is well enough developed so it doesn't just include the three of you it extends outward beyond you into the greater community and things stack like that and that's is1:05:19they get if they all get stacked up every level it's stacked on top of each other properly you have an equilibrated state and I don't think that that's any different than a vision of paradise I1:05:29think those are the same thing so now the question is well can that happen that's a whole different story1:05:38I mean it happens in your own life at those times where everything comes together for you you know it's chaotic and then everything snaps together and you think that's1:05:47exactly right and it's unstable you can't maintain it it fragments again but that's what you're that's what you're working towards if you have any sense you're working towards that constantly1:05:57and I think that's what music represents it's this stacking of harmonious patterns right that are playing themselves out and being and you watch how people respond to music the1:06:08orchestra's led by the leader every different individual plays his or her part they're organized into string sections and horn sections and so on so1:06:17you get individual sub group group orchestra leader then maybe you have people dancing well so what does that mean so maybe it's men and women dancing1:06:26in front of that like a Viennese Waltz so it's the the harmonious stacking of pattern being in the background led by someone who's making sure that the time1:06:35is in order and men and women arranging themselves according to the patterns right and everyone has a wonderful time when that's happening and it's acting out it's acting out the proposition that1:06:46all of these levels of being can be stacked up harmoniously at the same time everybody has a tremendously fun time while they're doing it maybe that's how you find a mate how to dance and for exactly the same reason1:06:56it's an optimal place to do that you see if there's someone that you can be with with whom you can mutually act out the patterns of being well we're all acting1:07:05that out at a dance we don't know what we're doing we're having a good time well yeah that's a little glimpse of paradise that's what that good time is now the Bible stories before what1:07:16happens what seems to happen is that you can there's there's two cataclysmic events that the first part of at the end1:07:25of the first part of Genesis there's the flood so the prehistoric world is wiped out by the flood and so the idea there in some sense there's a1:07:34bunch of ideas but one of them is there's a place in history past which we cannot look and that's absolutely true one of the things that's very strange1:07:43about human beings is that are written civilizations the ones we have records have all seemed to have popped up somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six thousand years ago it doesn't matter1:07:52where you look right Central America China India Greece Egypt it's all the same 6,000 years ago poof1:08:01there we were well what happened before that well the answer is we don't know everything is obscured by the chaos of history before1:08:10that point and all that seemed urged out of it so to speak are these incredibly ancient stories and so we're gonna walk through the ancient stories and see what we can pull out of them we've already1:08:19done that with several so so there are some representations of the Garden of Eden so this is by Hieronymus Bosch I don't know if you know who Hieronymus1:08:28Bosch is but he's definitely worth looking up because he was one strange character he was like I think he painted in the 15th century if I remember correctly he was like this 15th century1:08:38version of Salvador deli his paintings are so uncanny that that they're still shocking to the modern eye which is really something because it's not easy1:08:47to shock a modern person with a visual image but Hieronymous Bosch will definitely do that and that's his representation of paradise there's some central structure in the middle that's1:08:57partly phallic and partly chambered so and there's Adam and Eve you know United by God so and there's one by peter paul1:09:06rubens and it's sort of the primordial lush landscape that you might think about as the what the ancestral human home it's something like that a treed1:09:17landscape well white trees well we like fruit we lived in trees why not trees I mean even modern people have very powerful tendency to think about trees1:09:27as sacred you wouldn't get environmentalists tying themselves to great you know Douglas firs and protecting them if there wasn't some deep felt sense within us that they're sacred1:09:37whatever that means well trees are our home well that's as close to sacred as you're gonna get so ok so I'm going to1:09:47read you something from the book of Job and this is God harassing job so I don't know if you know the story of job but1:09:56it's a very interesting story and basically what happens with job is that God and the devil have a bat which seems a little you know on the unreasonable side for God but1:10:07he gets to do whatever he wants so he hasn't bet with Satan roughly speaking and says he says well job1:10:16he tells Satan that job is a good guy and that he's faithful to God and Satan says yeah let me let me out him for a while I betcha we can do something about1:10:25that and God says roughly speaking no you could touch him all you want he's gonna stay faithful and and and Satan says well we'll have a bet on that and so God hands him over and what happens1:10:36to job it's like everything terrible that you can imagine then happens to job right his his all his family dies all1:10:45his possessions are destroyed he gets a horrible skin disease and so then he's sitting there by the fire sort of scraping himself with bits of broken pots and all his friends come around and1:10:56tell him that the reason all this happened to him was because he deserved it so it's perfect right it's it's it's it's like an ultimate suffering story it's a precursor to the idea of the1:11:05crucifix that's one way of thinking about it so and Joe has a chat with God and asked some like Cain did roughly1:11:14what's going on and God attempts to he's irritated that job would even dare to question him it's like he's God it gets to do whatever he wants it's a very strange book anyways this is one of the1:11:25things that God says to job well God is trying to justify himself I would say to job and it's the reason I'm telling you this you see is because so imagine that1:11:37you're trying to analyze a literary work you might say well where's the meaning in the literary work and the answer is it's in the words word by word it's in1:11:48the phrases it's in the sentences it's in the relationship of the sentences to each other it's in the relationship of the sentences within paragraphs it's in1:11:57the relationship of the paragraphs within the contexts of the chapters and it's in the relationship between the chapters and the whole book and then the book in the whole culture so you can't1:12:08it's not easy to localize the meaning it exists at all those levels simultaneously and they all inform one another and what that means and it's even worse in a book like the Bible I1:12:17want to show you a picture this is an amazing picture so let me tell you what this is so the Bible is the world's first hyperlinked1:12:26document that's a good way of thinking about it so what you have here so what you see at the bottom there's a line along the bottom and then there's small1:12:36lines coming down from it okay each of those the line has dots on at each jot is a is a verse okay and then there's a1:12:46line associated with the verse that's a varying length and the length corresponds to how many times that verse is cross-reference somewhere else in the document and then these rainbow-colored1:12:57lines are the cross references so now that's really worth thinking about so then you think well that book is deep well why is it deep well it's because1:13:08every single thing in it refers to every other thing it's connected like your brain is connected like it's not a linear document and the really the thing is a book is a very strange thing right1:13:17because when you or even a story because when you lay out the story in some sense you're like god you're outside of the space and time of the story and so you can adjust the end to make1:13:28the beginning different you know how if you watch a movie and then it's got a surprise ending it changes the beginning you thought the beginning was one thing but it isn't it's something else well when you lay out a story you can fiddle1:13:38with the story anywhere in the story and so and you can also make something that happens before dependent on something that happens after which is very strange1:13:48and that's what's happened with the Bible because people have worked on it worked on it worked on it worked on it trying to synthesize it and make it coherent and make it make sense and so1:13:57they're continually connecting everything that's inside of it to everything else and so you end up with a document map that looks like that so now so you think about that everything is1:14:07connected to everything in that document not chaotically but meaningfully just like your brain is connected in a meaningful way it's not everything isn't connected to everything it's connected1:14:17in a meaningful way and then you think well where what do the stories mean and then the answer is well that's a hard question because all of them are connected with each other and then1:14:27there's all these different levels of analysis and so you can pull out meanings at one level of analysis that aren't self-evident at another level of analysis just like if you're1:14:36listening to a complex piece of symphonic music you can follow a bassline or you can follow the strings or you can follow the horns and they're all harmoniously interrelated but1:14:45they're also separable okay so there is an image that lurks in the Old Testament and the image is the same image it's roughly the same image as the image of1:14:56Marduk confronting Tiamat so for example at the at the beginning God makes here's here's how the beginning goes in the1:15:05beginning God created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moved1:15:15upon the face of the waters and God said let there be light and there was light okay so we got a look at the first few lines here so this is God justifying himself to job he says can you pull in1:15:26Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook will it keep you begging for1:15:35mercy will it speak to you with gentle words will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life can you make a pet of it like a1:15:44bird or put it on a leash for the young women in your house will traders barter for it will they divide it up among the merchants can you fill its hide with1:15:54harpoons or its head with fishing Spears if you lay a hand on it you will remember the struggle and never do it again1:16:04any hope of subduing it is false the mere sight of it is overpowering no one is fierce enough to rouse it who1:16:14is then able to stand against me who has a claim against me that I must pay everything under heaven belongs to me1:16:25more computer trouble oh there we go I will not fail to speak of leviathans1:16:34limbs its strength in its graceful form who can strip off its outer coat who can penetrate its double coat of armor who dares open the doors of its mouth ringed1:16:44about with fearsome teeth its back has rose of shields tightly sealed together each is so close to the next that no air can pass between they are joined fast to one1:16:55another they cling together and cannot be parted it's snorting throws out flashes of light its eyes are like the Rays of Dawn's flame stream from its mouth1:17:04sparks of fire shoot out smoke pours from its nostrils as from a boiling pot over born burning reeds its breath sets1:17:13coals ablaze and flames dart from its mouth strength resides in its neck dismay goes before it the folds of its1:17:22flesh are tightly joined they are firm and immovable its chest as as hard as rock hard as a lower millstone when it rises up the mighty are terrified they1:17:31retreat before it's thrashing the sword that reaches it has no effect nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin iron it treats like straw and bronze1:17:41like a rotten wood arrows do not make it flee sling stones are like chaff to it a club seems to it but a piece of straw it1:17:50laughs at the rattling of the Lance its undersides are jagged potsherds leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge it makes the depths churn like a boiling1:18:01cauldron and steez up the sea like a pot of ointment it leaves a glistening wake behind it one would think the deep had white hair nothing on earth as its equal1:18:11a creature without fear it looks down on all that are haughty and his king over all that are proud well so what's God doing he's describing what he defeated1:18:22in order to create the world that's Marduk and Tiamat okay so that's that's one reference like that all right so now another reference like that this1:18:34is from Psalms 74 yet God is my king of1:18:44old working salvation in the midst of the earth thou didst break the sea and pieces by thy strength thou didst shatter the heads of the sea monsters in1:18:54the waters thou did crush the heads of Leviathan right that's the creature that we just heard described thou gavest him to be food to the folk inhabiting1:19:04the wilderness now you remember so Tod when Marduk defeats time at he cuts her into pieces and makes the world out of her pieces and here what's happening is that the1:19:13force that that encounters the Leviathan is able to break it into pieces and feed everyone with it now the reason I'm telling you that in relationship to this1:19:22is because and the earth was what without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep let me tell you a little bit about that those lines before God's God begins to1:19:40create the world is Tohu Wabo who that's from the Hebrew the word Tohu by itself means emptiness or futility so there's a1:19:50psychological element to that a-and that emptiness or futility in some sense is what you confront when you're trying to extract your life from the world it is1:19:59used to describe the desert wilderness as well Touhou Wabo whoo chaos is the condition that bara ordering remedies1:20:10okay so there's the idea in the first verses that this initial chaos is being ordered and the order is what makes the world so the it's it's it's standard1:20:19cosmology order emerges out of chaos and the thing that makes it emerges the Word of God now darkness and deep which is tale in1:20:30Hebrew are two of the three elements of the chaos represented in Toa Touhou Wabo who the third is the formless earth in the ANU mulisch the deep is personified1:20:39as the goddess time out the enemy of Marduk here it is the formless body of primeval waters surrounding the habitable world okay so but we know Thao1:20:49and Tiamat are the same word or at least tale most derived from time out so the idea that's presented at the beginning of Genesis is the same it's an1:20:58abstracted and psychologize representation of the story that the Mesopotamians put forward so yahwah is Marduk roughly speaking going out and1:21:07conquering the dragon of chaos and making order out of it and then there are these allusions later saying job and in the Psalms of doing exactly that conquering a1:21:16primordial monster and making the world out of its pieces well so what does that mean exactly well it means that the highest ordering principle is the spirit1:21:27that goes out into the darkness or the deep that encounters the dragon of chaos because of obviously Leviathan is a dragon and defeats it and feeds the1:21:36people as a consequence while we are hunting creatures after all and in order to establish our place in the world we had to go out there and conquer the Dragons of the wilderness you might1:21:45wonder why does it drag and breathe fire well there's a bunch of reasons as far as I can tell fire is awe-inspiring so fire and a1:21:56terrible predator are the same thing because they both inspire awe fire is transforming but credit like what's a good metaphor for being bitten by a poisonous snake1:22:06well have you ever seen the wounds that a poisonous snake produces if you're bitten by them it's like someone took your arm and incinerated it and so the idea that a snake has fiery breath is1:22:16well let's call it close enough from a metaphorical perspective right now God is claiming to job that he's the spirit that Clee that clears the wilderness and1:22:27then builds order out of chaos and because because because he's the embodiment of that spirit in some sense job has no reason to ever question his1:22:37moral decisions it's something like that in the story of job but the point that that point will leave aside because it's a more complicated issue the point is1:22:47that the writers of the Bible are trying to dream up a representation of the spirit of civilization that's the right1:22:56way to think about it you can think of yahwah as the spirit of civilization and what is that well it's the thing that encounters the wilderness and makes habitable order but then it's also the spirit of the order itself and that's I1:23:07think why in Christianity there's a representation of God the Father because he's a representation of the the culture that's generated after the the chaos is ordered right you have the spirit that1:23:17goes out into chaos and orders and then you have the spirit of the order and then the spirit of the order and the spirit of the ordering principle have to figure out how to coexist that's partly1:23:26what the Egyptians were trying to figure out there's a dynamic relationship between the culture and the spirit that generates the culture and then you might1:23:35also ask should the culture be superordinate or should the spirit that generates the culture be superordinate and the answer seems to be the emergent1:23:44answer seems to be that the spirit that generates the culture should be superordinate to the spirit of the culture it's something like that and that's also why I think that one of the1:23:53brilliant discoveries let's say of Western individualistic civilization is that the group is there to serve the1:24:02individual because the individual is the thing that revivify is the group so with each depend on the other integrally but if you subordinate the individual to the1:24:11group then the group stagnates and dies and so that's a very bad long-term strategy even though the group and belonging to the group is clearly necessary you need to uphold the values1:24:20of the group but the values of the group should be subordinated to producing the individual who gives the group vision and the Mesopotamians figure that out the Egyptians figured that out we've1:24:30figured it out we just don't know that we figured it out and it's not a mere arbitrary supposition all right so I1:24:40should show you because this is actually interesting I think perhaps good I want1:24:57to show you what the cosmology what people considered to cause the the the the the structure of the initial order because it's kind of interesting and God said let there be a firmament in the1:25:07midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters and God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament and it was so and1:25:16God called the firmament heaven and the evening in the morning were the second day well so what are they thinking about well that's the sort of classical view of the world it's something like that is1:25:25that there's a disc that's the disc we inhabit and there's land that's the disc and under the disc there's water fresh1:25:34water and then under that there's the ocean and then on top of that there's a dome and that's the sky that's the firmament that's heaven and there's water above that well obviously because it rains so there1:25:44has to be water up there so that's the way the cosmos was conceptualized just so you know now it's a phenomenological conceptualization because that's what it1:25:53looks like right and you might say well that's wrong it's like well yes it's it's wrong in a functional sort of way it's right from a phenomenological1:26:02perspective but it's wrong from a all from a scientific perspective was never designed to be a scientific perspective so all right so we won't bother with1:26:11this part will we'll start here so God makes animals and plants and all of that and then at the end of it this is on1:26:21which day sixth day God said let us make man in our image after our likeness and1:26:32let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and over the cattle and all of the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth okay well the relevant there's two1:26:41relevant issues there one is let us make man in our image after our likeness well what exactly does that mean well we've already we've already encountered that1:26:51to some degree we've already encountered what the nature of the Spirit of God is in this story the nature of the Spirit1:27:00of God that creates order out of chaos is the thing that creates order out of chaos and so that the statement here is that there's something about human beings that partakes in that now when I1:27:13started unpacking this I thought okay look there's an idea that's at the root of our legal system and so our legal system is the articulation of the patterns by which we1:27:24live and to a fair degree it's it's an evolved system it's a culturally constructed system but it's an evolved system as well and it's predicated on the idea that there's something about1:27:33the individual that the law has to respect well so the question is well is that just an arbitrary supposition because that's really the question it's1:27:42the same question as is Western civilization founded on something that's a rock or is it just founded on something that's an opinion well it's the same question with regards to the1:27:52law the law assumes that there's something about you that's sovereign even if you're a murderer you have inalienable rights now you think that is a bloody1:28:01weird thing for any sort of system to have come up with because the idea that if you're the ultimate in malevolent transgressors that you still have some1:28:12sort of sovereign value it's like that is such an unlikely thing for people to think up that you really have to think a long time about how that might have come to be well there's an idea here that's1:28:22the idea is that there's something about human beings men and women you know because people often complain about the patriarchal structure of the Bible it's based on a misapprehension of1:28:31anthropology that was popularized by someone named gimme you toss at UCLA it says we're forever and for her perspective there's not a shred of historical evidence although there's1:28:41some psychological truth in it in in Genesis both men and women are created in the image of God that's quite a remarkable thing I think it's a rich a1:28:50remarkable part of the document because it's not what you'd expect from a patriarchal you know from a from a document that was designed to do nothing but extend the Dominion of the1:28:59patriarchy it's like you will left women with the damned cattle that would have made things a lot easier and that isn't what happened so both men and women have this image and what's the image well1:29:08that's the image of the thing that can order chaos and so it's necessary to treat you as if you have intrinsic value because the fact that you can partake in1:29:19the process of mediating between order and chaos means that you're basically the salvation of society that's what it means and so society can't impose on you1:29:29to to greater degree because you are too valuable for even the law to push arbitrarily past a certain point now1:29:38then you have to think this and this is this is this is where you really have to think about what you believe do you believe that or not because there's not1:29:48much difference really technically speaking there's not much difference than that between that and believing these stories it depends bloody well what you mean by believe they're not1:29:58scientific representations of an evolutionary process obviously the people who came up with them words scientists so whatever they are they're not that but they're making a proposition that's not an accidental1:30:08proposition and we that partly because it's rooted so deeply in these ancient stories we have no idea how old the Mesopotamian story is you know it's the oldest story we1:30:17have in written form so we know that but god only knows how old it is it's part of an oral tradition and these oral traditions can be look the same1:30:29Carver gave me a big thing called a sea suit and it's a man in the middle of a double headed sea serpent right so there1:30:39there that's 14,000 years old that came from Siberia it's the same bloody idea it's the same idea so these ideas aren't arbitrary so the1:30:48question is well are they true well then the question is what the hell do you mean by true because it comes down to that is it true that habitable order is1:30:59dependent on the spirit that moves into the unknown and takes the Leviathan and chops it into pieces and distributes it and the answer to that is yes that's1:31:08true as far as I can tell and do you mean is it literally true well it's just true as things get that's how we got here we got here because people went1:31:17into the unknown they conquered what was out there they took what was of utility from that they brought it back and they shared it with the community that's why1:31:26we're here that is the central story of humankind and that's still what we do you know we're not exactly necessarily going out to conquer an embodied monster1:31:36although we do that if we hunt for example but you know most of us don't do that anymore but to the degree that you're an explorer in the in the intellectual realm you're still going1:31:45out into the unknown and conquering what's out there looming like maybe it's it's the cure for a disease you're looking that right in the face you're trying to decompose it and break it into1:31:55its parts you're trying to understand and then you're trying to tell everybody what you found well and everybody Pat's you on the back and says well you're you're you're a brave Explorer of the1:32:04unknown well that is exactly the sort of thing that we should be fostering and it's the thing that we all admire so okay so that happens on the sixth day1:32:14and so now we know human beings are made in God's image well what does that mean exactly1:32:23I think I think what it means a reasonable way of thinking about it you can think about it like the genie the genie has this tremendous amount of1:32:32power that's constrained in a very small space and genie and genius are the same word roughly speaking so the genius is that your genius is the genie that1:32:41inhabits you right it's this logo spirit it's an it's put in a very small container you see that idea represented in the Christian conception of the1:32:52relationship between Christ and God because there's an idea that God had to empty himself out in order to fit into the body of Christ it's something like that they call that kenosis that's a1:33:01technical word and what it seems to be the idea that you're a looks like you're a low-resolution representation of the ultimate spirit that that encounters the1:33:12unknown it's something like that it's a very smart idea and you could say maybe that's what human beings have in common is that that that we reach an embodiment of that spirit for lack of a better word1:33:21so okay so then God makes the God makes human beings male and female makes them in his own image and is happy about them1:33:32and says well you're gonna dominate the world which you know people like David Suzuki read that to say you should go out and dominate the world because they1:33:41read that kind of patriarchal oppression into the text but this is more a description of how things are going to be then whether or not they should be that way so anyways that's the sixth day1:33:52the seventh day God rests right so that's the origin of the week roughly speaking so okay that's one story1:34:03there's two creation stories in Genesis and they actually don't match completely in their structure and what happened was someone they call the redactor maybe it1:34:13was a bunch of people we don't know took creation story one and creation story two from different places and thought well these are sort of the same and they're sort of different and people are going to be unhappy if we dispense1:34:23with this one and they're going to be unhappy if we dispense this this one but they don't make sense together so let's see if we can put them in some kind of order that makes a proximate sense and1:34:32they took the newer one and put it second and took the sorry they took the older one at second and put took the newer one and put it first so Adam and Eve is an older1:34:41story than the story that I just told you so but it's a different story it's written in a different style but it's been more or less brought into narrative1:34:50coherence with the first story so and you could say at the level of the sentence there is paradoxes but at the level of the chapter let's say the1:35:00stories make sense so okay so what happens up there went from the earth amidst and it watered the whole face of the ground and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground1:35:10and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul there's an identity in this archaic sort of thought between breath and spirit right respiration spirit1:35:20inspiration spirit NUMA like pneumatic tire spirit the breath contains the spirit well why is that well because when people died the breath leaves their1:35:31body and so it's an easy thing to identify that with the animating spirit right now anima means spirit as well so so that's the phenomenological reality1:35:41of the story and Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden and there he put the man whom he had formed Eden means well watered place well why well where1:35:51do you want to live these are desert people right who are writing this well what do they want they want an oasis what's a know what's an oasis it's a garden with water well you're gonna gonna live somewhere it's not gonna be1:36:01out in the middle of the damn desert you want to be in a garden that's watered and then you could say you also be in a walled garden that's protected and that's what paradise means Paradiso1:36:10means walled garden so this initial paradise is a walled garden why walled order it's culture nature what does it1:36:19mean well that's the natural environment of human beings it's a it's the optimal balance between culture and nature that's what a walled garden is with1:36:28enough water flowing in it to keep it to keep it fertile and that water is also chaos right there has to be it can't be static and dry and solid and stale there1:36:39has to be some living element to it so so it's a walled place that the water can still fructify and out of the ground1:36:49made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight so it's also full of trees this is our natural habitat and good for food The Tree of Life also in the midst of the1:36:59garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so these are two trees they bring forth fruit that produce something one produces the knowledge of good and evil and the other produces1:37:08eternal life so why well I'll get to that Amit and a river went out of Eden to water the garden and from thence it was parted and1:37:17became into four heads we won't bother with that so now God is having a little chat without him and he says look you can eat1:37:26every tree of the garden except one of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you you don't eat that because in the day you eat you'll surely die1:37:35so you might ask well why is the tree put there to begin with and well the answer to that is who the hell knows that's how the story portrays it we1:37:44don't know and the Lord God said it is not good that the man should be alone I will make help meet for him and out of1:37:53the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field in every fall of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof so that's an echo1:38:03of the idea of the power of the word right so even though these stories are from different traditions their separate traditions you see at the beginning that God uses his word to bring order out of1:38:13chaos and then he allows Adam in some sense to do the same thing is that there's this unarticulated plethora of being and the man comes along and says1:38:23that's that that's that that's that and that brings them into a higher order form of being so it's a it's a replication of the creation in a in a shrunken form and Adam gave names to all1:38:35the cattle cattle are just anything that has four legs roughly speaking and to the fowl of the air and to every beast of the field but for Adam there was not found to help meet for him and the goat1:38:45Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof and the rib which the Lord God had taken from man made he a1:38:55woman and brought her unto the man and Adam said this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man and then there's an injunction1:39:04therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh while there's also a there's a moral injunction there and so the idea is that1:39:13the two beings that have been created or actually not whole until they're one thing right and once they're joined together that's supposed to be one thing1:39:22and that one thing is actually a more perfect entity than the two things that are apart so and that's actually part of the sacred basis of the idea of1:39:33monogamous relationships in Western culture and they were both naked the man and his wife and we're not ashamed a crucial piece of information so what1:39:43exactly does that mean well the first question is what does it mean to be naked and so that's something1:39:52that I thought about a lot in relation and there's a relationship there with shame so the first question is what does1:40:01it mean to be naked and the second question is what does it mean to be not ashamed of that well there's an there is a I would say there's an implication of1:40:10a kind of unconsciousness so Adam and Eve exists in this paradisal state but they they don't they don't they don't have the capacity for self-reflection1:40:20there's no self-consciousness here well why would I say that because there's very little difference between self-consciousness and shame in fact if you do psychometric analysis of the1:40:31state of self-consciousness it loads with neuroticism so loads with anxiety and emotional pain so to become self-conscious what does it mean to1:40:40become self-conscious it me becomes it means you become aware one way of thinking about it is you become aware of your vulnerability or another is that you become aware of your insufficiency1:40:50okay so let's say that you're standing up in front of a crowd talking and you become self-conscious what happens well first of all you can't talk anymore1:40:59the second is he kind of fall inside and the third is you feel ashamed and the fourth is that you retreat and you look down so it's a low status operation and1:41:08it's associated with heightened anxiety and so then you might say well why would you become self-conscious before a crowd well the answer is they can see you1:41:17right and they can judge you and you can make an error in front of them and you can make a fool of yourself so they put you down that you can you can display yourself in a manner that ratchets you1:41:27down the dominance hierarchy that's to become self-conscious and so well at least you have the advantage of being covered up in front of the crowd but1:41:36let's say all of a sudden you're stripped of your clothes so what's the problem with that well all of your insufficiencies let's say are on1:41:45painful display you can be evaluated by everyone but even more importantly than that if possible is that clothes actually protect the most vulnerable parts of you human beings are upright1:41:55animals right we're very strange animals you take a cat or a dog they're basically armored the part of them that you see their back is heavily1:42:04armored heavily protected human being stretched up right and so the softest part of parts of us are there for display but also we're displayed as1:42:13sexual creatures too and so to become to be naked and not ashamed of it is to lack self-consciousness so the idea is that the Adam and Eve in the original1:42:22state in the garden lacked self-consciousness now the serpent was more subtle subtle is an interesting word here because it means kind of fog1:42:33like and and vague and difficult to detect so it's something that that lurks and is hidden so that's what the serpent is it sits in the domain of hidden things than any beast of the field which1:42:44the Lord God had made and the serpent said unto the woman hey hasn't God said you shouldn't eat of every tree of the garden and the woman said we may eat of1:42:53the fruit of the trees of the garden but of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden the central fruit God has said you shall not eat of it neither shall you touch it lest you die1:43:02and the serpent said unto the woman you shall not surely die for God knows that in the day you eat thereof then your eyes will be opened and you will be as1:43:12God's knowing good and evil all right so there's another implication there we already saw that there's an implication that Adam and Eve are not self conscious1:43:23and now there's the implication that their eyes aren't open or at least that they're not open fully in some sense they're not open for example to the knowledge of good and evil and that seems to be associated1:43:33somehow with death in some strange way okay so and it's the serpent talking to the woman so the serpent taught is that is the tempter of the woman so the1:43:44question is why in the world would that be I showed you those representations of Mary right holding the infant up in the air with her foot on the snake so you think well who's more self-conscious1:43:54women are men and the answer to that is women are more self-conscious than men and even further you might say that women taught men to be self-conscious1:44:03and I believe that to be the case maybe babies taught women to be self-conscious but women taught men to be self-conscious and they still teach them that all the time because there's1:44:12nothing that makes a man more self-conscious that to be rejected by a woman that he desires so the woman is always offering self-consciousness to1:44:21men and it isn't necessarily a gift that they exactly appreciate and that motif of course runs through the Adam and Eve story centrally because Eve is damned1:44:30forever in some sense for making out himself conscious well he didn't want to be self-conscious things were pretty good when his eyes were closed and he was wandering around not worrying about whether he was naked or not well the1:44:41women became self-conscious why because of snakes well maybe right maybe that's exactly what happened you know she imagined1:44:50we're being preyed upon for millions of years by predatory reptiles right and we become more and more alert to threat and more and more alert to threat and then one day we get so alert to threat that1:45:00we can see threat lurking in the future and then all of a sudden we become aware of the future and then we become aware of death and then we're really self-conscious but it's pretty good if1:45:10you want to keep the snakes down which we've been doing quite successfully ever since then but it's a big price to pay we got so damn sensitive to threat that we were finally able to conceive the1:45:20ultimate threat not proximal threats but the fact of threat itself and the fact of mortality itself and the fact of finitude itself and maybe women learned1:45:30that because they become painfully aware of the mortal limitations of their infants first right this small thing could die could end a little and1:45:41certainly as an object of predation and you can imagine God knows how many infants human-beings lost to predators I mean I told you at one1:45:50point I believe that there was a cat that was found that had a that had a that had a skull and jaws that were1:45:59specialized for biting the skulls of protohumans one long tooth at the back that would drive right through the back of the skull so the cat could put its1:46:08teeth here and drive the tooth right into the back of the skull so you know that's a good enough dragon for our for all for our intents and purposes I would1:46:17say anyways the snake comes along and opens the woman's eyes when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and1:46:26that was pleasant to the eye and a treated to be desired to make one wise she took of the fruit thereof and did eat and gave also unto her husband with her and he did eat and the eyes of both1:46:36of them were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons well there's a lot happening in those few lines now there's a fruit1:46:45thing going on there snake and fruit okay so we know from Lynn is Bell hypothetically that the reason that primates like us developed our intense vision is because we1:46:54co-evolved with snakes so the snakes opened their eyes what about fruit color vision right why to detect ripe fruit we1:47:03know that and our women and ripe fruit the same well they're the same insofar as it was women offering the ripe fruit and that's undoubtedly something that1:47:12happened you know that the hypothetical idea is the male's hunt and bring home protein the women gather what are they gathering well they're gathering at1:47:22minimum ripe fruit and then what are they doing they're sharing it well you also bring about a moral obligation when1:47:31you're sharing food right there's an invitation to reciprocity there and so the fact that women were sharing let's say ripe fruit with men also brings them1:47:40into their what would you call builds up the basis for the potential of a reciprocal moral obligation it's something like that and the problem again for men with being allied with1:47:50women and infants is that it also heightens their self-consciousness because you're a lot tougher and more indomitable say if there's just you but as soon as you have1:47:59wife say and then you also have an infant well all the burden of their self-consciousness and their vulnerability is placed upon you well it's a hell of a bargain well why did1:48:09men accept the bargain well it's partly because women stood in front of them offering them fruit right well part of the price that the men paid for that was1:48:19to wake the hell up well who the hell wants that it's a lot more it's a lot more calming to remain asleep with no knowledge of the sort of burden of1:48:28mortality that you would bear if you became self-conscious so fine so now they're done with it they the snake and the fruit woke them up and they can see1:48:37and the scales drop from the rise and so we can really see well so what does that mean how our brain is visual is devoted to visual processing so as well as long1:48:46as as our eyes got better our brain got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger what happens when it gets big enough well not only can you see you can Metis1:48:55see it's you can start to see into the future well that's exactly what happened to us not only could we see with our eyes we could see with our imagination and our1:49:04imagination is or you can see with your eyes closed right close your eyes bring up a vision you can imagine the future1:49:13well what do you see you're seeing a potential future with your eyes closed the circuitry is there once it's developed you can use it to imagine you1:49:22can project your project your vision into places that don't even exist and you can start to conceptualize the future what happens when you1:49:31conceptualize the future well this is a I'm spoiling the punchline you have to work because you can see the future coming you think all the future is1:49:40coming it isn't just the present anymore I don't have to just worry about whether or not I'm hungry right now I'm gonna have to worry about whether I'm hungry tomorrow and next week and next month1:49:49and next year and for me and for my wife and for my child and for the community it's like you can forget about your day-to-day existence in paradise at that1:49:58point there's no evidence that people in industrialized societies are happier than people in non industrialized societies in fact quite the contrary we're less happy why well because we1:50:09fully and constantly bear the burden of the future well that's good because we don't die and we live maybe 30 years longer and we have fewer horrible diseases and all of1:50:18that but that doesn't mean it's any picnic you have to carry that along with you wherever you go that's the burden of self-consciousness right and that's exactly what happens when God finds out1:50:27that Adam and Eve have become self-conscious before one of the first things he says is haha jigs up now man you're gonna be working forever toiling1:50:36forever it's your destiny there's no escaping from it well human beings work what does that mean they sacrifice the present for the future and that's partly as soon as1:50:47this happens like the next story which is Cain and Abel you see the motif of sacrifice emerge write that story circulates around the motif of sacrifice sacrifice the present for the future1:50:57well what's the price you pay you don't get the present that's a big price right because what you do is what you're doing essentially is you're taking all the1:51:06potential suffering of the future and putting it into the present all the time well so what happens well maybe you live longer and you live healthier but you're1:51:17not without the burden that that puts on you so the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were naked well so1:51:26what does that mean well what does naked mean it means you know you're vulnerable that's exactly what it means they know they're vulnerable so they so fig leaves together and make themselves aprons so1:51:35what happens is they wake up their eyes open they know they're vulnerable so they discover the future they discover their vulnerability extended into the future and the first thing they do is1:51:45build culture right that's the fig leaves it's like okay here's the vulnerability we put a barrier between us in the world it's like a wall right because this is externalized clothing1:51:56that's one way of thinking about it and so to put that clothing on this is clothing as a human Universal by the way now sometimes it's only used for1:52:05decorative purposes but far more often especially in cold climates it's used for protection so to clothe yourself is to recognize your vulnerability and to1:52:14use culture to hold it at bay so find they make themselves aprons and they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day and1:52:24Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden okay so before Adam and Eve wake up before they realize1:52:34they're vulnerable they don't hide from God so what does that mean well he's the spirit that goes into the unknown - to -1:52:44to conquer it and to make the world okay so let's say that's what you're supposed to do you're supposed to mediate between chaos and order okay and you're supposed to do that1:52:53forthrightly so then the question is what the hell is stopping you and that answer is easy your knowledge of your vulnerability obviously that's what's stopping you1:53:03it's like why aren't you courageous and forthright well because you can be cut off at the knees and terribly hurt and so you're gonna shrink back from that1:53:12responsibility and it's no bloody wonder right it's it's it's obviously what's going to happen so Lord God calls them1:53:21to Adam so he's trying to what that means - for the for God to call on you is to say for God to say I want to act through you or I want to act with you1:53:31well that spirit let's say well Adam says I heard I heard God says to Adam where are you and Adam says I heard your1:53:41voice in the garden right I heard the call but I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself it's like yes that's exactly what human beings are like that's precisely exactly what we're1:53:51like we hear the call but we hide and we have the thing is it's there's good reason for it it's not something trivial1:54:00and God said who told you you were naked did you eat the tree that I told you shouldn't eat and the man says the man doesn't come off very well in this1:54:09particular phrase as far as I'm concerned and there's actually quite this is actually quite a comedic story except that it's also a catastrophic tragedy it's like God calls out him out1:54:19like what's with you now you know you're hiding from me why and the first thing out him does it says it's her fault it's her fault she made me self-conscious1:54:28well I see that in resentful men all the time they're very antipathy towards women and they blame their misery and resentment on the fact that women won't1:54:38have anything to do with them while the women making them self-conscious for not being all they should be because the women think why should I bother with you if you're not the embodiment of the spirit1:54:47that will move into the unknown and and face the Leviathan which is exactly what she should be saying and you're thinking well I don't want to have anything to do with that but I'd like women to like me anyways it's like well good luck with1:54:57that so that doesn't work out and so instead of getting your act together you say those goddamn women that's exactly what Adam says to God he said but don't don't be laying this on my feet it's the1:55:06woman you made her she made me all self-conscious and cowardly it's like brilliant great wonderful and God says to the woman what did you do1:55:15and the woman said well it was it was the serpent that that confused me and and I ate well it's like actually I'm a little more sympathetic to her than to1:55:24Adam all things considered because after all she was trying to deal with the damn snake right and we find out that the snake is not only the thing that preys upon her infants but as the tradition1:55:35developed it's identified with Satan himself so and that's the snake in every soul that's the right way of thinking about that so she had her reasons but doesn't matter you pay whether you1:55:46have your reasons or not and so God says to the serpent because you've done this you're cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the field upon the belly1:55:55shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life so first of all the serpent seems to have legs right and then it's turned into a snake and that's1:56:05actually how it worked by the way because snakes had legs and they lost them now you know I'm not trying to say that this story necessarily represents that but it's an interesting parallel1:56:14and he tells the snake I'll put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed and her seed it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel1:56:23well yes well that's the snake striking right and the fact that when human being see snakes they want to just like The Simpsons whacking day right it's time to get rid of the snakes and that's why the many1:56:33great Saints are those who drive the snakes from the land like st. Patrick or Saint George and the dragon and it's the same representation of the hero moving out into the wilderness and confronting1:56:43the predatory the predatory predatory potential is the right way of thinking about it all right unto the woman he1:56:53said I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children and thy desire to be shall be to thy husband and he shall1:57:03rule over thee well that's a statement of Destiny not a statement of the way it should be so what does it mean I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy1:57:13conception well self-consciousness will do that because of course women are fully aware of exactly how fragile their infants are so that's a big problem in sorrow thou1:57:22shalt bring forth children that's something particular to human women right and here's why the price we paid for the rapid expansion of our1:57:31brain which is also something that gave us this self-consciousness and vision meant that there's an evolutionary arms race between the pelvic width of women and the hole in the center of the pelvis1:57:42and the infant's head so what happens is the infant is born far too young for a mammal of our size because if it was Benny older the head would be too big1:57:51the pelvis would have to be too wide it's structural stability would be compromised and then women couldn't run so right now women are at the maximum for hip-width in terms of their ability1:58:00to run so what's happened is that infants have had to be born younger with a compressible head so you know the bones of an infant's collar joined1:58:09together and sometimes after babies are born their head is actually almost cone-shaped because of the tremendous pressure that was exerted on their head during the during the birthing process1:58:19and of course that's killed innumerable women right I mean women's life expectancy before what the latter half1:58:28of the 20th century was way below men because they died in childbirth all the time and why well it's a it's a very what do you call that it's a it's it's a1:58:43very narrow gateway and the price that women pay for it is very high risk of death very high risk of sorrow because of death of children in in childbirth1:58:53and also extraordinarily extraordinary pain in giving birth so that's the price women pay for having vision and being self-conscious well that's and then1:59:02worse they desire their husband and he'll rule over them well whether or not that's good or bad it doesn't matter guards statement is that's how it's going to be1:59:11well partly that's because as far as I can tell there isn't really women roughly speaking there's women with infants and a woman with an infant is1:59:22compromised in terms of her what independent individuality to a remarkable degree because the infant is dependent absolutely dependent1:59:31absolutely dependent for a year and then unbelievably dependent for like eight years after that and then still pretty dependent for another five so once you1:59:41have an infant it's no longer you and I've talked to lots of women for whom that was a great relief by the way because it actually is somewhat of a relief to now not be the center of1:59:51everything you know if you go visit your in-laws for example and you have a baby it's like they pay attention to the baby your parents will do the same thing it's kind of nice to have that happen but2:00:00it's still an absolute catastrophe for you as an independent being and you're not going to go out in the forest and hunt down dragons when you have an infant so even if you could do it you're2:00:10not gonna do it and so that's basically what that's statement outlines and then to atomy says because you listen to your wife an eighth of that tree which I said2:00:19you know maybe that's not such a good idea curse it is the ground for thy sake in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of they light of thy life thorns also2:00:29and thistles shall it bring forth to thee and thou shalt eat the herb of the field in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return into the ground that's the death part for out of2:00:39it was thou taken for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt thou return and I missed one thing about that when the2:00:48serpent this took me a long time to figure out I think I've mentioned it already but it's worth reviewing the serpent tells Eve that if she eats from2:00:58the fruit of the tree then her eyes will be open and she'll be as God's knowing good and evil well the serpent doesn't say well you'll be as as gods insofar as knowing good2:01:08and evil but you'll die so you only get half the gift and so then I thought well there's this weird Minter mingling of of occurrences in the story there's the2:01:19development of vision the development of self-consciousness there's the knowledge of nakedness there's the emergence of work there's the emergence of pain and suffering in2:01:28childbirth and there's knowledge of good and evil I thought for ages I thought what the hell what the hell what's going on there why is there an emphasis on moral knowledge what does this have to2:01:38do with moral knowledge and the implication is that in the initial state of unconsciousness there was no moral knowledge and I think of that as an animal-like State right there's no moral2:01:47knowledge in animals you don't think well that evil cat you don't ever think that even if it's acting like a predator even if it's playing with its prey you don't attribute moral knowledge to the cat2:01:57because you say well it doesn't know what it's doing it doesn't understand what it's doing which is to say it acts it out but it can't represent it or maybe even more it acts it out but it2:02:08can't represent it and it certainly can't analyze its representation it doesn't have that level of capacity but we do so there's that's associated with moral knowledge to some degree why2:02:18knowledge of good and evil I thought all right here's what it is let's think about what you would consider reprehensible universally you could say how is this torturing an infant I would2:02:30consider that virtually universally reprehensible wouldn't you say okay so we'll accept that as a reasonable definition so then the question is one why would you do it2:02:41we'll leave that aside for a moment to how do you know how to do it that's the issue and that's easy once I know how I2:02:51can be hurt because I'm aware of my own vulnerability I know how you can be hurt and I can make it into a game and I can prolong it forever and I can do it the2:03:01worst possible way and that's why when you open your eyes and you know your vulnerability and your nakedness that you immediately have the knowledge of2:03:10good and evil and so then evil becomes something like well there's tragedy in life fine earthquakes cancer disease all those terrible things that's different2:03:20than me deciding that I'm going to make you miserable the one is while you're a limited creature in an unlimited world you're going to get hurt because of that and maybe there's ways that you can be that2:03:30will enable you to transcend that at least to some degree and still have the benefit of being that's entirely different than me deciding that things are going to go a lot worse for you than they might and2:03:40human beings are capable I don't know if you've ever gone to some of the dungeon torture dungeons in Europe boy those are fun places to go you think you take the2:03:49most malevolent person you possibly could and then have a little convention of those people and then get them to think up the worst possible things that they could possibly devise and then you2:04:00have the instruments of torture that in a in a medieval torture dungeon right it's an art form and you think well why do people why are people willing to inflict that on one another well and2:04:12we'll talk about that next time when we talk about the story of Cain and Abel because I think it holds the secret to that and in the meantime I'll stop with this story but I want to tell you the story of the Buddha because it maps on2:04:22to it very nicely so what do you have you have you have a protected space there's unconscious beings in a protected space something comes in in2:04:31the form of the serpent to reveal death to view to reveal vulnerability and death right and then the paradise comes to an end the human beings are2:04:41eliminated from it and they don't get to come back so God puts angels with flaming swords at the at the at the gateway to paradise so that people cannot come back yet it isn't obvious2:04:52what that means except that there's got to be some sort of trial by fire before re-entering paradise but we can leave that alone for a moment so that's the basic structure of this story2:05:01unconscious human beings emergence of knowledge realization of death and suffering and the elimination of the paradise right okay so now I'll read you2:05:11the story of the Buddha the father of Prince Gautama the Buddha Savior of the Orient determined to protect his son from desperate knowledge and tragic2:05:20awareness built for him and enclosed pavilion a walled garden of earthly delights okay so the story goes that an angel visited Buddha's father and said2:05:30that he's going to have a son and the son is either going to become the greatest ruler that the world has ever seen or a spiritual leader and the father being a practical man thought where there's no bloody way I want my2:05:40son to be some like wandering spiritual leader I want him to be the greatest king that the world has ever seen okay and so the father decides how am I going to get2:05:51my son to be the greatest ruler the world has ever seen I better get him to fall in love with the world because then he's not gonna go traipsing after some sort of half-witted2:06:00spiritual knowledge he's gonna stick to practical tasks right that's something that a father should do to some degrees orient you in the world right and maybe2:06:09shouldn't subvert your your spiritual development to any great degree but there's a practical element to this and and so anyways that's how it works and so that's what happens the the the2:06:19father builds this city of perfection and he eliminates from it everything that's a reminder of the suffering2:06:28that's associated with life so the only thing that's allowed the only creatures that are allowed to be in there the only people that are allowed to be in there are healthy young and happy people so2:06:37the buddha grows up surrounded by nothing but the positive elements of life well you think well what does that mean well it's akin to the paradise idea obviously walled enclosure of paradise2:06:47where there's no death but there's more to it than that - it's also in some sense what a good father would do what do you do with your young children2:06:56well you don't expose them to death and decay at every step of the way right do you you build a protected world for them like a walled enclosure and you only2:07:06keep what's healthy and life-giving inside of it and you don't expose them to things that they can't tolerate you know maybe you don't take a three-year-old to a funeral now maybe you do but maybe you don't there's2:07:16things that you don't expect them to be able to cope with you regulate what they're allowed to watch you're not going to show them the TEC Texas Chainsaw Massacre when they're four2:07:25years old right so so you're staving off knowledge of mortality and death and so he's just being a good father in many ways here all signs of decay and2:07:34degeneration were thus kept hidden from the prints emerged in the immediate pleasures of the senses in physical love and dance and music and beauty and pleasure Gautama grew to maturity protected2:07:45absolutely from the limitations of mortal being however he grew curious despite his father's most particularly and will and resolved to leave his seductive prison2:07:55well it's that curiosity element it's the same thing that lurks in the Adam and Eve story it's like God tells I'm Eve see that tree over there don't2:08:05be bothering with it well you know what's gonna happen with human beings especially if there's a snake associated with it they're gonna be over there right away check in that place out and that's exactly what happens with the Buddhists2:08:15like he's raised to be healthy and what is what's the consequence of that is that the fact that he's healthy makes him look for what's beyond the protected2:08:26confines of the thing that made him healthy it's like what's like even in the Geppetto story you know where Geppetto paints on Pinocchio's mouth and he's ready to go he puts him outside the2:08:36next day and Pinocchio is ready to run away with all the kids right so the consequence of raising a child in a healthy way is that the child is going to be curious enough to go out there and2:08:46look for some trouble and we actually know that because there is follow-up studies of teenagers you imagine that there's teenagers who never break any rules and then there's teenagers who2:08:55break all the rules okay these teenagers don't do very well introverted depressed anxious depressed sorry I said that twice these ones are2:09:04antisocial the ones in the middle that's what you want you want your damn teenager to get out of the paradisal confines of your house and they go causes some trouble and to investigate2:09:14maybe you don't want to know about it any more than you have to you don't want them to be breaking rules all the time and you don't want them to be so timid and oppressed that they can't make a2:09:23move on their own and never make a mistake so the the paradoxical thing here and it's sort of echoed out this is why I like these two stories back-to-back is like if you give people2:09:33what they want then the first thing they're gonna do is try to get beyond it and Dostoevsky says the same thing in notes from underground he says if you gave people everything they wanted2:09:42pure utopia so he says so that they're there sitting in a pool of bliss with nothing but bubbles of happiness coming up from the surface and all they have to do is eat cake and busy themselves with2:09:53the continuation of the species dosti said Dostoyevsky's observation is the first thing that people would do is find something to smash that with just so2:10:02that something interesting and perverse could happen it's like well yes where were creatures that are designed to encounter the unknown we want to keep2:10:11moving beyond what we have even if we have what we have is what we want and maybe that's part because we're oriented towards the future we think well this is great but2:10:20it's not good enough it's great but it's not good enough there's always something more that drives us forward well so that's what happens with the Buddha he gets curious he sees the walls he thinks2:10:30there's walls there's probably something outside of those walls so then he goes to his father and he says I'm I want to2:10:41go outside what's outside and his father says no how you don't want to go outside and Buddha says yeah well I really do want to go outside and his father knows that unless he lets him go outside he's going to climb over the walls and so the2:10:51father decides he's gonna let him go outside because he can fix everything out there first so he goes outside it's like the Chinese preparing for the Olympics you know when they sprayed the2:11:00grass with with with green paint got rid of all the homeless people it's the same thing so he goes outside the city and he tells everyone all right old people sick people dying people hit2:11:11the road we don't want to see you for a while clean all this out we want the attractive people around the sides of the roads like waving palm fronds and all of that and so when my son comes out2:11:21he's going to see nothing but what's good and so he gets that all arranged and lets his son go outside now his son goes outside in this little chariot thing and he has a someone with him now2:11:31unbeknownst to his father that person that's with him is an emissary of the gods and so in a perverse way he plays the same role as the serpent in the story of Adam and Eve and the gods have2:11:43already arranged so that the father's carer is going to be insufficient and it's the snake in the garden idea it's like no matter how much care you take to2:11:53make things perfect some of the some of what what you're excluding is going to come back in so anyways Buddha goes outside and and he's in his2:12:03chariot and preparations were made to gild his chosen road to cover the adventurous path with flowers and to display for his admiration and preoccupation the fairest women of the2:12:12kingdom the prince set out with full retinue in the shielded comfort of a chaperone chariot and delighted in the panorama previously prepared for him the2:12:21gods however decided to disrupt these most carefully laid plans and sent an aged man hobble in full view alongside the road2:12:30the princes fascinated gaze fell upon the ancient interloper compelled by curiosity asked his attendant what is that creature stumbling shabby Benton broken beside my2:12:41retinue and the attendant answered that is a man like other men who was born an infant became a child a youth a husband a father a father of fathers he has2:12:51become old subject to destruction of his beauty his will and the possibilities of life like other men you say hesitantly inquired the prince that means this will2:13:00happen to me and the attendant answered inevitably with the passage of time well that's the end of that party the world collapses in on Buda and paying he2:13:11hightails at home well what does that mean well that's what children do roughly speaking is there around there mother there they've got security there they go out into the unknown they2:13:20encounter something that's just a little bit too much for them bang they come home they get all padded back into shape and hugged and taken care of hugging children and patting them is actually analgesic it actually reduces2:13:31pain unsurprisingly that's what you do with someone who's grieving right so you hug them because grief is pain so so they you know you pat them they get rid2:13:40of their pain they get rid of their anxiety you calm them down and what happens well the next day they want to go out again well that's exactly what happens to the Buddha so he's all2:13:49shorted out by his encounter with death which is very little different than what happens to Adam and Eve runs back recovers for six-month he has post-traumatic stress disorder he runs2:14:00home and he recovers for six months right in time his anxiety lessened his curiosity granny ventured outside again this time the God sent a sick man into2:14:10view this creature he asked his attendant shaking and palsy horribly afflicted unbearable to behold a source of pity and contempt what is he and the2:14:19attendant answered that's a man like other men who was born whole but who became ill and sick unable to cope a burden to himself and others suffering2:14:29and incurable like other men you say inquired the prince this could happen to me and the attendant answer's no man is exempt from the ravages of disease2:14:39once again the world collapse got hammer returned to his home but the delights of his previous life were ashes in his mouth and he ventured forth a2:14:49third time the gods in their mercy sent him a dead man in funeral procession this creature he asked his attendant laying so still appearing so fearsome2:14:59surrounded by grief and by sorrow lost and forlorn what is he and the attendant answered that is a man like other man born of woman beloved and2:15:08hated who is once you who once was you and now is the earth like other men you say inquired the prince then this could happen to me this is your end said the2:15:19attendant and the end of all men well that's the end of childhood right there's no going back after that it's like Pinocchio goes back there's no one home anymore it's there's nothing that2:15:29your father can do to protect you from knowledge of death there's no returning to the childhood unconsciousness because you're new now no and there's no going2:15:39backwards suicide that's going backwards that's how you replace your emergent self-consciousness with the old blissful unconsciousness and that's exactly what2:15:49suicidal people wish they're going to destroy their painful self-consciousness and make it all go away the world2:15:58collapsed a final time and Gautama asked to be returned home but the attendant had orders from the princes father and took him instead to a festival of women occurring near occurring nearby and a2:16:08grove in the woods the prince was met by a beautiful assemblage who offered themselves freely to him without restraint in song dance and play in the spirit of sensual love but Gautama could2:16:19think only of death and the inevitable decomposition of beauty and took no pleasure in the display well so you see2:16:29the parallels between one story and the other they're the same they have the same underlying structure initial paradise partly childhood partly unconsciousness the emergence of2:16:40knowledge of mortality into that and the demolition of the of the paradise this is the same meta story that we've been talking about all along ordered state collapse into chaos well the rest of the2:16:51story is the return like in the Bible Bibles actually set up that it's collapsed into history and then a movement upward the question is what's2:17:01the movement upward that's the question here when the collapse is caused by knowledge of mortality and self caught and the emergence of self-consciousness2:17:10and knowledge of death is there any manner in which Redemption can be attained or is that the final like is that finally is that does that finally2:17:19demolish you well that's the question and that's that's that's it's the answer to that question that entire2:17:28civilizations constantly pursue and the question is well what is the answer and part of the answer is identification with the spirit that generates order out2:17:39of chaos that's the answer it's something like that and so then the question is what does that mean well that'll be what the last two lectures in2:17:48the course are about because we're down to two last lectures so any questions does it make sense more more importantly2:17:58really is there is there any way in which it doesn't make sense because these stories are not supposed to make sense right that's the theory is that2:18:07their archaic superstitions or something like that well it doesn't seem to me that that's the case it seems to me that they make insanely perfect sense they're2:18:17exactly right they tell you exactly what human beings are like and exactly what the situation that we face is so and so2:18:26then the question is well the diagnosis is made properly what it has the cure being properly identified well that's2:18:36what we'll discuss for the next two sessions0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:11so last week I told you I offered you an interpretation of two foundational0:00:20stories right or more than two but roughly speaking to the creation stories0:00:29because there's two of them in Genesis and then also the story of the Buddha and I was presenting you with a proposition and it's a multi-layered0:00:39proposition the first proposition is that the archetypal story structure that we've already been discussing is reflected in detail in those stories and0:00:50the archetypal story structure is something like the existence of a pre-existing state where things are roughly functional so that you might think of that as the state of things0:01:00going well and that's the state where your perceptions and your plans are sufficiently developed so that when you0:01:09act them out in the world not only do you get what you desire but the story itself validates itself through your0:01:18actions right because what happens when you act something out and you get what you intend just like when you use a map and get where you're going not only does0:01:27that get you to where you're going but it also validates the plan or the map and so that's that's that's a definition of truth that's a pragmatic definition0:01:36of truth this is the sort of thing that I was trying to have a discussion with about Sam Harris because the idea is that we have to orient ourselves in a world where our knowledge is always0:01:46insufficient we never know everything about anything and so the question then is how can you ever make a judgment about whether or not you're correct and the answer to that is something like well you lay out a plan and you can0:01:57think about it this way if this is actually an answer to the postmodernist problem of how is it that you determine whether or not your interpretation of0:02:06the world is we won't say correct because that's not exactly right but you know the postmodernist subjects say with regards to the interpretation of the text that there's a very large number of0:02:15variations of ways in which that text can be interpreted and that's actually true and it's the same it's a it's actually reflection of a deeper claim which they always off0:02:25and sometimes also make which is well if that's true for a text which isn't as complex as everything although it's complex then it's even more true for everything which is to say the world0:02:36lays itself out in a very complex manner and you can interpret that in a very large number of ways so who's to say which interpretation is correct okay0:02:45fair enough it's a reasonable objection and it's it's tied in with even a deeper problem which is the problem of perception itself because if the world0:02:54is laid out in a manner that's exceptionally complex then how is it that you can even perceive it well that's that's partly the question that0:03:04we're trying to answer and the answer to that is well you have evolved perceptual structures and they're actually oriented towards specific goals and your embodied0:03:13so the your embodiment as a goal-directed entity is part of the solution to the problem of perception but it's more complicated than that so0:03:23we could say well you come equipped and this was Kant's objection to Pure Reason essentially that the problem is if the0:03:32facts don't speak for themselves there's too many facts for them to speak for themselves so you have to overlay on top of them an interpretive framework well where does the interpretive framework come from well the right0:03:42answer to that is something like it evolves right it's taken three and a half billion years for your perceptual structure your embodied perceptual structure to evolve and it's done that0:03:51roughly in a trial and error process I don't think that exhausts what's happened over the course of evolution but it's a good enough shorthand for the time being so so there's the constraints0:04:02imposed on your perceptual structures by the necessity of survival in reproduction but there's other constraints imposed to that you might regard two subsets of that one is that0:04:11because you exist in a cooperative and competitive landscape the perceptual structures and plans that you layout will say the maps that you layout have0:04:20to be negotiated with other people and so that puts stringent constraints on the number of interpretations that you're allowed to to apply so you can think about this in a piagetian sense0:04:30that is if there are children in a playground and they're trying to organize themselves to play they have to agree on a game and the game is of course a sexual structure and a goal-directed0:04:40structure and a structure that the delimits action and interactions and so they at least have to settle on a game and so that constrains the set of0:04:49possible actions and perceptions in the environment to those that are deemed socially acceptable and then you say well what are there further constraints and the constraints might be well let's0:04:59play the game and see if it's any fun and that means that you have to take the plan that you've organized consensually and then lay it out in the actual world and see if when you lay it out in the0:05:09world it does what it's supposed to do in some sense what you're doing is testing a tool so the idea that the the range of interpretations is infinite and0:05:19unconstrained turns out to be incorrect and now it's that that is that doesn't mean it's easy to figure out how they're constrained but the technical suggestion0:05:29that well there's an infinite number of equally valid interpretations is just not correct it's not correct and it's not correct on biological evolutionary ground and it's not it's also not0:05:39correct on socio-cultural grounds because it has to be negotiated and then you know Piaget put a further constraint on that essentially by saying well not0:05:48only does it have to be a game and a game that attains its end but it has to be a game that people want to play so it also has to satisfy some element of0:05:59subjective desire as well so that's three levels of constraint right it has to be a game you want to play it has to be a game that you can play with other people and it has to be a game that if0:06:08you play with other people actually works in the world okay well so much for an infinite array of options it's a very constrained array of auctions now and I0:06:18think and that the idea that I've been proposing to you is that what evolved mythology does these representations that we've been dealing with these archetypal representations is sketch out0:06:28that landscape what what is the landscape of playable games that's a good way of thinking about it and so it's it sets out a landscape it's it0:06:37sets out a description of the landscape in which the game is going to be played as well as the description of the lens of the game itself and so the landscape0:06:46is roughly the core the core archetype seems to be something like it's it's something like the interplay0:06:55between chaos and order and chaos is represented by hidden the serpent Isle predator because we use our predator detection circuits to conceptualize the0:07:05unknown because what else would we do it that seems given that we're prey animals0:07:14and given our evolutionary history it's very difficult to understand what else we would possibly do because the critical issue about venturing into the unknown is that you might die or perhaps0:07:24a slight variant of that is something might kill you but whatever those are close enough to the same thing so chaos is what causes your deterioration and death and there's lots of ways to0:07:33conceptualize that but but reptilian predator fire-breathing reptilian predator isn't a bad way to start and so the question is well what do you do in0:07:42the face of that and one answer is you build circumscribed enclosures that's order and then also you act as the builder of circumscribed enclosures so0:07:52that's partly the hero now the hero is also though that's not good enough because the circumscribed enclosure isn't impermeable it can be invaded it will inevitably be invaded either from0:08:03the outside or from within right and so we've been conceptualizing the the predator the malevolent predator at0:08:12multiple levels of analysis throughout our evolutionary history say but also in our symbolic history trying to understand the nature of that which invades the enclosure right and we can0:08:22say well it's partly external threat it's partly social threat but it's also partly the threat that each individual brings to bear on the social structure0:08:31because of our let's say our intrinsic malevolence and so that would be the snakes within and so that accounts for the analogy that the Christian analogy0:08:40between the serpent in the Garden of Eden and Satan which is a very very strange analogy it's not obvious at all why those two things would stack on top of one another especially given that0:08:50when the creation story originally emerged in the in the form I talked to you about last week the story of Adam and Eve the idea that the serpent in the garden was also something that was0:09:00associated with the adversary wasn't an implicit part of the story that got laid on afterwards like well what's the worst possible snake well0:09:09that's a reasonable question and then a better question is what do you do about the worst possible snake and one answer is you face it but there's other answers too like you0:09:18make sacrifices right and that's how you stave off the dragon of temporal chaos roughly speaking is that you learn to conceptualize the future you see the0:09:28future as a realm of potential threat and then you learn to give things up in the present and somehow that satisfies the future now so maybe you're offering0:09:37sacrifices to God and you think well why is that well think you're going to think about that psychologically why does that work well you can think about the Spirit0:09:46of God the Father as an imagistic representation of the collective spirit of the group we'll call it the patriarchy if you want doesn't matter0:09:56it's the thing that's common across the group as a spirit as a psychological force across time why do you make sacrifices to that that is what you do0:10:05all the time you're right now you're sacrificing your time to the spirit of the great Father because your assumption is is that if you do what's diligent so0:10:15you're not chasing impulsive pleasure at the moment unless you're pathologically interested in this class or something like that you're not chasing impulsive interest you're sacrificing your0:10:24impulsive interests to satisfy the spirit of social requirement and so you're offering a sacrifice to that spirit in the hope that you can make a bargain with it so that it will reward0:10:34you in the future and that reward will be part of it partly the staving off of insecurities which is ever no more than to say that part of the reason that0:10:43you're getting your degree is because you believe that you laid you in finding employment and status and all the other things that will stave off the dragon of chaos so now those things were as we've0:10:55been at pains to to to point out as those things were acted out and then represented an image and story long before they could be fully articulated because we're building our knowledge of0:11:05ourselves and also our social structures and also the world from the bottom up as well as from the top down there's an interplay between the two levels of analysis okay and so so that's partly0:11:18that's part of the archetypal underpinning and then with regards to the stories themselves you're you're in a map so to speak you're using a map and with any luck its detailed enough so0:11:29that you can use it to get to the place that you want to go and sometimes you don't and that means that you have to recalibrate your your journey along the0:11:38map which by the way is exactly what GPS systems do when you go off the pathway right they stop that's an anxiety response from the GPS0:11:48system they stop they recalibrate and they readjust the map now and then if you're unfortunate this very rarely happens anymore you'll be on a road that isn't mapped and then the GPS system0:11:59doesn't know what to do well that happens in real life too I mean those are I'm using GPS for a very specific reason those are intelligent systems as far as I'm concerned those are the closest things we ever designed to0:12:09intelligent systems because they can actually orient right they orient in real time and they're unbelievably sophisticated systems right because they rely on a huge satellite network and so0:12:19on and they're cybernetic systems technically speaking they respond very much like the way that we respond so so0:12:28anyways you know you're in un habit a map you try to adjust the resolution of the map so that it's mono more complex than it needs to be to get you from0:12:37point A to point B that's it you want minimal resolution because that enables efficient cognitive processing it doesn't overload you too much like when I'm looking at this room if I look say I0:12:48want to walk down this pathway basically what my mind does my perceptual field and you can detect this if I look straight ahead I can barely see you people on the periphery you're more like0:12:57you're kind of like blurs you - I can tell that you have heads but that's about it when you move I can see your hand I can probably see your eyes but barely0:13:07so you're all very low resolution and even though I can't detect it at the very periphery of my vision you guys are black and white so my color vision disappears at the periphery even though0:13:16I can't I can't actually perceive that so what happens is if I want to walk down here this pathway becomes high-resolution it becomes marked with positive emotion all of this turns into0:13:26low resolution back here it's not even represented and then I find out well am i doing properly and the answer is while I walk forward and if I get to the goal then0:13:35I've done it properly enough and if you know what have you stand up and get in my way then I'm going to focus on you and assume instantly that I haven't0:13:44mapped you properly right I put you in the category of irrelevant entity when in fact you have to be in the category of strange object the thing that objects0:13:55and so well so then we inhabit those structures all the time we're in a structure like that a perceptual structure and if it's working then it's0:14:05got the archetypal quality of paradise so to speak because it's axioms are correct and it's functional and then now and then something comes along and that's what the snake is the eternal0:14:15snake in the garden that pops up inside a structure and it turns out that the things that you weren't attending to are the most important things rather than0:14:25the least important things and that what does I do it blows the map into pieces and that can happen at different levels of severity but at the ultimate level of0:14:35severity its apocalyptic right everything goes and that's it that's a traumatic intrusion and essentially the story of the Garden of Eden is the story0:14:46of a traumatic intrusion that's exactly what it is and so what happens is that Adam and Eve are living in unconscious bliss roughly speaking everything's fine they're in their0:14:55walled garden they're in a paradisal state they're not aware of their own vulnerability or nakedness so they're not suffering from negative emotion something pops up that radically expands0:15:06their vision and all of a sudden now they can apprehend all sorts of things that exist as threats so that's their own nakedness and vulnerability and0:15:15temporality itself because they become aware of the future and bang that state of being in that paradise is forever gone that's the strange thing about0:15:25human beings this is what what happened to us I think is that our perceptions developed to such a degree that we could no longer ignore what was irrelevant we0:15:37couldn't do it because we discovered roughly speaking once we discovered our finite limitations in time and space we discovered that we were surrounded by0:15:46infinite threat always and maybe that's why people are so hyper awake because threat wakes you up well we're in a constant state of existential threat now0:15:57the advantage to that is that we take we take arms up against a sea of troubles constantly that's the advantage right and we build enclosures and we take0:16:07precautions for the future and we live a very long time and we generally live quite safe lives compared to the lives we could live and so we've traded pain0:16:17for anxiety that's another way of thinking about it now it's still a pretty rough trade right because who wants to be nervous all the time but you're alive and awake when you're0:16:27nervous and it is a form of consciousness elevating activation that's another way of thinking about it so the story of Adam and Eve is the story of the eternal fall that that's0:16:38what it is it says look you exist in these walled enclosures but there's something that lurks that will always knock you off your feet and then the question is what0:16:47is that and and the answer to that is being formulated over very long periods of time partly it's the probability of predation itself that's the snake the thing that can come in subtly and0:16:57undermine you okay but then that's that's it what would you call it expand it upward to include the abstract snake0:17:08which is that thing that can undermine your conceptual schemes right so you have your actual territory and then you have your abstract to our territory and in your actual territory there are0:17:17actual snakes and in your abstract territory there are abstract snakes right and then the worst snake of all is malevolence and that's I think that's0:17:27technically correct because one of the things that you view for example when you're looking at post-traumatic stress disorder is that it's almost always the0:17:36case that someone who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder which you might think of as a real real life reincarnation of the fall is that people0:17:46encounter something malevolent and it breaks them because it's the worst thing to understand it's like suffering is one thing man that's that's bad now vulnerability and0:17:55suffering that's bad enough but to encounter some who wishes that upon you and will work to bring it about that's a whole different category of horrible0:18:04especially what it also reflects something back to you about yourself because if someone else can do that to you and they're human that means that0:18:13you partake of the same essence strangely enough that's actually the cure to some degree to post-traumatic stress disorder is like if you've been0:18:22victimized you're naive and you've been victimized the way out of that is to no longer be naive and to no longer be victimized and that means that you you see this reflected in the Harry Potter0:18:31idea for example that the reason that Harry Potter can withstand Voldemort is because you've got a piece of a party's being touched by it and the way that you0:18:40the way that you keep the psychopaths at bay is to develop the inner psychopath so that you know when when you see what right and then but that's a voluntary0:18:49thing it's it's so it's like a it's like a a set of tools that you have at your disposal which is full knowledge of evil and that does Nietzsche said if you look0:18:58into an abyss for too long you risk having the abyss gaze back into you right the idea is that if you look at something monstrous you have a tendency to turn into a monster and people are0:19:08often very afraid of looking at monsters things exactly for that reason and then the question is well should you turn into a monster and the answer to that is yes you should but you should do it0:19:19voluntarily and not accidentally and you should do it with the good in mind rather than falling prey to it by possession essentially because that's0:19:28the alternative how does it possess you that's easy you're suffering makes you better you're better this makes you resentful you're resentful means meat makes you vengeful0:19:38and once you're on that road you go down that a little bit farther man well you end up it fantasizing in your basement about shooting up the local high school0:19:48and then killing yourself right because that's sort of the ultimate end of that line of pathological reasoning being should be eradicated because of its intrinsic evil and I'm exactly the0:19:57person to do it and I'll cap it off with an indication of my own lack of worth just to hammer the point home right and if I can garner a little post post0:20:06posthumous fame along the way well that'll satisfy my primordial primate dominant tired the imaginings - at least in fantasy so0:20:15you know it's the full package if you want to go down that route and of course people don't like to think about that sort of thing and it's no bloody wonder but without the capability for mayhem Europe you're you're you're a potential0:20:26victim - may have so you need your sword it should be sheath but you need to have it and it's very frequently the case if you treat someone with post-traumatic0:20:35stress disorder there's two things you have to do you have to help them develop a very articulated philosophy of evil because otherwise their brain bothers0:20:45them over and over and over what why were you so dealing with naive how did you become victimized why were you such a sucker these are good questions you don't want to have that happen to you0:20:54again you don't want to be exploited twice okay so your eyes have to open up we know the price of that from the Egyptian myth right you come into contact with Seth what happens even if0:21:05you're a god you lose an eye it's no joke man it's no joke and then the cure for that is the movement down into the underworld and with the revitalization of the Father0:21:14that's the identification with the force that created culture right and that then there's you and that together then you can withstand malevolence maybe you can0:21:23withstand tragedy and malevolence and then that's the whole secret right because that's what you want in life you need to be able to whisk down tragedy and you need to be able to withstand0:21:32malevolence because those are the forces they're always working against you and so it's just this is associated with the Union idea of incorporation of the shadow right you have to be we know this0:21:43God we know how predators work with regards to children even if you're a pedophilic predator and you're looking at a landscape of children the child0:21:54that you're going to go after is the one that's timid and won't fight back you pick your victim and predatory people in general or exactly like that0:22:03man they're because they're predators they're not going to attack someone who's who's going to fight back in fact the issue is likely not to even come up they're going to be looking for someone0:22:13one way or another that cannot conceptualize what they are and then perfect it's it's open season and it's open season and so if you're treating0:22:23someone with post-traumatic trustus order first they need an introduction to the philosophy of malevolent and second they have to learn to become dangerous because that's the0:22:32only way out what's the alternative to get these recurrent thoughts about their vulnerability in the face of malevolence and their own naivety because by0:22:43definition if someone psychopathic has exploited you you're too naive it's a definitional issue you can say well that's no fault of mine how the hell could I be prepared fair enough man0:22:54perfectly reasonable objection doesn't solve your problem because it's an it's an eternal problem right the internal problem is how do you deal with tragedy0:23:03and malevolence and you can say well I'm not prepared it's like yeah fair enough unsurprising especially if you were over protected as a child it's not a good0:23:12idea to over protect your kids because the snakes are going to come into the garden no matter what you do and so then you instead of trying to keep the damn snakes away what you do is you arm your0:23:23child with something that can help them chop them into pieces and make the world out of them so that the trick for human thriving in the face of suffering and0:23:32malevolence is strength not protection it's a completely different idea we also know this clinically we know for example that if you treat people with exposure0:23:41therapy for Agra phobia which is roughly speaking the fear of chaos I would say the fear of everything you don't make them less afraid you make the braver it's not the same0:23:51thing because with an agri-food they see what happens to them is is the fault they never conceptualize death and suffering they're naive right it never0:24:01enters their theater of their imaginations because they're protected from it but then something happens this often happens to women in their 40s because they're the people most likely0:24:10to develop Agra phobia something happens there they've been protected from chaos by Authority their entire life so maybe they had an overprotective father and0:24:19then they went to an overprotective boyfriend and then they went to an overprotective husband and maybe they were willing to be subjugated to all three of those because of the project0:24:28protection right so so that's the bargain they stay weak and dependent and maybe they have to because that's the only way they can appeal to the person0:24:37who's hyper protective but the they pay for that is that they're not sufficiently competent and then something happens in their life often in their 40s they develop heart palpitations maybe as a consequence of0:24:48menopause their heart starts to beat erratically and they think oh no death it's like well who are you going to talk to about that right there's no protection from0:24:57authority for that or maybe their friend gets divorced or maybe their sister dies or something like that it brings up the specter of mortality and maybe the specter of malevolence and mortality and0:25:07it brings it up in a way that authority recourse to Authority cannot solve and so then they have panic attacks what happens they go out they get afraid they0:25:16feel their heart beating then they get afraid of their heart beating because they think oh no I'm going to die and they think oh no I'm going to die and I'm going to make a fool of myself while I'm doing it and attract a lot of0:25:26attention so the two big fears come up mortality and social judgment then they have a panic attack it's like fighter flights going out of control very very0:25:35unpleasant then they start to avoid the places they've had a panic attack then they end up not being able to go anywhere so then Kyah math has come back right a huge0:25:44monster a little victim and so what do you do with them well there's no saying note there's no time app that's done0:25:53right there naivety is over they've had a direct contact with the threat of mortality and social judgment they've met the terrible mother and they met the0:26:02terrible father and there's no going back there's no saying oh the world is safe it's not safe not at all it's not safe0:26:11the fact that you think it's safe means that you were living in an unconscious bubble that was sort of provided to you by your culture it's a gift and now0:26:20that's been shattered and so now what do you do well the answer is you retreat until you're in your house and there's nowhere you can go you're the ultimate frozen rabbit right and your life is0:26:30hell because you can't function the alternative is let's take apart the things you're afraid of let's expose you to them you know carefully and0:26:40programmatically and then you'll learn that you can you're actually tougher than you think you never knew that and maybe you didn't want to take on the0:26:49responsibility because you know people play role in their own demise so to speak when you had opportunity to go out and explore or withdraw because you were0:26:58afraid you chose to withdraw because you were afraid so it's not only that you were over protected often it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fact that you were over protected and0:27:08run back there whenever you had the opportunity you know so maybe you're a kid in the playground right and you're having some trouble with other kids and you know in the back of your mind I0:27:17should deal this with deal with this myself but you go and tell your mom and get her to intervene and you know that that's not right you know that you're breaking the social contract but it's0:27:26easier and so that's what you do you run off to an authority figure and hide behind the Great Father right roughly speaking well the problem with that is you don't learn how to do it yourself so0:27:36then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40 so then you take people out you say well what are you afraid of ranked it from 1 to 10 so 10 is make a0:27:48list of 10 things you're afraid of the least the thing you're least afraid of will call number 10 so we'll start with that okay well I'm afraid of elevators okay well let's let's look at a picture of an0:27:57elevator let's have you imagine being in an elevator let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open because that's how you're0:28:07responding to it symbolically right and you're going to do that at it at the the closest proximity you can manage you find out you go do that0:28:16it works you're nervous as hell especially a permit an anticipatory perspective shaking you go out you stop you watch it happen and you actually0:28:25calm down you do that 10 times it no longer bothers you well what you've learned that you didn't die but more importantly than that you've learned0:28:34that you could withstand the threat of death that's what you've learned and then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and finally you're back in what's no longer the elevator0:28:44from a symbolic perspective it's a tomb right it's it's it's a place of enclosure and isolation and you learn hmm turns out I can withstand that and0:28:54then you're met much more together much more confident and that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that I've seen this multiple times is that0:29:04if you run someone through an exposure training process like that and toughen them up they'll often start standing up to people around them in a way they0:29:13never did before because they wouldn't stand up for themselves before because they weren't willing to undermine the protection see if you're protecting me0:29:22I can't bother you because I can't afford to forsake your protection so if I'm going to play that game I'm going to be high hide behind you then I0:29:32can't challenge you so that's no good because that's sometimes why people you see this with guys very frequently they're still deathly afraid of their0:29:41father's judgment when they're in their 30s or 40s it's like well why not because they still want to believe that there's someone out there that knows and so they're willing to accept the0:29:50subjugation because it doesn't force them to challenge the idea that there's someone out there that knows because that's the advantage of having your father as a judge right because he knows0:30:00well what if he doesn't what if no one knows any better than you well that's a rough thing you don't until you realize that you're not an adult right that's0:30:09really technically the point of realization of adulthood is that no one actually knows what you should do more than you do I mean it's a horrible realization because what the hell do you0:30:18know it's a terrible realization and people will often pick slavery permanent slavery to the spirit of the Great Father let's say over that realization0:30:28and it's completely understandable but the problem with it is is that there's more to you than you think and so if you continue to hide behind that figure then you never have a chance to understand0:30:37that there's more to you than you think far more to you than you think maybe there's enough to you so that you can actually withstand the threat of0:30:46mortality without collapsing maybe even withstand the threat of malevolence without collapsing who knows it's certainly possible and it's not an0:30:56abstract question it's exactly the sort of question that you address in the psychotherapeutic process it's it's always the question that you address and the answer is often in the affirmative0:31:07because people can get unbelievably tough and you know that because people work in emergency wards and hospitals right or they work in in palliative care0:31:16Awards or they work as March very assistants I mean these people have bloody rough jobs you know or they're on the front line of police investigation into you know highness0:31:25child abuse crimes and so they're confronting malevolence on a regular basis and you know those are very stressful jobs but people do them and0:31:34some people do them without even being damaged by them although that's a harder thing because you can see horrible things you know things you'll never forget so so I would say the the story0:31:46in the story of Adam and Eve is a meta story and it's a meta story for two reasons one is it's about how stories transform0:31:56because Adam and Eve are in this unconscious paradise and then it collapses and that happens to every potential story right that's Nietzsche's realization he said look imagine that0:32:06you live within a belief system and then something arises to challenge the belief system not only does the belief system collapse but something worse happens0:32:15your belief in belief systems collapses and that's the road tonight now it doesn't have to because you can jump from one belief system to another but sometimes that doesn't work is that you0:32:24do a meta critique and you say oh I was living in this protective structure and it turned out to be flawed okay one alternative is jumped to another protective structure fine another0:32:35alternative is protective structures themselves are not to be trusted bang you're in chaos how the hell are you going to get out of that that's the pathway to nihilism well you can you can0:32:46you can work your way through that that's difficult or you can do what Jung would regard as a soul damaging move and you can sacrifice your new knowledge0:32:55Andrey identify with something rigid and restricted which is what I would say is happening to some degree with the people in your Europe who are turning to a0:33:04regressive nationalism as an alternative to to the current state of chaos it's like I know that people need to identify with local groups I understand that but0:33:14that they risk the danger of making the state the ultimate God and that's order but that's not a good replacement for chaos it's just another kind of catastrophe right0:33:23too much order too much chaos both catastrophes you want to stand in the middle somehow and mediate between the two and that's where you have your real0:33:32strengths because then it isn't that you've discovered a safe place to be even the bloody right-wingers are after a safe place right they just want it to0:33:41be the state yeah exactly well there's no safe places and the next issue is do you really want a safe place is that what you want you want to be so weak0:33:51that you want to be protected from threat what the hell kind of life is that you're a paralyzed rabbit in a hole that's no life for a human being you0:34:00should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence because and the reason for that too is this is the weird paradox this is and I believe this is0:34:09the paradox first of all that was discovered in part by Buddha but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity which is that the solution to the0:34:18problem of tragedy in malevolence is the willingness to face them now who the hell would ever guess that it's completely paradoxical it's a completely0:34:28paradoxical suggestion is that well why does it work well because the more you confront the two of them the more you grow and maybe you can grow so that0:34:38you're actually larger than the chaos and malevolence itself and you think well what's the evidence for that and that's easy that's what people do that is how we learn like every time you0:34:48expose your child to something new a playground what are they exposed to chaos and malevolence now there's more to it than that obviously because kids play and0:34:58they you know they promote each other and they form friendships and all of that but in the playground itself there is the complexity of the social structure and the malevolence of the0:35:07bully it's right there and that you throw your kid in there and you say adapt and they do okay so they can do it at a small scale it's not trivial the0:35:16playground is a complicated place the kid can adapt well how much can you scale that up can you scale that up to from the chaos and order and malevolence0:35:27of the playground to chaos and order and malevolence itself well that's the question well I don't think there's any reason to answer that in the negative so because0:35:38we don't know the full extent of the human being and it is the problem that's worked out so in the Buddhist story for example what happens after so buddha's world0:35:47collapses in the same way that Adam and Eve's world collapses it's a consequence of repetitive exposure to mortality and death what happens to Buddhas he realizes that the little protected city0:35:58that his father made for him the walled garden it's exactly the same motif that's in this Adam and Eve story is is it's it's what it's fatally flawed that0:36:11kind of protection cannot exist and he discovers that in pieces right which is exactly what happens to children is that they go out they discover a limit they run back and the parents can help them0:36:22with the limit they run out they discover limit they run back but some at some point they run out they discover a limit they run back and the parents have nothing to say to them because they've hit the same limit that the parents hit0:36:32which is like well what are you going to do with your life how are you going to how are you going to operate in this archetypal universe while your parents can only say well they can say you0:36:41identify with the proper archetypal figures they do that they at least act that out for you but at some point it's a problem that they cannot solve for you without making you weaker that's the0:36:52thing you know so it's an interesting thing that I've learned in therapy because one of the things you have to learn as a therapist is how do you not0:37:01take your clients problems home with you it's a very common existential problem that beginning therapists face because they're afraid it's like while you're0:37:11dealing with people all the time you have serious problems sometimes it's mental illness although less frequently than you'd think and sometimes it's just that they're having a good catastrophe right there their parents have cancer or0:37:22something like that or the father has Alzheimer's and they're unemployed they have a drug problem or they have a schizophrenic son or like these aren't mental illness problems right those are0:37:31just catastrophes and so people are discussing those with you all the time how do you avoid being crushed by that or avoid taking at home and the answer to that is you don't steal the problem0:37:41that that's the answer it's like you have some problems if you come and talk to me I'll help you figure out how to solve them I will not tell you how to0:37:51solve I won't steal your problems because what we're trying to do in therapy is number one solve your problem number to turn you into a great solver of0:38:00problems and the second one is way more important than the first one and so you never solve someone's problem by removing from them the opportunity to0:38:10solve their problem that's theft that's the eatable situation that's the eatable situation that's the overprotective mother now farther can play that rule too we're talking about0:38:19archetypal representations like I'll protect you at the cost of your ability to protect yourself no wrong that's that's a sin that's a good way of0:38:29thinking about that is not what you do with people not with your children not with your partner not with yourself you don't do that that destroys people's0:38:38adaptive competence and it disarms them in the face of chaos and malevolence and that's a terrible unisen someone oh darn armed in the world like that it's a0:38:49terrible thing to do so and if people aren't strong enough to manage it then they get resentful and then you know when you get the downhill spiral that goes along with that okay so the meta0:38:59story is partly you're in a mat you're you have a map but it's insufficient and things will come up to disrupt it and sometimes the disruption is catastrophic0:39:09everything falls apart that's what happens to the Buddha and that's what happens to Adam and Eve and the rest of the biblical stories are actually an attempt to put that back together now0:39:19that's being assembled as I said it's been assembled over centuries right okay we've got the problem the problem is the apocalypse the ever-present reality of0:39:29the apocalyptic fall that's the problem and so you could say well what is that it's the insufficiency of all potential conceptual schemes right your conceptual0:39:39schemes are insufficient to deal with the complexity of the world it's a permanent problem so what do you do you stop relying on your conceptual schemes that's part of the answer you start0:39:49relying on your instead on your ability to actively generate conceptual schemes in the face of chaos and malevolence and0:39:58so that makes you someone that identifies with your creative capacity your creative courageous capacity for articulation and action in the face of0:40:08the unknown rather than some formulaic approach to the territory and that it not and that the idea is that that elevates your character to the point where you can0:40:18withstand tragedy and malevolence without becoming corrupt and that provides a permanent solution to the problem well then you might say cynically what's your evidence that0:40:28that's a permanent solution an answer that is while the evidence isn't all in yet first of all because people only live that way partially and so we0:40:38haven't put the hypothesis to the full test and second we don't know what our limitations are we have no idea what our limitations are and they're they're both0:40:48greater and lesser than we imagined because you you know you have to ask yourself like if people stopped adding voluntarily to the misery of the world0:40:57and devoted themselves to setting things straight setting themselves straight and setting the things around them straight what would happen and the answer to that is well there'd be a hell of a lot less0:41:08unnecessary misery in the world so that might not be a bad place to start but apart from that there's very little that we can say could we overcome the catastrophe of mortality why not0:41:19you think that's beyond our capacity could we make the world a place where no one was suffering any more than necessary and still allow the world to exist well possibly because we don't0:41:30know the limitations of our capacity we're only running at 40 percent if that I would say we don't make full use of all the people that are in the world we don't have our situation set up so that0:41:41the gifts that they could offer to everyone are fully realized we haven't set the systems up for that yet so we waste people like mad and then we waste0:41:51ourselves like mad and so I would say this is something also that's it one of the things that's really interesting about the Old Testament Jews this is I0:42:00think one of the reasons that their book has become so central is because what happens in the Old Testament after the fall is that Israel produces a series of0:42:09states right rise of state and then a fall and then a rise of another state and then a fall so it's the same thing except it's happening at a political level the political state rises it gets0:42:19corrupt it falls it rises out of the ashes again gets corrupt and Falls I think that happen times in the Old Testament and one of the things that's very interesting is0:42:28the reaction of the Jews they always say it was our fault instead of taking the Cain and Abel roots oh and I'm going to tell you the Cain and Abel story right0:42:37away instead of taking the Cain and Abel route they always say if the state collapsed it was because we did something wrong that's very different than saying you know it's arbitrary fate0:42:47it's the nature of arbitrary fate or the structure of reality that we're doomed to collapse into chaos and that's an0:42:56indication of the corruption of being well you can take that route if you want it's the corruption of being well good luck with that so what are you going to0:43:05do about that that's easy start you'll start to work for the destruction of being that's what you will do the alternative is to say this terrible thing happened and somehow it's0:43:15my fault well at least that ly opens you up the pathway to doing something about it and maybe it's actually the case maybe terrible things happen because0:43:24you're just not who you should be at least it's a night you know that's true to some degree right you know it because things happen to you all the time and you think well you know if I just would0:43:33have played that game straight if I would have put this thing in order that wouldn't have happened it's like okay fine what's the ultimate extent of that das esq said at one point that every0:43:43human being was not only responsible for everything that happened to him or her but also simultaneously responsible for everything that happened to everyone else it's a very it's a I would say it's0:43:54almost a hallucinogenic idea right it's a it's a transcendent idea and it can go very wrong sometimes depressed people for example get hyper responsible for0:44:05what's happened and just crushes them and so it's a it's a mode of thinking that can produce its attendant pathologies but there's something about it that's there's something about it0:44:16that's metaphysically true so all right so I'm going to tell you the story of Cain and Abel now I really like this story it's it's very short it's only0:44:25about a paragraph long which is very interesting because it it's one of these examples where there's a it's like a genie that the story there's so much0:44:34condensed into it that it's almost unbelievable and there's even ambiguity condensed into it which is which is very very interesting because it actually makes the story more0:44:43complex and sophisticated so let me tell you the story now the first thing I want to tell you some things about the story first so we've got the original paradisal state and then the collapse0:44:52and so now metaphysically speaking we're in the collapse we're in the we're in the post fall condition we're still occupying a mythological landscape right0:45:03this isn't history as we normally understand it it's meta history so when we talk about Cain and Abel Cain and Abel we're actually talking about the first two real human beings because Adam0:45:15and Eve a were created by God and being were in Paradise and so that's not the normative condition of human beings right that's a that's a special time0:45:24that's outside of normal time and space Cain and Abel by contrast they're in history because in some sense history actually starts a couple of times in the0:45:33Old Testament it starts with the creation of being it starts with the formation of the garden it starts with the fall it starts with Cain and Abel it starts it over again with Noah and then0:45:43it starts with Abraham which is really where what we would recognize more as conventional history begins so there's a number of starts of history but this is one of them Cain and Abel are the first0:45:53two human beings who are they they're the adversarial brothers hero and adversary there are types of Christ and Satan the well-known supposition you see0:46:03that hostile brother motif well it's an archetypal motif and the hostile brothers are the part of you that's striving for the light that's one-half0:46:13and the part of you that's embracing the darkness and so that's part of you it's part of the social structure that's Seth and Osiris it's part of the natural0:46:23order in some sense that's the benevolent and destructive elements of nature right you see that negativity running through all the archetypal0:46:32representations but Cain and Abel are the hostile brothers and the KE Cain is roughly that part of you that says Oh to hell with it and means it right and that0:46:43means you'll work for your own pain and destruction at the same time that you're working for the pain and destruction not only of your brother but but more particularly of the brother0:46:52that you admire because that's actually a lot more entertaining right if you're going to become destructive and you go destroy something bad that hardly0:47:02qualifies as destruction what you want to do is find something great and destroy that that's destruction that's revenge none of this coding punishment where it0:47:14deserves to be what you want to do and this is partly why the story of Christ is archetypal and the archetypal story is when you cannot push beyond what's the worst possible punishment what's the0:47:25worst possible punishment meted out for the least the least the most innocent person you hit an archetypal end there so you define most innocent person you0:47:35can do that any way you want define most innocent person define worst possible punishment can join the two things you get an archetypal story and the reason for that is you can't push0:47:44beyond it and so if you want to destroy something you want to destroy an ideal not something that's flawed and so Kate and Abel are set up exactly that way so0:47:55I'll read you the story and I'll interleave some interpretations along with it so an atom anew Eve his wife and she conceived and bore Cain and said I0:48:05have got the man from the Lord and she again bare his brother Abel and Abel with the keeper of sheep but Cain was a tiller of the ground0:48:14okay so Abel's a shepherd and Cain is a farmer the Shepherd is a archetypal symbol because the Shepherd is the0:48:24leader of a flock and the Shepherd is the heroic leader of a flock and the reasons this is Middle Eastern mythology let's say well if you were a shepherd what did you do you took your slingshot0:48:33in your stick and you defended your nice juicy plump delicious sheep against lions right so it was no joke man you you were a tough cookie if you were a0:48:43shepherd because while you were acting as the guardian of that you're acting as the Guardian against predation roughly speaking and you weren't armed very well0:48:52I mean well you can just think about it for a minute it's to think about fighting off a lion with a with a slingshot or with a bow and arrow with a spear I mean you have to have a lot of0:49:03courage to manage that especially successfully so Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain was a tiller of the ground which isn't as heroic to roll and so right off the bat you get this0:49:14dichotomy between the two roles it's also a great interest that Cain is the older brother and Abel is the younger brother and you see that very frequently in mythology because the older brother0:49:23is the one that's privileged by status right so he's got he's got privilege Cain because he's the elder brother that also means that if there are possessions0:49:33to be handed down the generations the older brother gets them now interestingly enough Cain has privileged but he's not the one that's favored by God that's and I think that's absolutely0:49:44absolutely brilliant that it's set up that way because it's actually Abel who doesn't have the right that the first Lord has who actually turns into the person who's the proper manifestation of0:49:54the ideal it's because Cain has things given to him you might think well that that's great he's privileged what a wonderful thing for Cain it's like don't be so sure about that and partly because0:50:05one of the things that you'll find because many of you will be well off when you have children is one of the problems with being reasonably wealthy when you have children is that you0:50:14deprive them of privation because the law of what makes people mature is necessity and if you have for example if0:50:23you have more money than you know what to do with roughly speaking it's very difficult to say no to your children when they want something because why are you going to say no you can just provide0:50:33it well what makes you think that that's what you should do well you can have anything you want well what happens you devalue what you want and your desires0:50:42continue to grow well that's not very helpful so it's not obvious at all that providing people with an excess let's say a privilege is something that's good0:50:52for them from a psychological perspective they need to hit the proper limitations and if you're fortunate it0:51:02becomes very difficult to deprive your children properly so you'll you'll fight with that it's a big problem that's what happens when you get spoiled children roughly speaking right they get every0:51:11they get everything by doing nothing well that's not a good lesson because that won't work in the world it worked very counterproductive leigh-anne in process of time it came to pass that0:51:22Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord and Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof and the0:51:31Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering but unto Cain and his offering he had no respect and Cain was very wroth angry and his countenance fell0:51:40okay so again there's a tremendous amount packed into that this is the first time that we see the motif of sacrifice right and so I mentioned to0:51:49you before how these archaic people conceptualized the world right it's a dome with a disc of land and underneath0:51:58that a disc of water fresh and underneath that a disc of salt water so that's the world and then up in the heavens that's where God is and so God's0:52:07up in the sky and we talked about why that might be and part of that is well when you look at the night sky you look at what transcends your current reality and you look at what inspires awe so0:52:18there's a God exists where awe is experienced fine that's a perfectly reasonable that's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis when you think that what0:52:27you're trying to do is formulate what constitutes the transcendent because if you exist within a conceptual structure and you encounter that which is outside0:52:36the conceptual structure you will feel off that's a combination of fear paralysis right and the combination of overwhelming possibility and you can0:52:46experience that for example if you listen to a great piece of music what happens the hair on the back of your neck stands up why because you're a prey animal and you just puffed up to look0:52:56bigger that's why you have that experiences pile of erection and it's part of awe so when you see a cat pop up because a big dog is in front of it that's what the cats feeling it's like0:53:06oh my god pop right so you when you encounter that which transcends your your limited sphere of apprehension then0:53:15you experience aw you look at the night sky that's what happens music can do that and all sorts of things that we do can evoke that sense and so they located0:53:24the transcendent value in that which inspired awe fight reasonable now you can argue about the utility of the personification0:53:33right because God the Father was personified in human form but that's a very sophisticated idea too because as we already found in the Old Testament0:53:42there's an there's an association between whatever God is yahwah or Elohim and and creating order out of chaos and0:53:51something about each individual human being and so I don't believe that the personification of God the Father in the Old Testament is archaic and and0:54:00primitive at all I think it's one of the most sophisticated things that people ever developed the idea is that the ultimate transcendent value is the capacity to generate order out of chaos0:54:10using linguistic ability let's say and that each person has that as an essential element of their being like argue with that see how far you get that0:54:20is one hell of a vicious conceptualization and I would also say it's the bedrock upon which our legal system rests so you don't move that easily you move that and many things0:54:30fall and there are things that you may say you don't believe but you ask them out all the time in fact if you didn't act them out people would set you straight very very rapidly because0:54:39basically what other people want from you even though they don't conceptualize it in this terms is that you Accord them the respect due the the incarnation of0:54:48the logos that's exactly what it means to interact with someone properly so it's you can say what you want about what you believe it doesn't matter what0:54:57matters is what you act out all right so also now we have this conceptualization of what's transcendent that's emerged as0:55:06a part partially perhaps as emotional contagion that which inspires awe is that which is transcendent and it's associated with these underlying ideas about the creation of order out of chaos0:55:16and the instantiation of that spirit in human beings that's all lurking in the background and then we have this other idea which we already talked about which is that0:55:25there's a patriarchal or paternal spirit that represents the community at large stretched across time you can think about that as the spirit of the ancestors so it's the past it's the0:55:35present but that's also projected into the future that's the thing you bargain with for your life in the future I'm going to sacrifice myself to get a0:55:44degree why is that because the spirit of my culture will reward me in the future that's the sacrifice okay well took people we were0:55:53chimpanzees for God's sake it took us a long time to figure this out chimpanzees don't sacrifice the present for the future you know you got to ask yourself how long did it take human beings to0:56:04figure out that there was a future and then what to do about it I mean this isn't some we didn't go from chimpanzee to fully articulated human being in one0:56:13in one step it was created knowledge and that was extraordinarily painful what did we learn from observation something0:56:22like storing up goods for the future helps us live imagine how difficult that is you know imagine that you're you're a farmer back wouldn't but that was an0:56:32extraordinarily you were barely scraping out a living doing that it was hand to mouth at best all right so now it's winter and you've got your damn seeds in your cellar right what are you going to0:56:42do you're starving you're going to eat them or are you going to wait and plant them again in the spring because that's your damn choice and so the people who decided to eat them well some of the0:56:53people who decided to save them died well let's say more of the people who decided to eat them died and so this sort of knowledge was was gathered with0:57:03an unbelievable agony you don't get what what you have what you want right now for you that's nothing because you're very much accustomed to getting what you want all the time right now roughly0:57:13speaking you know compared to people who live from hand to mouth but back when things were much rougher the idea that you had to sacrifice something of value0:57:22now to be paid off in the future man that was a rough thing to accept okay so what happened so people figured this out somehow they figured out that you could0:57:31make an offering of something you valued and that might help set the world straight how did they conceptualize that well they conceptualize it ritually they0:57:40were acting it out to begin with it's like the PIA jetty an idea you know when I would when I look at that cup part of the looking is this right it's the0:57:50adjustment of my body to the shape of the cup as part of my understanding well Piaget is here one of these days great observations that we use our bodies to represent0:58:01things long before we understand what it is that we're representing which is to say no more than we act things out we're dramatic creatures right we use0:58:10drama and the sacrificial ritual is a drama that points to a higher psychological truth and the higher psychological truth is let go of what's0:58:20in let go of what you value now and perhaps that will pay off Multi manifold in the future you're making a bargain and then you might say well who are you0:58:29making a bargain with and you could say well nature but that's not exactly right it's not exactly right because let's say0:58:38I have something of value in a social in the social organization and I'm going to I'm going to let it go because I'm relying on a corresponding reward or a0:58:49greater reward in the future it's a contractual relationship with other people it's not a relationship with nature it's that we've organized ourselves into a social structure and0:58:58we're willing to maintain the integrity of the social structure across time so that if I give up something now I can be paid for it in the future and the rules0:59:09that the deal is that we're going to try to keep the future the same as the present so that those contracts can be can be met in the future that's money that's what money is right here's some0:59:20money you made of sacrifice that's why you get the money what is the money signify it's a promise from the community that the labor that you0:59:31invested can be stored and then brought forward for your own purposes in the future so it's actually part of the social contract so the thing you're0:59:41sacrificing to is the spirit of society that produces the social contract and so that's conceptualized as God the Father well how else would you conceptualize it0:59:52it's it's the spirit of the dominance hierarchy that's the right way to think about it so it's the it's what's common across all the members of the dominant1:00:01hierarchy across time well it's something you can negotiate with true or not what the hell do you think you're doing when you make a contract what's the law it's all of this1:00:11it's the manifest mission of that patriarchal spirit across time and space and what do you do you sacrifice to it well so back 4,000 years ago 5,000 years ago however old1:00:21this story as it's probably older than that this is the best people could do with regards to realization and they got it quite right because they also noted that God was happier if you actually1:00:32sacrificed something of value and so there's a tremendous complexity and that idea because one of the things I could say and this is something you can pointed out let's say you're miserable1:00:42and unhappy okay here's a cure find what's valuable and let it go so we1:00:51could say well maybe it's a relationship that you have maybe its relationship with your parents right and the relationship is pathological but you're locked into it you value it and no wonder because it's a relationship with1:01:01your parents and you're suffering terribly because of it or what do you do maybe you let it go it's a sacrifice and the idea is that well that will clear1:01:10the future for you well very frequently when people are suffering terribly not always - sometimes you just suffer stupidly blindly and without recourse1:01:19you know you get cancer and then you die so we have no idea how to deal with that but sometimes the reason that you're suffering is because you just won't let1:01:28go of the thing that's biting you you think well I can't let go of and I've had clients like this I can't stop communicating with my mother who phones me three times a day every day of my life and never says anything that isn't1:01:38unbelievably critical and demeaning I can't let that go like well that's not such a good idea the funny thing too often when people1:01:48let something like that go it goes away sorts itself out and then comes back so they don't even end up losing it but unless they're willing to let it go to1:01:57sacrifice it they make no headway whatsoever and so one of the rules is if people are impeding your development you sacrifice your relationship with them1:02:08right it's a very very rough rule so in process of time it came to pass that1:02:17Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord and Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof now that's interesting this is this is where a1:02:26close reading matters so we don't know what Cain's offering is it's not much described but we do know something about Abel's offering and what we know is that by the standards of the time it's a high1:02:37quality offerings so it's the firstborn and it's the fat that high-calorie right I mean you know we think of fat as a dietary danger but if you're hungry1:02:47that's really wrong right because fat is unbelievably high-calorie and so what's happening is the story points out quite clearly that what Abel decides to offer to God is of high quality so it's the1:02:57real thing it's the real thing he's paying a price okay and so then it's burned well why is it burned well you know this is back1:03:07again thinking from an archaic perspective well gods in the sky you can't throw your lamb up into the sky it'll just fall back down and so the people knew because they've mastered1:03:17fire that smoke and savour rose and so you could detect the quality of an offering as a consequence of burning and then that would go up in the spirit of1:03:27the fire would go up to the sky and God could detect whether or not your offering was of a reasonable quality you know it's concretize obviously but you don't want to make the assumption that1:03:37the people who were our forebears were stupid just because they thought using metaphors that aren't the same as our metaphors they were still mapping out the damn territory in Owens and and1:03:47you'd look you can read a book like you're above the authors of the book or you can read a book as if it might have something to teach you and I would say1:03:57well sometimes the book isn't worth reading but if a book has been around for a very long period of time and a very large number of people have thought that perhaps there's something in it1:04:06sometimes they're right so and it's a tricky thing and it might also depend on how you read it but I found that this1:04:15sort of investigation was a lot more useful if I started from the presupposition that maybe there was something I didn't know instead of you know so funny for example I taught a1:04:24first year course about ten years ago on the psychology of religion it was so interesting dealing with the eighteen-year-old students because they're completely dismissive of1:04:33religious ideas and I thought God you guys you don't know anything and you have this specific kind of blindness that a set of very intelligent social1:04:42psychologists also identified which was blindness blindness because it actually turns out that the least the less you know about a topic the more you1:04:52overestimate the quality of your knowledge so I thought we're in this situation where kids who don't even know how to act in the world they don't know anything will come to university and1:05:02start up with the proposition that there is stood critics of judeo-christian culture which of which they know nothing they know nothing about it they knew nothing about history they know nothing1:05:11about philosophy nothing about literature but they're absolutely certain that they're correct in their in the criticisms that they're bringing forth it's absolutely unbelievable1:05:21so anyways and it's not helpful because then you don't you don't get to learn and you aren't well see you know what1:05:31happens if you don't learn okay so anyway so it looks like Abel's doing a good job that's the implication the story doesn't say Abel is doing a really1:05:41good job with his sacrifices it just hints at it and I like that because because it leaves that ambiguity it's like maybe you're working really hard1:05:50and your brother's working really hard and you really can't tell the difference between your quality of work and his quality of work but for some reason he's succeeding like mad that happens right1:06:00because there's an arbitrary element to life and so the story says well the Lord has respect unto Abel and his offering and there's an implication that maybe1:06:10the reason for that is that you know Cain's offerings are a little second-rate but the story doesn't come over to Club you over the head with that idea it just leaves it as a as an1:06:19ambiguous possibility and the reason for that is sometimes you make sacrifices and maybe they're even real ones and they don't pay off or they pay off for someone better and so there is this1:06:28arbitrary nature of the the transcendent that you're attempting to deal with it rewards and doesn't reward more or less of its own accord or there's an element1:06:38of that and so it's ambiguous in the text even though there's a hint that you know perhaps Abel is doing a better job than Cain so I like that I think it's very sophisticated so what happens1:06:50well Cain makes his offerings and God isn't happy with them now we don't know how Cain figures out that God isn't happy with his offerings we get some1:06:59hints of that too but the story does tell us that's what happens and so then we get the psychological response on the part of pain now one response could be Jesus I must be doing something wrong I1:07:10better straighten myself out you know I better come up with a better quality offering and try that again that isn't what happens what happens instead is that Cain becomes angry Roth1:07:20and his countenance falls and so what does that mean it means this right it means he is not happy he's angry and out for revenge and so one of the I've been1:07:31thinking about this a lot lately with regards to the literature on inequality because there's a very good literature that shows for example that there's there's a as a measure called the Gini1:07:41coefficient and the Gini coefficient is a numerical index of the relative inequality of a geographical locale so for example if you went to Newfoundland1:07:50where everyone is roughly not very rich or North Dakota say almost everyone there is say lower middle class something like that or upper working class something like that very little1:08:00variability low Gini coefficient okay if you go to Miami Beach say where everyone's rich low Gini coefficient because it isn't an index of absolute1:08:10wealth or absolute poverty it's an index of relative poverty and so if everyone's rich the relative poverty is low and if everyone's poor the relative poverty is1:08:19low now one question is where is the crime and you might think while the crime is where the absolute poverty is1:08:28high right or the absolute wealth is low that's where the crime is that's wrong if it's if things are relatively distributed in an egalitarian manner the1:08:38male-on-male crime especially homicide is low and it's also the case where everyone is rich but if you go into places where there's some rich people1:08:47but not very many and there's a lot of people who are comparatively poor than the male homicide rapes rates and violent crime rate up substantially it's a consequence of1:08:57male-on-male competition and so what you could derive from that and maybe even reasonably is that you should flatten out today I'm income into its distribution because you're1:09:06destabilizing the society by facilitating male criminal aggression you can make a good case for that you know in places like Colombia where the Gini coefficient got unbelievably1:09:16extreme society got so violent that it could barely hold itself together so so you can make a conservative argument for redistribution of income using the1:09:26observation that if the income distribution gets too extreme the whole bloody thing starts to destabilize it might fall but but then you also might say wait a minute1:09:35is it inequality that's driving the violence or is it resentment of the inequality that's driving the violence now that's a tough question because you1:09:46might say well what if the game is rigged and there's no way of moving up the power hierarchy well then maybe anger and the desire for revolution is the appropriate response but that doesn't really mean to me that1:09:56the response should be the sort of thing that you see in high Gini coefficient neighborhoods which is interracial intra-racial violence between men so for1:10:07example in neighborhoods where there's high murder rates the the murders are always between young men and they're always within race and so that doesn't1:10:16seem to me to be exactly a politically revolutionary move right it's more like it's more like violent competition for the sake of attaining status and you1:10:26might say well that's reasonable but because the inequality is there and then need to find status because it's part of what drives them forward it's part of what makes them attractive to women it's1:10:35a necessity well the question is do you attain status through destruction or do you start making your offerings put in your offerings in order and that's something we really need to figure out because1:10:45that's a fundamental political question it's a fundamental political question anyways what happens in this story is that khane decides that the fact that god isn't accepting his offerings means1:10:56that he's entitled to become angry and and and negative it's good those two things are both put together right he's Roth he's angry and he's also depressed1:11:06and so he's in a state of mind that well I think the best characterization for that is hostile resentment because it's unfair it's like yeah it's unfair so1:11:15what are going to do about it can you get destructive about it you're going to change your approach well Cain he does the ultimate thing and this is what people do when they do the ultimate1:11:25thing because that kind of hostile resentment has an archetypal endpoint and the archetypal end point is the point that you get when you're hostile1:11:34and resentful because you haven't been successful and then you go sit in your mother's basement for about 10 years and then you start imagining just how nice it would be if you shot up the local high school so that everybody knew your1:11:44name and what happens is you go from I'm irritated because things aren't working out for me very well - I'm irritated I and I hate those people for whom things are working out well - I'm irritated and1:11:55I hate the fact that the world is set up so that this has happened to me and then you go - well because I'm irritated and hate the world I'm going to do whatever I can that will destroy it most rapidly1:12:05and with the with the highest possible amount of pain and suffering conceivable and at that point then you don't just go shoot up the high school you go up and1:12:14shoot up the elementary school and so if you're wondering what kind of pathway people walk down to get to that point that's the pathway and the ultimate cap of that is well I'll kill the kids1:12:25because well we already know that killing the innocent is a lot more effective than killing the guilty and then just to cap it off I'll blow my head off at the end just to show you just how goddamn pointless it all is and1:12:35so that's the logical extension of Kane's attitude and you might think well that's a bit of an over-reading and I would say it's not an over-reading at all it's exactly what happens in the1:12:44text so it's exactly what follows it so fine so Cain is not happy and so who is he not happy with well he's not happy1:12:54with God so what does that mean well we've already unpacked this he's not happy with the social contract because that's part of the spirit the patriarchal spirit let's say man there's1:13:04more to it than that because we already we've already analyzed what God the idea of God might represent in the background of this story he's not happy with the transcendent he's not happy with the1:13:14idea of the logos all of that no faith in the transcendent nothing but he does nothing but despise the social contract and he's got no1:13:24faith whatsoever in the the logos let's say the word that brings chaos are the border he's all got nothing but contempt for all of that and you know certainly1:13:33you know people like that and if you don't know them you just go on YouTube and read the comments and you'll see all sorts of people like that so so anyway1:13:42so God has a little child with him and he says well what why are you angry and and why why are you upset and Cain says1:13:51then God says if you do well won't you be accepted and if you don't do well sin lies at your door and unto thee shall be his desire and thou shalt rule over him1:14:01okay that's a very mangled translation I would say so I'm going to take it apart so what God says is while you're angry and you're upset it's like well what's1:14:11your problem and then God tells Cain if you did things properly they would work out for you was the last thing he wants to hear because what Cain wants to believe is1:14:20that the reason he's not doing very well is because there's no sense having any faith in the logos the transcendent is is evil and aimed exactly against him1:14:29and the entire social contract is faulty that's what he wants to hear but that is what God says God says wait a minute maybe you're doing something wrong well1:14:40that's maybe a worse message then everything else is corrupt it's like you're having a problem because you're just not everything you could be well and then God says something really nasty1:14:49and you can't help from this lines I read a bunch of translations to try to figure out exactly what it bent so this is what God tells Caden he says you're in a room in a house and1:15:01there's something at the door and he uses a metaphor God uses metaphor it's a sexually a lot aroused predatory cat and you invited in you've invited in you1:15:12know that it has evil intent you invited in to mate with you right and you it's it's union with you it's this malevolent1:15:21force this it's sexual union with you has produced an offspring and that offspring is what possesses you and so not only have you done something wrong1:15:32you've you've invited the Spirit wrongdoing into your life and you creatively intermingled it with it voluntarily to bring forth a monster of1:15:42your own creation so that's what God tells Cain it's like look it's bad enough that God says you know you should1:15:51get your act together because maybe that's why things aren't going so well for you before you criticize the transcendent and the world and the structure of being maybe you're doing something wrong but1:16:00it's worse than that he says not only are you doing something wrong you bloody well know you're doing something wrong and you and you're doing it creatively and with intent so not only are things not going well1:16:10for you but you've played a creative role in producing that situation and so God basically says I am taking zero responsibility for rejecting your1:16:20sacrifice it's all on you and so Cain leaves and he's like seriously not happy with that response because he wanted to hear pat1:16:31pat you're a victim of circumstance and everything is conspiring against you and really being god I should get my act together and just give you what you want because obviously being God I'm wrong1:16:41and you're right well that is what happens it's exactly the opposite that it's completely on you that's the that's the judgment and so Cain leaves and1:16:50believe me he's he was Roth before his countenance had fallen before but it's nothing like it is now and so he hits the next stage and he thinks okay I'm1:17:00going to take my revenge what am I going to do I'm going to find the most innocent and worthwhile thing that's favorite of God and I'm going to kill it and that's what he does so it doesn't1:17:10matter that his brother and Abel you know we're drawing the inference Abel's done the right things everyone likes him everything's flourishing for Abel he's a1:17:19good guys one of those people that you meet that has everything and then you meet them and you wish you could hate them but you can't because they're really good people and then you really hate them because not only do they have1:17:28everything but it appears that they deserve it and there's nothing that sort of sits in your soul and rots it more than that realization and so that's the situation with Cain and so Cain thinks1:17:38Cain talked with Abel his brother and it came to pass when they were in the field but Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him so that's so1:17:47interesting because look look what happens to here so he's not doing well he's separated from the transcendent and from society he's bitterly resentful and now he goes1:17:57out and kills the very thing that he most wants to be so he destroys his own ideal right he demolishes his own ideal that's how far his resentment has pushed1:18:08him and so he's he's done right but he doesn't matter because it enables him to take revenge so he doesn't care it's like it's like the the suicidal school1:18:17shooter that blows off his head at the end of his mayhem it's like he doesn't matter to him it's part of the same art form and the Lord says unto Cain where is Abel thy brother and Cain said I know1:18:28I don't know am I my brother's keeper well that's a good question that's why it's posed in the story because the answer that it's supposed to be yes and God says what have you done the voice of1:18:37your brother's blood cries unto me from the ground that's actually the motif that Dostoyevsky explores I would say in1:18:47crime and punishment because what happens is that the Skolnick Cobb is Cain for all intents and purposes and he commits a murder but he gets away with it well so he thinks so he thinks no one1:18:59suspects him he buries the money he can't stand to touch the body he buries it in a in a abandoned lot and he's drawn there now and then to look at1:19:08where it is but he can't touch it because the money it's so funny because the money before he kills the pawnbroker is not the same as the money after he1:19:17kills the pawnbroker and the Restonic off before he kills the pawnbroker is not the same as the risk Olenick off after he kills the Paulding broker in1:19:26fact they're not the same at all and so the Skolnick have is tormented by God you could say but not from the external world1:19:35he sets the crime up quite nicely it's that this the spirit against which he transgressed tortures him from within and there's no escape from and so1:19:45eventually what happens in crime and punishment is the Skolnick ov continues to manifest himself as guilty in every possible way until he receives the punishment that he desires because it's1:19:55the only way that he can set things right he actually he actually he essentially turns himself in eventually because he can't tolerate what he's done so well so that's the1:20:06idea the voice of thy brother's blood cries unto me from the ground it's guilt1:20:15and now you're cursed from the earth which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand when you till the ground it will not1:20:24henceforth yield unto you it strength a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth you know and you might say well why does God not just strike Kain1:20:35dead and the answer to that perhaps is that wouldn't be sufficient punishment1:20:45that's what it looks like to me it's like what's the punishment you live with what you did right and I don't want anybody taking out either because then1:20:55you won't have to live with what you did so that's the punishment and Cain says unto the Lord my punishment is greater than I can bear like yea behold you have driven me out1:21:05this day from the face of the earth and from thy face shall I be hid that's the same as what happens to Adam in the Garden of Eden remember Adam hides from God and he has his reasons1:21:15and now Cain is alienated from God there's no Reid there's no reconstructing that relationship he's put himself by violating his contract1:21:25let's say with the transcendent and also with society and also with his own spirit he's put himself outside the possibility of redemption and that's why he says the punishment is greater than I1:21:35could bear there's no hope left right so he's in hell for all intents and purposes behold thou hast driven me out1:21:45this day from the face of the earth and from thy face shall I be hid and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth and it shall come to pass that everyone who finds me will will kill me1:21:54and God says therefore whoever slayeth Cain vengeance shall be taken on him Sevenfold and the Lord set a mark onto Cain lest any finding him should kill1:22:04him now that's interesting you think why in the world would God protect Cain well the next part of the story actually tells you that you have a family I have a family1:22:13your brother kills my son so what you I come and I kill your father and your cousin and then you think well I1:22:22killed your father and your cousin I'm going to come back and I'm going to kill four of your people and then I come back and say yeah no problem it's sixteen to1:22:31you this time and then you come back and you say sixteen a let's try for thirty-two and so this is what happens this is actually why justice systems are set up by the way you go there's a bunch1:22:41of reasons justice systems are set up and one is to punish the guilty that's one the other is to have the guilty repent that's two to maintain social1:22:51order that's three here's another one that no one ever thinks about back thirty years ago the governor of Massachusetts whose1:23:01name I forget was running for president and while he was governor of Massachusetts he had released a number of prisoners one of whom his name was I think Willie maybe Hortense doesn't really matter and1:23:12when Willie was released on this program he went out and raped someone and perhaps killed them I can't remember but it doesn't matter that the rape is good1:23:21enough and the governor was asked during a debate what he would do if a relief prisoner had raped his daughter or his1:23:31wife and he gave a very weak answer what was his name he did a very weak answer of something about you know letting the law take its due course and that's the1:23:41wrong answer right the right answer is I would be compelled with every fiber of my being to hunt that person down and to tear them into bits but I won't do it1:23:52now what so what's the purpose of the justice system it's to alleviate you from the responsibility of revenge that's what it's for1:24:01because otherwise what happens you kill one I kill two you kill four I kill eight you kill sixteen and soon everyone's at war and so God protects1:24:13Cain to stop that from happening to stop the feud from emerging because those things can go forever and then from transforming the entire society into a state of war and so what's also so I'll1:24:23tell you the rest of the story and Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and well in the Land of Nod on the East of Eden and Cain knew his wife and she1:24:33conceived and bare Enoch etc so now you have a genealogy right so Cain starts to have a family you have a genealogy and so a number of people are named in the1:24:42lineage and so and it tells you what this is sort of an attempt to describe how things came about so this is like the naming of the heroes of old and so1:24:51you have Enoch who builds the city you have jebel who is the father of those who dwell in tents and of those who have1:25:01cattle you have Jubal who is the father of musicians and Zillah who bore tubal Cain now tubal Cain is a very interesting person1:25:11by tradition tubal Cain is the first artificer of weapons of war so Cain's descendent after multiple generations is1:25:21the person who produces weapons of war alright and so so there's another bit of the story within which that needs to be placed in context and Lamech who's one1:25:35of the grandchildren of Cain says unto his wife that wives Adah and Zillah hear1:25:44my voice ye wives of Lamech hearken unto my speech for I have slain a man to my wounding and a young man to my hurt okay so what he's saying is he he's been1:25:55involved in a murder if can be a vote Avenged Sevenfold truly Lamech seventy and Sevenfold and so1:26:04there's the implication there that the tit for tat process has begun Cain kills Abel Abel Cain's children kill seven1:26:15Cain's grandchildren kill seventy fold and then tubal Cain pops up on the horizon and he's the person who makes artifices of war and so the story in its1:26:26fragmentary manner ties the individual psychopathology that's resentful and revenge seeking to the proclivity for1:26:35broad scale warfare and this really hit me because I was interested particularly in what was happening in the Nazi camps with the guards because the guards were gratuitously1:26:45cruel and I was very curious about that and so here's an interesting story this was in a book called ordinary Germans Hitler's willing executioner's and it1:26:55was a book that was written about 30 years ago that challenged the idea that the Nazi phenomena was top-down order following which I don't believe by the way I think that's a very weak weak1:27:06hypothesis fascistic societies are fascistic at every single level of organization spiritually within the family within the local community it's1:27:15like a holograph it's the same absolutely everywhere it's not top-down I mean there are leaders who get produced and maybe they catalyze it but to blame it on the leaders is to forget1:27:25about the process by which the leaders come to be so no you don't get a past that way so here's one of the things that happened as the Nazis started to1:27:36lose the war so here's what you should have done if you were a Nazi and you wanted to win the war you should have enslaved the Jews and the gypsies and had them work right you have the head1:27:45should have had them work for the benefit of the victory and then if you wanted to liquidate them afterwards that's the logical thing to do if you want to win and we assume that Hitler1:27:55wanted to win but that's not a very intelligent assumption why would you assume that he wasn't exactly a good guy so why should we assume that he was aiming at the good that he was promoting1:28:05even in his own terms right the glorious everlasting fourth Third Reich right let a rule for a thousand years and be a bastion of civilization1:28:14in music because that's the sort of thing he purported to be interested in well so what do you do with the Jews and the gypsies well round them up fine it1:28:23slave them fine you don't kill them you certainly don't devote a substantial proportion of your war resources while you're losing to accelerate the rate at1:28:33which the extermination is taking place because that's a bit counterproductive unless what you're aiming at is the maximum possible mayhem in the shortest period of time well so what happened as1:28:42the Germans started to lose the war did Hitler lose faith in his own ability no he believed that the Germans had betrayed him with weakness and so he was perfectly willing to accelerate the rate1:28:53at which Germany was losing the war and so when Hitler and his minions have the choice here's the choice you can suspend your unnecessary demolition of people win the1:29:03damn war and then pick it up afterwards or while you're losing you can just accelerate the mayhem even though it's counterproductive it's like what they pick well they pick to accelerate demand1:29:14and so to me there's an old psychoanalytic idea I think this was derived by you you can't figure out what someone is doing or why look at the1:29:23outcome and infer the motivation if it produces mayhem perhaps it was aiming at1:29:32mayhem now you know you have to use that dictum carefully if someone's irritating you you know maybe it's because you're irritable that you should sort yourself out but maybe it's because they're1:29:42actually aiming at irritating you and that's the actual motivation so perhaps not but it's another tool in your analytical armament so and so you see1:29:53well this is the thing about warfare that's so interesting about about because you can you can attribute it to territoriality you can attribute it to a1:30:02war for resources that's what the I would say wretchedly simple-minded economists presume people fight over1:30:13scarce resources it's like hey we're a little bit more sophisticated than that and first of all what resources are you talking about the bloody idiot had1:30:22nothing they live perfectly well what did they have snow and seal blubber you know people can live and unbelievably deprived conditions and so1:30:31the idea that there are natural resources that we fight over because there's a shortage of them is a pretty oversimplified view of human beings it's like well why do people fight well maybe1:30:40they fight sometimes for good reasons but very very frequently they fight for bad reasons and those bad reasons are our personal as well as socio-cultural1:30:49and economic you know if you are a Nazi prison guard for example whatever pathologies you were carrying around in your destructive little soul whatever element of Kane was deeply embedded in1:30:59you had the opportunity to be manifest fully at every moment of your waking existence right you have these people who are completely beholden to you with no rights whatsoever to1:31:09you could do whatever your evil little heart determined think well maybe that was a motivation for putting them there to begin with and all the cover story about well we're trying to build the1:31:18Third Reich and we're trying to stabilize the state and we're trying to do all these good things maybe that's just a cover story for the real motivation which is nothing but but what1:31:27the construction of death camps that killed 6 million people how about that and the obliteration of 120 million people on the planet and the end oh and the and the leaving of European runes1:31:37maybe that was the motivation or are we going to attribute to Hitler the highest possible motives say no it's an archetypal manifestation of Cain now1:31:47he's going to put up a front it says I'm your savior it's like well destructive people think that Cain is their Savior1:31:59let's take a break for 15 minutes so ok so the next thing that happens these1:32:12stories were sewed together right to make something that resembles a coherent text and there's this literary athletic1:32:21no there's a literary technique known as metonymy and metonymy is the juxtaposition of two things beside one another with the implication that1:32:30because they're juxtaposed they are causally they're related in some important matter to one another and so the stories are sequenced and the1:32:39there's an implicit the stories are sequenced in a particular manner and you might operate under the assumption that1:32:48that sequencing occurred because the sequencer who was an editor or a group of editors they called that person to read actor but they have no idea if it1:32:57was one person or many people who organized these texts into something resembling a coherent story so imagine the stories evolved somewhat independently and then they were organized so that they produced what1:33:08approximated the coherent narrative it's not entirely coherent because there are paradoxical claims say at the level of the sentence so for example the creation1:33:17order in the first story in Genesis isn't exactly the same as the creation order in the second story and you know people who insist upon the literal truth of the Bible whatever that means1:33:27is are bothered by those contradictions and turn themselves into knots trying to iron them out and fair enough right because you want the story to be coherent but you know that's sort of1:33:41it's important but it's also beside the point you don't want to focus on one level of analysis at the exclusion of all the other levels of analysis that's probably the right way to think about it now the1:33:51fact that these stories are sequence in a particular manner and that that kind of makes sense implies that there's some sort of narrative coherence underneath driving forward otherwise they would be1:34:02nothing but a random assemblage of stories and they're by no means random that's for sure they're selected and edited and put together in a particular manner by and then stored that way and1:34:11dealt with in a particular manner by thousands of people over many many years what happens after Cain and Abel is while there's an interlude which is this interlude and it's kind of a bridge1:34:22and and there's a lot packed into it too although I'm not going to take it apart very much says so this is after after the Cain and Abel story and it came to1:34:31pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born unto them but the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair and then took them wives of all which1:34:41they chose and there were giants in the earth in those days and also after that when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bare children to them the same became mighty men which1:34:50are of old men of renown okay so I already pointed out that if you go back just a little bit you see that the1:34:59descendants of Cain are represented as founders of institutions right there are1:35:11Enoch who builds the city and an adder or jabal who is the father of those who dwell in tents and of those who own1:35:20cattle and then there's Jubal who's the father of all that are musicians and so on so one of the things that you see in in myths very frequently is that if1:35:29there's a pattern of behavior that's characteristic of the culture that pattern of behavior is attributed to a hero who was in the past who was the first person who did that and so you1:35:40might say well what does that mean well it means in Parkton there was the first person who did that although more likely there was an assemblage of people who1:35:49aggregated that particular ability say the ability to play music across a very large amount of time but these are pre literate people right and they're trying to remember the past and so what happens1:36:00Mircea Eliade documented this quite well is that that aggregation of people gets collapsed into a single meta person and that's the hero of old and so and I1:36:10already talked about how this works is that you know there are admirable people and then you can tell a story about an admirable person and then you can extract a story out of the set of1:36:19admirable people and you keep building higher and higher order admirable people until you extract out at the top what's ultimately admirable and this is1:36:28actually an indication of that process occurring the Giants that are referred to in this particular phrase are the heroes of the past who established the traditions on which the1:36:38society exists and so that's all compacted into this little paragraph so this little paragraph here there were1:36:47giants in the earth in those days and after that when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bare children to them the same became mighty men which were of old men of renown well1:36:56you could hardly say I think there's very little difference between what I just told you and what this story says I mean it says it as if it was something1:37:06that literally occurred but in some sense it doesn't exactly say that it says well the ancient landscape was a landscape of heroic adventurers it's1:37:16like well we do that to our own history right I mean even when we consider it literal history we don't pick people at random to historic I sweep ick people1:37:27who had some substantive impact and tell stories about them and and they're emblematic in some sense of the spirit of striving that characterizes humanity1:37:37and and so you can't have history without some mythologies ation because the mythologies ation occurs at the level of the selection of the entities1:37:47about which you're going to weave the historical tale so okay so anyway so there's little there's a little interlude there that it talks about the1:37:56appearance of heroes in the past but then it's just that's just done with very very rapidly and then we move into another story this is the story of Noah1:38:07so the way it looks to me is that the the part of Genesis that I'm going to talk to you about ends with the flood1:38:17myth and also with the Tower of Babel and so the flood myth is the demolition of everything that came before and the Tower of Babel in some sense is exactly the same thing so there's two chaotic I1:38:28mean it's like the fall occurs in stages there's paradise and then Adam and Eve fall into culture and then Cain and Abel Cain falls into chaos and then the1:38:39entire society falls into chaos and the flood comes and the Tower of Babel is produced and then that's the end of the truly archaic parts of the Bible and so what1:38:50that seems to me what's happening it's very sophisticated is that there's a implicit causal narrative being warrant woven about the manner in which Cain1:39:00responds and the probability that human beings are going to deteriorate and the flood is going to come so and God saw that the wickedness of man was great in1:39:09the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually and it repented the Lord that he had made man on earth and it1:39:19grieved him at his heart well we already encountered a story like that once already right that happened in the martyr story where time out and absolute give rise to the elder gods and1:39:29they kill absolute which was not very smart idea right they demolish the sub structure of their stable society and of1:39:38course chaos comes flooding back well what does it mean to say that human beings let's see to say that the1:39:50wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the hearts of his own thoughts of his heart was only evil continually is not much different than to say that people are acting in a manner that demolishes the1:40:01cultural structure now we've already even pointed out that the cultural structure that happens in this story was produced by the heroic Giants of the1:40:10past right and we've also noted that what Kane is objecting to in his Kane like manner is the social structure which isn't rewarding properly and the transcendence that's above that and the1:40:21spirit of logos itself he's rejecting all that okay so the issue here is that when that sort of evil is produced exactly as when AB sue is Slade Slade I1:40:33guess that's right by the by the Elder Gods then all hell breaks loose all chaos comes back now time at if you remember correctly is the god of the salt water goddess of the salt water and1:40:43so the return of time at and the flood are mythologically similar ideas now Elia has taken apart flood myths from all over the world and he made two1:40:53brilliant comments about them and there are also akin to some degree to what you can see the Egyptian story about Seth and the corruption of the state so because the1:41:02Egyptians figured out that there's always a power working within the state let's say that corrupted it now that was set and that was always working for its overthrow it's an idea like Satan and I1:41:11said that the the word Seth becomes the word Satan through Coptic Christianity so so the le adds I deal with this that1:41:21things fall apart of their own accord merely because they aged that that's the first motif in the flood story and that's only to say that if you build something it decays if you build1:41:30something and you just leave it the hell alone it will soon not work right and that's entropy so one of the reasons that the flood always threatens is merely because1:41:39of entropy and you see that reflected in the Egyptian story because one of the reasons that Osiris falls prey to Seth1:41:48is because he's old you know he was a great hero when he was young and created the Egyptian state like the men of renown but now he's old and it's worse1:41:57he's be willfully blind but that's the next thing but the fact that he's all is just to start things fall apart of their own accord so once something is given to you you1:42:06have to maintain it just to ensure its continued existence and so you actually you actually have a contract with most of the things that you own it's it's1:42:15like a it's like a moral contract let's say you have a car well you've decided that you're going to sacrifice to have the car and so you you performed an1:42:25ethical calculation but the car was only worth the sacrifice as long as it functions as a car and so what that means is that to justify the sacrifice1:42:34you've made to have the car you have to maintain the car because otherwise you're acting out the proposition that the thing you sacrificed for actually didn't have any value and so you're1:42:44obliterating that as a useful contract and you run into the situation where the car will just deteriorate of its own accord and then you won't have a car at all well so let's say how do you speed1:42:55the process by which your car deteriorates well that's easy you're driving it along the road and it starts to make a ticking noise tick tick tick1:43:04tick and you think I should go have that ticking noise checked because you've heard it and then you think nah it won't matter it's like yeah probably it'll matter and what does1:43:13matter mean well matter is mother that's chaos to you no matter but what it means is that that little ticking noise is the birthplace of time at in your car that's1:43:23a good way of thinking about it is that it's your first indication that the dragon of chaos is going to manifest itself in your car that happens when you I've got a funny story about that so I1:43:34had a friend in in in graduate school someone I really liked but I wouldn't call her mikela mechanically inclined let's put it that way and she had an old1:43:43Honda and those things were notorious for rusting out this is thirty years ago when they were first produced they weren't adapted well to Canadian winters and we used to go in her car in her1:43:52Honda and it got a little on the scary side because it was so rusty underneath that you can actually see through the floorboards and that actually made me nervous because if you can see through1:44:02the floorboards that means that they're not really floorboards what they are is like rust and so I mentioned the fact that that might be a problem to her a1:44:12couple of times but she was sort of blithe about it and one day she was driving down st. Lawrence Street in Montreal which is the main street running roughly north and south and her1:44:21hood popped up it bent and popped up spontaneously and so she was pretty curious about that and so she was with this friend of hers who was just as clueless mechanically as she was which1:44:31is really quite remarkably clueless and so they pulled off into a service station and had the guy come out look at it and well he he opened the hood1:44:40obviously and what had happened was the body had fallen off the frame so and what had happened was the shock which is like supposed to be attached to the car1:44:49had pushed up through the through the hood so literally that car body had like fallen onto the ground and but she was1:44:59she managed to drive the car okay so look that's I wouldn't exactly call that willful blindness because perhaps there was an element of willful blindness she1:45:08didn't know anything about mechanics but you get the point right it's like let's say she would have been in a fatal accident you might say well you can shake your fist at God for producing the1:45:17circumstances but you know the fact that you could see through the floorboards that's probably something that you might have paid attention to and so always the question is if things fall1:45:27apart around you to what degree is it the mere tendency of things to degenerate entropically because they do that of their own accord or have you1:45:36sped the probability of decay by failing to pay attention when with our little snake manifests itself inside your paradise and it's always it's always a1:45:45question so when here's a here's an example an interesting example I think so I've thought about the actual floods like the New Orleans flood1:45:56okay so New Orleans is built where there are floods everyone knows that and it's a major port in the United States a huge part of American trade goes down the rivers to New Orleans1:46:05so there was a reason it was built where it was even though it was a dangerous place to build it and in order to maintain New Orleans they had to build these levees that kept the water back now the American what is it American1:46:16Army Corps of Engineers if I remember correctly was responsible for building and maintaining the levees and the dikes okay Holland is also built underwater as1:46:27you may or may not know and they build huge dikes to keep the ocean back so they could reclaim the land and that's basically Holland Holland is an unbelievably organized society and part1:46:37of the reason is is it isn't land it's underwater and so if you're not bloody well awake in Holland then the ocean comes in and you all drown and so the Dutch are very very careful about such1:46:46things and they build their dikes so that they calculate storm intensity and then they calculate the intensity of the worst storm in 10,000 years and then1:46:56they build the dikes to withstand that storm the Army Corps of Engineers built the dikes in New Orleans to withstand the worst storm in a hundred years and they knew that was insufficient and New1:47:05Orleans Louisiana is an unbelievably corrupt state and you can't dump money in there to fix things because people just steal all the money so and then nothing gets fixed and so then what1:47:15happens there's a hurricane and then what happens there's a flood and everybody says why would God send the flood and answer that is well was there a flood or where the dikes not high1:47:24enough and that's what's so interesting is that it's always this is a great father versus great mother conundrum if a system failed is it1:47:35because of the surround overwhelming the system or is it because the system was insufficiently awake and doomed itself1:47:44okay so Eliot its take on the flood myth is this God comes along and floods the world periodically why and that that's the catastrophic influx of chaos right1:47:54so chaos will wipe you out from time to time why well entropy does in your conceptual schemes and your willful blindness speeds the process and remember that's1:48:05what the Egyptians said about Osiris right they said he was old he was a great king a man of renown but he was old but he was also willfully blind and1:48:15it was the combination of his age and his willful blindness that allowed Seth to chop them up into pieces and and depose them and so that would that ferret out it's brilliant right it's1:48:24like why the states fall apart because the structures get old and no one's taking care of them and people have their eyes closed and so it's the same1:48:33situation it's the same situation in the flood myths it's like well yeah things fall apart they're going to flood but if you were awake enough and you were on top of it then you could continually1:48:43stave that off and actually partly what you're doing because you're alive is staving off entropy like you're an anti em tropic process it's a really good1:48:52definition of life there's a great physicist named Erland Schrodinger who wrote a book called what is life and that's the fundamental thesis of the book you're always trying to stave off entropy what's the best way to stave off1:49:03entropy decay chaos keep your eyes open that's the rule shut your eyes especially two things you know you should see the flood comes and that's the evil of man that's laid out1:49:13in this story because that's the worst sort of perhaps it's not the worst it's one of the primary sins so to speak that will bring about the flood we already1:49:22talked about the other things that characterized Cain's attitude so1:49:31here we go so gods upset because he made man on earth and it grieved him at his heart and God says I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the1:49:41earth both man and beast and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air for I repent that I've made them but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord1:49:50okay so that's an interesting thing so here what we have is the question is the whole worlds in chaos at this point1:49:59right in this point the story and the chaos is of multiple sorts it arose from the fall it rose from the emergence of self-consciousness it emerged safe arose1:50:08from the sins of Cain like things are not going well it's multiple levels of collapse and it's got to the point where God saying this is a mess like it's such a mess that the whole thing has to be1:50:18washed away the first fall wasn't enough even Cain's collapse wasn't enough we're going to just scrub the whole bloody thing clean so it's it's the ultimate in1:50:27traumatic collapses the question is well what do you do in the face of the ultimate in traumatic collapses and the answers in the story so know as someone1:50:37who finds fate who finds favor in the eyes of God so he's like Abel there's something that Noah's doing right it's going to enable him to ride out the1:50:46storm and so the question hits the same question do you want to have a life where there's no storms or do you want to have a life where you can ride out1:50:56the storms that's the issue right are you behind the dikes or do you build a boat do you tap them the boat that's the same idea and so the idea here is that the thing that rides out the chaos is1:51:06the thing that builds and captain's the boat it's another dominance hierarchy idea what should be at the top well it's the top of something that doesn't get1:51:15flooded out as well what should be at the top well it's to be the boat builder and to be the captain of the boat it's not to be hidden from the flood precisely and so I mean here's a here's1:51:26here's something to think about identity identity politics because that's what we're up to our neck it okay are you who1:51:35you are can I box you in will you accept that as an identity so I could do that lots of ways you're male you're Asia you're you right there's things about you that I1:51:45can derive because of your putative membership in a set of different groups the problem with doing that is that the number of groups that I can assign you1:51:54to is without end so I have to pick arbitrary groups to assign you to and you can accept that if you want but there's no evidence that those are the1:52:03proper canonical groups but maybe you're happy about that because now you've been assigned membership in a group and that's your identity okay so the question is well fine what happens when1:52:14that identity is flown into pieces then what well here's here's the answer to1:52:23some degree and this is the answer that's embedded in the story of Noah if you want to withstand chaos do you1:52:34want to be who you are or do you want to be the thing that changes who you are constantly that's the question and that's the difference that's the1:52:43difference there's a categorical difference in identity are you who you are or are you the thing that could continually be more than you are and that's the thing that isn't the stable1:52:53identity it's not the initial state it's also not the state of being in chaos that nihilistic state let's say and it's not even the state of reformulations1:53:03that occurs after you've gone through the process it's the state of continually going through the process so you can identify with the thing that trends you can identify identify with1:53:13the thing that you are or you can identify with the thing that transforms who you are right and that's the same as the state subjugating itself to the1:53:22individual because the individual is the thing that transforms the state and what the state should do the states necessary because obviously it organizes all of us into peaceful cooperation and1:53:32competition the states necessary then the question is is the state the highest good an answer that is well it can't be because it's old and dead and blind and1:53:41so if the state becomes the highest good then you're occupied by the spirit of something that's old and dead and blind well that's not only not good for you1:53:50because then you're old and dead and blind but it's also bad for the state because as soon as the state gets old in dead and blind God gets unhappy with it and the chaos comes in and washes it1:54:00away so it seems like a bad solution so what's the proper solution you subordinate your group identity to the identity that transforms your identity1:54:10right and the state subordinates its power to the vision and articulation of the individual because that's what revives the state and so that's what1:54:19these stories are trying to stumble towards roughly speaking so Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord why well Noah was a just man and perfect in his1:54:29generations and Noah walked with God now remember in the Adam and Eve story Adam was walking with God to begin with but1:54:39then he got all self-conscious and hid behind a bush and when God came to walk with him he blamed his wife for his insufficiencies which I still think1:54:48that's such an unbelievably comic story I just can't believe it it's so absolutely ridiculous but that's exactly what happened while you have Noah here and Noah Noah's like a counter another1:54:58counterpart to some degree to Cain no as a just man and he walks with God and so he's oriented properly and because he's oriented properly when the flood comes not only does he manage to get through1:55:09it as an individual he manages to get through it with his family and he saves and while he saves he roughly saves the world that's how the story puts it1:55:18forward I mean it's an ark and it's full of animals you know it's it's got a child story element to it fact I suspect it probably was a story that was primarily told to children you know it's1:55:27like a fable but it's a fable with Punch like the Pinocchio story is a fable with Punch it's like well yeah there's going to be a flood there's always a flood1:55:37there's always a flood so who are you if you want to get through the flood well then you're Noah you're the thing that builds the boat you're the thing that acts justly you're the thing that walks1:55:47with God we already know what that means you identify with the transcendent that's like Geppetto pointing to the star before the transformation process1:55:56that occurs with Pinocchio it's you're identifying with the benevolent spirit of the state so you have a relationship with the transcendent and the benevolent spirit of the state and you're also1:56:05identified with the capacity to generate chaos of order and the reverse that's what it means to walk with God roughly speaking it's across all of those dimensions so1:56:15what does that do it gives you the power to withstand the flood and to bring people and and and being itself and1:56:24civilization along with you and that's the story of Noah so it's a precursor it's another Abel as a precursor to the idea of the redeeming Messiah right Noah1:56:35is a precursor to the idea of the redeeming Messiah you could think about the mask proto messiahs or proto meta Heroes something like that and they1:56:44manifest themselves they're part of the Giants that walked in the past and they're embodied their attempts embodied in story to elucidate the the triangle1:56:54that's at the top of the pyramid right the eye that's at the top of the pyramid so so I won't tell you the rest of the Noah story because I don't think it's1:57:04necessary for us to to - to delve into the - the more narrative details but I1:57:14do want - so it's a pretty rough I can point out it's a pretty rough story every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground both Man and cattle and creeping things1:57:24in the fall of the heaven and they were destroyed from the earth and Noah only remained alive and they that were with him in the Ark it's a very terrifying story you know and and it's worth1:57:35attending to because we are currently in a period of extreme chaos so okay so anyway this works out God's had enough1:57:44he's killed is enough he's killed enough of everything it's a it's a traumatic occurrence we can put it that way the waters recede and God God is done for1:57:53the time being and so then this is what happens at the end so the ark settle down there unloading it and creation is1:58:03reborn and so then you think well what sets things right again between man and God and the story says that Noah built in our altar unto the Lord and took of1:58:13every clean beast and of every clean fowl and offered burnt offerings on the altar so it's the same idea here it's that the same idea that you started to see emerging in the Cain1:58:22Abell story what is it that sets things right between man and God sacrifice so the flood comes then Noah makes the proper sacrifices right it's1:58:31part of reestablishing the proper order he makes the proper sacrifices and so God is happy with the sacrifices which is a good thing given that he's pretty1:58:40ordinary and-and-and the Lord smelled a sweet savour so remember I told you before that the reason people thought1:58:49that this would work was because the smoke would rise up and God would be able to detect whether or not the the sacrifice was of high quality well you have it written right there you know1:58:59it's very concrete eyes dim egde of the archetypal spirit right the Lord smelled a sweet savour and said in his heart I1:59:09will not curse the ground any more for man's sake for the imagination of man's heart is evil from this youth neither will i again smite any more every living1:59:18thing as I have done that's pretty nice as Noah's sacrifice actually calms down God down to the point where he says well I'm not going to wipe everything out1:59:27again it's like well fair enough you know but it I would consider it somewhat of a tenuous contract because we've seen1:59:36more than one example in the recent century where we came bloody close to wiping everything out again while the1:59:45earth remains seedtime and harvest and cold in heat in summer and winter and day and night shall not cease neither again will i smite any more every living thing as I have done so all1:59:56right so that's that he basically tells Noah the same thing again that he told2:00:05Adam at the beginning of the Genesis story so fine and then he tells them a bunch of rules which I could go into but at the moment I won't but I want to show2:00:15you that basically what God I guess I should do this to some degree God lays out a bunch2:00:26of rules so you could think about it as a precursor to what happens in the story of Exodus where the Ten Commandments are revealed so this is like a foreshadowing of that story no one makes the proper2:00:36sacrifices and God says okay fine here's the rules follow these rules and then they're laid out and things will go okay with you that's the covenant that's the agreement between the end you could say2:00:45that's the agreement between the individual and the spirit of the state that's one way of looking at but it's not enough because it isn't merely the spirit of the state that's being2:00:54negotiated with it's the spirit of the state it's the spirit of that which transcends the state and it's the spirit of the moral order that's within the individual all three of those things are2:01:04being negotiated simultaneously the proper sacrifices are made the proper rules are laid out and the idea is that there'll be a good balance between order2:01:13and chaos as a consequence as long as people continue to play by the rules so that's the offerin fundamentally so part that seems to work out and then this one2:01:25I think is extremely interesting it's also very short it took me a very very long time to to understand this2:01:38all right so this is after the story of Noah so what happens is you get this situation where things descend into chaos and there's a great flood so that's sort of like the ultimate chaos2:01:48story and I think of it as it there so you imagine when things fall apart one possibility is that they fall into chaos the other possibility is something like2:02:00they become hyper conceptualized in hyper orderly and so then the state itself which would be the antidote to2:02:09chaos actually becomes a source of pathology and I think that that's what's being hinted at in the story of the Tower of Babel so here's what happens is that human beings I'll read it to you2:02:20this is this has to do with Noah's descendants it's a flip into another story and it came to pass as they journeyed from the east oh yes2:02:29and all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died news story and the whole earth was of one language and one speech everybody's getting along fine in their2:02:40tribal organization let's say it's homogenous they can all speak to one another and they all speak the same language and it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found2:02:49a plain in the land of Shinar and they dwelt there and they said to one another go to let us make brick and burn them thoroughly and they had brick for stone and slime had they for mortar and they2:03:00said go to go to let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven and let us make a name lest we be2:03:09scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth okay so what's happening here only the2:03:19bear this is this what this story means is very deeply implicit in the story it's hinting at it and I think it's because it was really beyond the power2:03:28of the conceptualization of the people who generated this story to elaborate it to any great detail but I think what it means is this is that there's a guy2:03:38named Robin I think it's Robin Dunbar and one of the things that Dunbar has done is do a very in detail correlation2:03:48analysis of cortical expansion and group size and what he showed is that if you if you plot primates by2:03:57cortical size let's say you corrected for body size you plot primates by cortical size and then you plot the size of their social groups you see a very tight relationship between the size of2:04:07the social group and the size of the cortex the optimal human social group is like two hundred individuals is something like that which is maybe roughly the number of people that you can reasonably track on Facebook after2:04:18that it's like well there's names but you don't know those people you're not capable of tracking social dynamics there any more complex than that particles you have other problems2:04:27to solve and so one of the things that has been observed is that human groups tend to fractionate if they start to exceed 200 and maybe that's partly because you can't keep track of the2:04:36complexity but there's another constraint which is you want your group to be big enough so that it protects you but you want it to be small enough so that you can climb to the top because so2:04:46when the group gets really really really really big well maybe it can protect you although it also doesn't give a damn about you like once you're 1602:04:55thousandth of the group like you are at the University of Toronto we're 130 millionth of the country or maybe 1 300 millionth of Europe which is partly why2:05:05Europe is going to fragment because that's just not enough right you're just not enough there that this the group is too big what happens you keep aggregating the group it gets2:05:16more and more powerful and you can think of that as something that has the capacity to replace the transcendent right will make a society that's perfect it's like a utopian vision that's what I2:05:26see happening in this story it's like we'll make something so great on the part of human beings that it will reach up to heaven itself which means it will take the place of God that's what it2:05:35means that's exactly what the Communists did in Soviet Russia that's what they tried to do in China too and so that's why you ended up with people like Stalin as the God so you talk about getting2:05:45what you deserve so anyways so you build these monolithic enterprises that will let's call them state enterprises and2:05:54the idea there is that the state the hyper organized and all-inclusive state can bring about Utopia that's what it means to reach to heaven so what happens2:06:04so god gets wind of that and he says blood says the Lord came down see the city in the tower which the children of men built and the Lord said2:06:13Behold the people is one and now they all have one language and this they begin to do and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have2:06:22imagined to do go to let us go down and therefore confound their language that they may not understand one another's speech what's interesting because it's sort of the story kind of portrays it as2:06:32jealousy on God's part right it's like oh these these human beings they're they're building so magnificently that they're starting to challenge my2:06:41Dominion well I'm going to go down there and play a trick or two law on them and that'll that'll take care of that so what happens the people within the so the group gets bigger and bigger and2:06:50bigger and bigger and bigger and what happens it starts to fragment that is what happens that's exactly what happens that's part of the reason why the totalitarian state enterprise to replace2:07:01the transcendent with structure that's one of the reasons it's doomed as you pull more and more people in what happens is you start to pull in chaos itself and that starts to fragment the2:07:11order here is an interesting thing I think that's happening with the soul the LGBT power groups are exclusion excluded2:07:20groups right and so it started out with gay rights and then one of the things that's happened it's so interesting so you could think of there was a normative group and there was excluded people okay2:07:30and so one section of the excluded people stood up and said hey you know enough of this explosion so we're going to categorize ourselves and we're going to fight for recognition as the excluded2:07:41we're going to fight to be included but what happens is well it's L and then it's lb and then it's lb G and then it's LGBT and the last thing I saw which was2:07:50actually handed to the medical students in at the University of Toronto there's 20 letters why well because you can't2:08:01this is tangentially related to this story only you can't come up with a category of the things that don't fit inside categories because there's an2:08:10infinite number of things that don't fit inside categories and so when you try to build a category out of all uncatted oracle entities all that happens is2:08:19defragment because there's actually no unity there and one of the things you are starting to see is that there's power battles emerging on the part of the excluded on the left and it's2:08:28inevitable because and I think that's what this story is trying to represent is that you can't build the state up beyond a certain size if you Delia will2:08:38fragment and fall apart the people within it will no longer speak the same language and they'll they'll they'll disperse themselves to different corners of the earth and so I think we're2:08:47actually in real danger of forgetting this and one of the things that I saw read a couple of ominous things so if you plot the size of economic2:08:56catastrophes over the last thirty years they're getting bigger each time so that's scary now part of that is because the world economy is getting bigger and so maybe you have to control for that2:09:05but the magnitude of the chaos has been increasing with each collapse okay one2:09:16of the things that came out of the last collapse 2008 was the government rescuing collapsed companies like AIG and the Royal Bank of Scotland which by2:09:25the way was the biggest company in the world no one knows that but Royal Bank of Scotland collapsed it was the biggest company in the world and AIG was the insurer of insurers and so it collapsed too they2:09:36were rescued by the government and maybe fair enough but one of the motifs that came out of that was the idea of too big to fail2:09:45well this story says wait a second it says too big means definite failure it means inevitable failure and that2:09:56strikes me as highly probable is that there's a warning in this story although it's it's just it's a bear story right it's only four or five lines it's just2:10:05the outlines but it's placed in a very particular place it's placed right after the flood right it's like well there's the nihilistic chaos of the flood and then there's the temp totalitarian2:10:14temptation to build hyper structures that can theoretically replace the transcendent well what happens you build a hyper structure net fragments from within and then people don't speak the2:10:24same language and they and they you know distribute themselves sort of chaotically on the surface of the earth so therefore is the name of it called Babel2:10:35because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth and from thence did the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all the earth I think the other issue too is is that2:10:45what's the problem with the homogenize a ssin of a group it's like you bring everyone into the group and then they're all the same uniformity well the2:10:54advantages you can understand everyone the disadvantages there's no variability left right there's no variability everyone is a clone of everyone else and2:11:03that's great if you know where you're going and you know how to get there but it's really really bad if the underlying structure shifts on you because the fact that you're adapted to one situation2:11:13hyper adapted to one situation might mean that you're content completely not adapted to the next situation you build groups that are too big and too2:11:22homogenous they're effective but only within the limited range of their map and it's the map no longer functions then the whole thing sinks and that's I2:11:31think what happens in this particular story and then okay at the end of that then what happens is that soon afterwards and I think perhaps immediately afterwards the story of2:11:40Abraham emerges and that's really I would say that's when the the prime myths the primal myths take on a more2:11:49historical element and history you know roughly speaking history as we know it begins something like 6,000 years ago so and then then you know the rest of the2:11:59biblical stories proceed apace from there what basically happens is that this is something that was well mapped out by Northrop Frye and you'd think at the University of Toronto that you all2:12:09would have been encouraged to read Northrop Frye because he was perhaps the greatest literary scholar that the University of Toronto ever produced and what he he outlined the Old Testament2:12:20very interestingly he said that what happens after these initial stories is that the state arises so it's like the Tower of Babel is continually rebuilt2:12:29over and over it's the state of Israel's Israelis Israelite to get their act together build a state what happens they get corrupt the Prophet comes up and2:12:39says you better watch out because what you're doing is not making God happy and the prophets are very brave because they come forward that the case are authoritarian they could kill them at an2:12:48instant but the profits are moved by walking with God let's say for lack of a better argument they come to the king and say look you're not caring for the widows and the children right you think2:12:58that's okay because they're weak it's not okay you're breaking the Covenant you're breaking the rules and the price for that is what we're Esau the price for that is the flood it's like get your act2:13:08together or you're going to be sorry now sometimes the Kings to whom the prophets speak listen but often they don't and then the whole bloody state is demolished and then the Israelites are2:13:18back like they're enslaved or they get wiped out by their enemies or like it's a complete bloody catastrophe that lasts for centuries then they kind of struggle back up and make another state and then2:13:28they get arrogant and then it gets corrupt and then a prophet comes along and says you know what happened last time like well that was 600 years ago right and I know everything now so I2:13:37don't have to pay any attention to you it's they ignore it and then because and the prophets say you are violating a fundamental moral order you're supposed to as king you're supposed to be subject2:13:48to something higher than yourself right it's like the idea that the Mesopotamians had that the emperor was supposed to be an emissary of Marduk that's why he was the Emperor because he2:13:58was a good Marduk he could confront chaos and make order that was what gave him his sovereignty or the Egyptian pharaoh was a combination of Osiris and Horus that's what gave him sovereignty2:14:07and so the idea was you get to be king but you have to act out the spirit of being King and if you don't do that then2:14:16well King or not all hell's going to break loose for you and that's what the prophets continued to say but the Israelites you know they don't pay2:14:25enough attention and they continue to get absolutely demolished and so the Old Testament can be read at least in part as the description of a sequence of the rise and fall of States and their2:14:36descent into corruption and chaos and so we'll leave it at that because I want to tell you the next part of the story the last part of the story roughly speaking in our next lecture which is also the2:14:47last lecture so we've got about 12 minutes if we want it so if anybody has any questions you can ask them or we can2:14:56and if you don't then we could call it a day so does any well it's a lot of information so and it's a lot of strange2:15:05information so I'm curious you know it's if it what do you make of it you're2:15:21talking about Europe around eternity so why is why the group war side which is America is related fate you think the2:15:32right and left can talk to each other sure you think they speak the same language right so you see of that fragmenting occurring and they really are not only are they speaking different2:15:42languages they're they really are speaking different languages it's the right way of thinking about it yes it's very very dangerous you know I think the u.s. worked for a long time first of all2:15:51because it didn't always have 300 million people it's a lot of people to put under one umbrella now the utility of the American system is that it is a2:16:00hierarchy right there's individuals families towns States underneath a somewhat loose federal structure and that's sort of so it's not a it's not a2:16:11monolith where everyone has to speak precisely the same language it's got some flexibility built into its structure because it's it's come it's it's formulated into components which2:16:21have a certain amount of autonomy and so far that's worked sufficiently well whether it will and it will probably continue to work I mean the Americans are very very robust people and they've2:16:31gone through things that are analogous to what they're going through now many times god only knows right but but it's very dangerous thing to presume that the2:16:41Americans are down for the count because they have an uncanny ability to rise out from mash is even stronger than they were before but you can certainly see the danger lurking in Europe that's2:16:50that's a different thing like I think the European state is doomed because I think it grew too fast and it severed the connection between2:17:00like there's not the proper hierarchy of identification so and people are saying wait Brussels like who the hell are you guys why are you making decisions for us2:17:09and we don't agree with your decision and like are you sure that Greece and Germany can be in the same place because that's by no means self-evident right2:17:18the Germans aren't very happy about it and the Greeks aren't very happy about it and one of the rules for making an organization is that it's a lot easier to make a functional organization worse2:17:28than it is to make a dysfunctional organization better and so you might say well you've got Germany and France and England well let's say Germany and2:17:37France powerhouses especially Germany they can afford to bring Greece in well maybe but there's no evidence that they2:17:47can afford it so I mean Greece is unbelievably corrupt no one pays their income tax that's a big problem right and bringing them in to a union at a2:17:57high order has no effect whatsoever on the micro behaviors and the thing is the micro behaviors have to be rectified and no one really knows how to do that how do you stop a country where people don't2:18:07pay their taxes from how do you stop people from not paying their taxes why do we pay our taxes who knows we could just all of a sudden decide not to you2:18:17know and the government wouldn't have the resources to run around gathering them all up for one reason or another it's become customary for people in functional Western democracies to pay2:18:26their taxes but why who knows it would've been way easier for us just to do what the Greeks did and pretend to2:18:35pay them you know so they're too big I think and so the people on the right is saying back to the nation like I understand why they're doing that but2:18:46but the danger is the nation will subordinate the individual and I do see it as another example of safe spaces it's just scales different so and that's2:18:58why I think that the proper antidote to that to both the chaos on the left and the order on the right roughly speaking is to walk the proper line in the middle2:19:07and when we better do that because things are not things are too chaotic at the moment so it's not good maybe it's really good that's possible but we're in2:19:18a state where I really believe we're in a state where things could go any number of ways and there's no there's no predicting it so and I've2:19:27never felt that you know I mean I lived in the 80s and you know political correctness rose up in the 90s as well and I can remember a lot of what happened in the early 70s with the oil2:19:37crisis and all that so there were times when things were shaky but they weren't shaky the way they are now they're in internal shakiness rather than something2:19:46that was a threat that would seem to be imposed from the outside and that's different and and it's it's it's it is2:19:55associated with with this intellectual war that's going on with post-modernism in the you Marxism and all of that as well so the ether of the program music on the2:20:08GPS will be especially ideal in rest future and you mentioned that the program probably exogamous or pronounced and then it's picked lean on the Western2:20:18assessment what is asked for imagery a goal-directed and with special ability related and2:20:27they are so given that Madrid has made a real little piece of doing it could this account for the jungle2:20:36that's a lot of questions they're good questions well I'll tell you a couple of strange things that that things that I don't really understand the first is when we've done the analysis of the2:20:46effects of the future altering program it has had a difference its differential impact on men and it had a particularly differential impact on what I would call2:20:55excluded men and so that would be non-western ethnic minority men or or what majority men who are doing very2:21:04well so for example at Mohawk College the theater authoring program had a particularly robust effect on Mohawk College students who were men who2:21:13haven't done very well in high school and who hadn't picked a major that had a destination a career destination at its end so you can imagine those people are2:21:22they have an ambiguous relationship with the idea of education and they're not oriented specifically towards a goal they're not very motivated now why does2:21:33it have a differential effect on man that's a good question well first of all the women are doing better so it might just be a matter of the fact that it2:21:42does better for people who aren't doing as well and at the moment most of them are men I don't believe I think that might be part of it but I don't believe that's all of it I think that part of2:21:52the reason that women are doing better is because they're agreeable and so if a system sets out a structure and says here's a pathway to attainment the women2:22:01won't rebel against that they'll go along with it and that's working very well for them at the moment the men especially the men on the disagreeable end of the distribution and there's way more men on the district disagreeable2:22:11end of the distribution then there are women right that's what you get from if you look at overlapping normal distributions so there's the male just female distribution for agreeableness2:22:20male distribution for agreeableness tremendous overlap okay women are higher all the really agreeable people are women all the really disagreeable people2:22:29are men and maybe the real differences occur at the extremes right so so and it's a very interesting side effect of overlapping distributions so they people2:22:39can be mostly the same but that can still produce radical differences disagreeable men won't do anything they don't want to do they just say up yours I'll go home and2:22:50play video games with you no I'm not listening to your stupid classes and why should I work for you I'll just go have fun I'll do my own2:22:59thing I don't think they're motivated and so then if you take the men who are like that and you say okay what do you want you can have what you want but you have to figure out what it is so then2:23:09they write down what they want they think oh hey well that might be worth having so maybe I'll put some effort into it that's what it looks like to me now you know that's weak evidence and this is a weak argument but I'm trying2:23:20to stretch out my understanding to account for this but I'll tell you something else that's really weird I don't understand this either so more than 90% of the people who watch my2:23:29videos on YouTube are men now that's weird because not about 80% of psychology students are women so that is not what you would expect right you'd2:23:38expect that the majority of them would be women and you might say well it's because of the political stance I've taken and I thought well that's possible so I went and looked at the demographic data because I have that well before I2:23:48did any of the political videos eighty-five percent of my viewers were men so it's actually increased a bit it's increased by six percent and that's2:23:57not trivial but it was still overwhelmingly men so that was interesting I thought what the hell why is that exactly and then now I've been watching crowds2:24:06when I've been talking to them and the crowds that have come to see me in person this happened at the University of Toronto free speech debate and I actually noticed it and commented on it2:24:16before the debate took place because I was talking about intrinsic differences between men and women and I looked around the room and I thought hmm hey 80% of the people in this room are men so I had all the men stat women and2:24:26women stand up and then all the men stand up it said look like here's a natural experiment for some reason 80% of the people who showed up to this or men now everybody thought I was kind of2:24:35cracked to to do that and it was a risk you know and I but I thought no there's something going on here and then what's interesting now is that every public2:24:45appearance that I've made that's related to the sort of topics that we're discussing is overwhelmingly men it's like it's like 85 to 90 percent and so I2:24:54thought wow that's weird like what the hell's going on here exactly and then the other thing I've noticed is that I've been talking a lot to the crowds that I've been talking to not about2:25:03rights but about responsibility right because he can't have the bloody converse what do you do it you can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility because your rights are2:25:13my responsibility that's what they are technically so you just can't have only half of that discussion and we're only having half that discussion the question2:25:23is well what the hell are you leaving out if you only have that half of the discussion and the answer is while you're leaving out responsibility and then the question is well what are you2:25:33leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility and the answer might be well maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life that's what it looks like to me it's like here you are2:25:42suffering away what makes it worthwhile right you know you're completely out you're completely you have no idea what2:25:51you're you it's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is responsibility that's what gives life2:26:02meaning it's like lift a load then you can tolerate yourself right because look at your useless easily hurt easily killed2:26:11why should you have any self-respect that's the story of the fall pick something up and carry it pick make it heavy enough so that you can think yeah well useless as I am at least I could2:26:22move that from there to there well what's really cool about that is that when I talk to these crowds about this the man's eyes light up and that's very2:26:31like I've seen that phenomena because I've been talking about this mythological material for a long time and I can see when I'm watching crowds people you know their eyebrows lifter I let light up because I put something2:26:41together for them that's what mythological stories do so I'm not taking responsibility for that that's what the stories do so I save the story people go click click click you know in their eyes light up2:26:50but this responsibility thing that's a whole new order of this is that young men are so hungry for that it is unbelievable and one of the things I've been talking to some of the people2:27:00who've been running for the conservative leadership in Canada and I've been talking to them about well the difficulties they have communicating with young people because conservatives2:27:09what the hell are they going to sell to young people right because being conservative is something that happened when you're older they can sell responsibility no one's selling it and2:27:18the thing is for men there's nothing but responsibility you know I was watching The Simpsons the other day I watched the first Simpsons episode and I deconstructed it and so it's really2:27:29interesting so what happens in the first Simpson episode is that it's Christmas and Homer and Marge are going to buy some Christmas presents but Homer doesn't get his Christmas bonus and so2:27:38he's absolutely crushed by that and that actually is a recurring theme in The Simpsons where Homer loses his job or something like that or can tonight make enough money he's completely crushed2:27:48even though he's kind of useless bumbling laughing fool of a guy you know the thing that gives that show its soul is that he's still oriented towards his2:27:57family that's what makes him honorable is that foolish as he is he's decided to adopt responsibility for his family and to try to bear that and so he's not he's2:28:06a holy fool he's not a complete fool and it's so interesting watching the story because he suffers dreadfully as a consequence of not being able to fulfill his responsibilities well that's for men2:28:16women have their sets of responsibilities they're not the same right because they're complicated because women of course have to take2:28:25primary responsibility for for having infants at least but then also for caring for them there they're structured differently than men for biological2:28:34necessity even if it's not a psychological issue and it's also partly a psychological issue women know what they have to do men have to figure out what they have to do and if they have2:28:44nothing worth living for then they stay Peter Pan and why the hell not because the alternative to valued2:28:53responsibility is impulsive low-class pleasure and you saw that in the Pinocchio story right that's Pleasure2:29:03Island it's like well why lift the load if there's nothing in it for you that's another thing that we're doing to men that's a very bad idea and to boys it's like you're pathological and oppressive2:29:14it's like fine then why the hell am I going to play that's if that's the situation if I get no credit for bearing responsibility it could bloody well be sure I'm not going to barity but then2:29:24you know your life is useless and meaningless and you have you're not full of self-contempt and nihilism and and that's not good and so that's why I think that's what I2:29:33think's going on at a deeper level with regards to men needing this direction a man has to decide that he's going to do something he has to decide that and2:29:43the different sort of animal things were some more yeah well you know importantly what2:29:54you're trying to do in the future authoring process is say okay well what's your highest value right it's the star it's like okay what are you aiming for you can decide man but you know2:30:03there's some criteria it should be good for you it should be good for you in a way that facilitates your moving forward maybe it should be good for you in a way2:30:12that's also good for the family in the community it should cover the the domain of life I mean there's constraints on what you should regard as a value but2:30:22you but within those constraints you have the choice you have choice well the thing is is that people will carry a heavy load if they get to pick the2:30:31goddamn load so and they think well I won't carry any load it's like okay fine but then you're like the sled dog that doesn't have a sled to pull you're just2:30:40gonna you're going to tear pieces out of your own legs because you're bored you know you need people are pack animals they need they need to pull against2:30:49awake and and that's not true for everyone it's not true particularly say for low conscientious people I mean maybe they're open and creative or extroverted and some other things but2:30:58for the for the typical person they they'll eat themselves they'll eat themselves up unless they have a load this is why there's such an opiate2:31:07epidemic among dispossessed white middle-aged guys who are unemployed in the u.s. it's like they lose their job they're done right they despise2:31:16themselves they develop chronic pain syndromes and depression and the chronic pain is treated with opiates it's like that's what we're doing so yeah that's2:31:26what it looks like to me is you you have to and it's so interesting to watch the young men when you talk to them about responsibility there's a god damn thrilled about it it just blows me away2:31:35it's like really that's what that's the counterculture grow the hell up and do something useful really I could do that2:31:44oh I'm so excited by that idea no one ever mentioned that before like rights rights rights rights Jesus it's it's appalling it's a bit and I2:31:55feel that that's deeply felt by the people who are who are coming out to to listen to these sorts of things too they've had enough of that so and they2:32:04better have because it's it's a non-productive mode of being responsibility man that's where the meeting in life is so all right good one2:32:16more class thanks we'll see you next week0:00:002017 Maps of Meaning 12: Final: The Divinity of the Individual
0:00:000:00:11I Started that I started the beginning of the class three months ago talking to you about0:00:22What it what the problem was that I was trying to address? and The fundamental problem was the problem of belief systems0:00:32and the issue is was what precisely constitutes a belief system and0:00:43Then a secondary question was why are people so inclined to even engage in conflict to Maintain and Expand their belief systems0:00:56and then maybe a sub question of that and is there an alternative to conflict with regards to belief systems and then the last issue0:01:06Was something like well. Is there a way of judging the relative quality of belief systems? And so those are all very very complicated questions, I0:01:16mean the first one is something like How is it possible to understand the structures by which we orient ourselves in the world the second one is something like0:01:30What's the pSychological significance? Precisely of those systems. What role does it play in? psychological health and maybe also in Social health0:01:41the next one is can you make a [non] [relativistic] case when you assess an array of different value systems and0:01:53then link to that is is it possible to hierarchically organized value systems in The manner that's justifiable, so that something can be reasonably considered in0:02:06a superior or subordinate position now the last question Drew my attention because because of the implications of the first set and the last0:02:20question drew my attention because I Was trying to sort out the metaphysics in some sense of the cold war?0:02:30the question was was this just a battleground between two hypothetically equally0:02:40appropriate belief systems which would could be a morally immoral relativistic perspective right it's belief systems are arbitrary and So combat between them is in some sense inevitable and even more to the point there isn't any other way0:02:55around the discontinuity in some sense other than combat or subordination because there's no way of0:03:04adjudicating a Victor because there's no such thing as victory if there's no way of ranking value systems. It's arbitrary As a frightening prospect because it means that if you have a value system, and I have a value system0:03:17And they're different and they're different [I] mean we can talk or you can subordinate yourself, or I could do the same But there's also no [reason] why we shouldn't just engage in Flat-out0:03:28Conflict now it's complicated in the modern world obviously by the fact that conflict can become so [untraveled] that it risks destroying everything and that doesn't seem necessarily to be in anyone's best interest unless0:03:43Your interest haps happens to be in destroying everything and certainly there are no shortage of people whose interests tilt in that direction0:03:52Alright, so the first question was well. What does it mean to have a belief [system] and That's a very complicated problem, and I think0:04:05It's a subset of the question of being Maybe you can break the question of being into two0:04:15domains Which we've done in this class, and you could say well, you can assess being From the perspective of what exists and then you can assess being from the perspective of how?0:04:26You ought to act? so it's like you walk into a room and you can describe the furniture or You can determine how your going to conduct yourself in the room0:04:38Maybe it's the difference between a play and the stage setting for a play now the Modernist Perspectives Roughly speaking is that the fundamental reality is to be found in the description of the furniture?0:04:52So to speak in the description of what is that's the scientific? process [and] the scientific process seems to involve0:05:03the stripping off of the subjective from perception and to some degree from action and the extraction of the commonalities across0:05:13perception as a means of delineating the Nature of reality Now obviously that's a [very] powerful0:05:23process, and it has many advantages, but exactly what it is that science is doing is not precisely clear one perspective might be is that0:05:33we are genuinely Discovering the Nature of objective reality [and] perhaps even the nature of reality itself0:05:43but There are some problems with that perspective one of them being that The scientific process seems to strip the subjective from the phenomena. It does that technically right?0:05:57I mean you have [a] hypothesis about what something is and you have a hypothesis about what something is and you have [a] hypothesis [about] some [what] something is and we undertake a number of procedures to assess what the0:06:09Fundamental phenomena is and then we look across our perceptual set and we extract out the commonalities And we dispense with everything that is superfluous everything that's merely subjective0:06:19So what you feel about the chair is not relevant to the objective existence of the chair and so it eradicate subjectivity, and that's a very useful process because it does seem to enable us to0:06:33Grasp reality in a fundamental sense more profoundly, but it leaves the subjective behind and maybe that's a problem0:06:43Because it annoys okay, okay? Thank you. [what] [if] I just didn't alright appreciate it, so0:06:52so then the issue might [be] well is something you retrieve ibly lost if you dispense with this objective and and also, how0:07:01Deep a hole do you dig when you dispense with this objective? and I think that that's0:07:10intrinsically associated with the Problem of the relationship between is [an] [dot] because That's an old0:07:19Philosophical conundrum, I think first put forth by D. David hume Who made the claim that? No matter how much you know about something from an empirical perspective?0:07:29You cannot use that as an unerring guide to action in relationship to that? To that empirical object or set of empirical objects and people it's a tricky [issue]. You know because obviously you can use empirical0:07:42information to inform your decisions But I think But the problem is is that there's multiple pathways of action that are implied by any set of data that seems to be the fundamental0:07:55Problem, it's something like that. Is that you can't draw a one-To-one Specification between the empirical district description and what you should do about that and like maybe an [example] is0:08:05But you can gather a lot of information about aids and you can gather a lot of information about cancer and you can gather a lot of information about educational outcomes and Economic outcomes and so forth but it isn't obvious. How you then use that?0:08:18empirical information For example how to guide policy decisions because you might say well, how much money should we spend on education? compared to cancer prevention and how much money should be spent on cancer prevention compared to curing aids and or0:08:32Addressing disease in the third-world country what happens is that the set of variables that you? Encounter while trying to make your empirical calculation get to be so massive so rapidly that there doesn't seem to be any0:08:43Logical way of linking them to a behavioral outcome now. It's kind of associated with the postmodern conundrum as well Which is well if you have a set of data, and it could be a literary work without better0:08:53There's a very large number of interpretations that you can derive from [that] set of data And there's no simple way of deciding which one is going to be canonical and so it isn't it I think the reason that you can't derive a naught from an is is because you run into something like0:09:07Combinatorial explosion it's like you have an infinite [number] of facts at your disposal Roughly speaking and then another infinite number of ways that you can organize those facts and that0:09:16massive array of facts and and [Andrey] categorized facts doesn't tell you what to do in a given situation0:09:25and so maybe the question of what to do in a given situation is a different domain of question and I believe that to be the [case]. I think it was Stephen Jay gould who talked about religion and science as0:09:41- I think he called them different Magisterium to different fundamental domains that and that each had their realm of operation and one was the0:09:50description of the objective world obviously that's on the scientific end and the other was the realm of ethics and so you could put Religion Mythology narrative the humanities all of that history even for that matter to some degree into the into the0:10:05ethics Category and because I don't see a [straightforward] way of Taking a set of facts and then transforming them into a behavioral compulsion0:10:18then I do think that these two [things] are reasonably regarded as overlapping and intrinsically associated but0:10:28But technically and philosophically separable [alright], so then then the next question emerges well if they're separable if there has to be a0:10:40domain of inquiry into the structure of [values] What might that look like? like how is it that you would understand the0:10:53psychological and sociological phenomena that are associated with a Moral stance0:11:04[Howhow] would you understand the details of that and then even more to the point is there any way of subjecting different sets of ethical interpretation to0:11:16Testing so that you can judge their comparative validity because that's sort of the way out of Moral relativism Roughly speaking. It's like0:11:25First you make the proposition that there are value structures and that they're independent from empirical investigation and then the next is that you investigate the possibility that you can compare and contrast different structures of ethics and0:11:38Draw some sort of conclusion. That's not merely arbitrary Now it might be turtles all the way down. That's how the old joke goes right, but But maybe not then I was interested in that again because I thought well are we fighting the cold war0:11:53merely because we're having an argument or is there some Manner in which one of these systems can be just determined to be wrong and of course0:12:07There was more weight behind that query because The soviet system and the maoist system and and the system. That's in place in North Korea0:12:19were not only Predicated on different assumptions than in the western system, but they were also extraordinarily murderous and so that seemed to add additional0:12:28Weight [to] the to the sequence of questions so0:12:37I was reading young at the time and young was carl young was fundamentally I would say a psychologist of narrative of story and0:12:47and He he outlined this He outlined the idea for me that people inhabited Stories Roughly speaking0:12:57He said actually they inhabited myths and even more to the point whether they knew it or not They inhabited archetypal myths or even that they were possessed by them0:13:06And so it was the first time I'd really come into contact with the idea directly put that there was a direct relationship between the0:13:15structures that you use to orient yourself in the world and stories, and so then I started to assess0:13:24the fundamental elements of stories what what - story looked like and while I was doing that that was informed by a number of other things that I was reading about including a0:13:34set of I Read the Neuroscience literature with regards to information processing fairly extensively0:13:43And that introduced me [into] a whole set of other ideas including cybernetic ideas which have been incorporated into what I was describing to you, and this basic cybernetic system is a0:13:52system [that] has [a] starting point in a system that [has] an [endpoint] and A system that has a subsystem that monitors progress or deviation from progress0:14:02Along the pathway to the endpoint, and I thought well [that] looks a lot like a story Or a map that's another way of thinking about it, and I thought okay Well that's where the overlap is and the fundamental story is something like it's very [straightforward]. It's0:14:15it's also the frame that you inhabit when you conceptualize the world and narrow and Narrow and simplify the world which you have to do because it's so complex because you have this infinite number of facts that0:14:25Are laying around you well so what are you doing? Well? You're a mobile creature a living creature not a static information processor and0:14:34You're targeted you're a targeted creature, and otherwise you wouldn't move Right to move is to be a targeted creature because you have to move towards something or away from something so the targeting is built0:14:44Right into the fact that you're a mobile creature, and then you might say well What do you target [and] answer to that is well, you target? Target you could say you target what you aim for but?0:14:54Then you could say well you you aim for what you want you target your desires And then that leads you into a discussion of the underlying neurobiology essentially you bring to the table a set of inbuilt0:15:06desires and the targets that you pick Have to address the fact that those desires exist and the desires are actually grounded in Necessity0:15:17and this is this is a sidebar, but this is where I think piaget theory is weaker than it should be because piaget and you know I'm a great admirer of piaget believed that the0:15:29Human infant came into the world with a fairly primordial set of reflexes mostly sensory motor reflexes and then bootstrapped Him or herself up on the basis of those reflexes in the sociological in0:15:41the Social Surroundings Viewpoint [that] the child comes in with a few basic elements that can get it going elements of exploration and memory essentially and then it builds itself0:15:53Of the consequence of its exploration in the social community now. I think that's true except that It's too empty because what it fails to0:16:04take into [consideration] is the fact that and I think this is this is an observation in some sense philosophically that was first made by immanuel, Kant when he criticized pure reason0:16:15so that You can't come into the world structureless you have to come into the world with an inbuilt structure And then it's the interaction of [that] structure with the world0:16:24That provides the information that you can use to build yourself, but the structure has to be there And I would say that's the sameness logically speaking as the idea that the [great] [father] is always there, right?0:16:35There's the great mother is always there. That's Chaos itself the great father is always there that's order That's the interpretive structure that you use to interact with the Chaos and then of course the individual is always there at the same time0:16:45that piaget in some sense ree-ree told that story except He didn't0:16:54give enough credence to the fact that the infant comes into the world far [more] fully formed than his theory0:17:03His theory presumes now the problem see that the problem with that is [that] Without that additional underlying set of let's call them neurobiological constraints the interpretation universe gets too large you0:17:17[need] constraints to narrow The domain of phenomena that you're contending with and and it's in the analysis of the constraints that the answer to0:17:28How do you stop drowning in an infinite number of Potential interpretations emerges? The interpretations are subject to constraints0:17:37And that's also the way out of the Moral relativist Paradox as far as I can tell now one of the things I really liked about Piaget was that He describes some of the constraints one of the constraints was is well0:17:49if I'm going to exist in a social world And I'm going [to] because I won't exist at all if I don't exist in a social world then there are constraints on the way that I have to interact with other people and0:18:00Piaget is essential point was I have to organize myself To play a joint game with you But the Joint game has constraints and one of them is you have to want to play?0:18:11Because you have other options [and] then there are other constraints You and I have to be able to play in a way that other people don't object to or maybe even that you and I0:18:20Have to play in a way that other people will be look support and then you can imagine another constraint which is You and I have to play a game in a way that other [people] would support that will last more than the moment0:18:32So it has it has to work today and tomorrow and next week it has to work across the span [of] times it has [to] Work not only for you And I but it has to work for our future [cells] and so the damn constraints are starting to pile up0:18:43That's just on the socio-Cultural side that's on the constructionist side only But there's about the biological constraints are equally important because not only does the [game] that you and I have to play0:18:53Have to satisfy those emergent sociological constraints, but the game also has to be organized so that the internal polity that0:19:04that's composed of Let's call them the fundamental motivational and emotional systems that make that Constitute us. They have to all find satisfaction because otherwise the system grounds halt [and] so0:19:18This seems to me to be the beginnings of an answer to the postmodern conundrum looks like okay? Any set of facts is amenable to an infinite [number] of interpretations fine got it0:19:29That makes deriving and is from an [Oauth2] very difficult endeavor right no problem. [all] right, but that Doesn't mean that any old solution will work0:19:40why well first of all it's merely because we introduced work into the Conversation to begin with the interpretation has to be functional and again. That's what it seems0:19:50That's what seems to tie. It back to the story. This is also what got me interested in pragmatism, technically speaking and so because if if0:19:59your conundrum is here you are and there you have to be and How to get there then one of the constraints on the Manner in which you interpret the world is0:20:09When you apply your interpretation Do you end up moving from the point you're at to the point you want to be and if the answer that is no? Then the solution is insufficient now. You could call the solution untrue, but I it's dangerous, too0:20:22to introduce the truth Falsity Dilemma because because it isn't its functionality more its functionality more than truth although0:20:31I think you could say that in the final analysis truth Is integrally linked to function? But I'm not going to touch that question for the time being the point is is that your interpretation of the world carries within it implicitly a theory about its own validity and the0:20:46Theory about its own validity is that if you enacted in the world it will produce the result that you Desire and then the consequence of that is [that] if it doesn't produce the result that you desire then it isn't good enough theory0:20:57period and that's how you grapple with The fact that although you don't know everything you still have to orient yourself in the world0:21:08You lay out partial theories that make partial predictions, and if they do a good enough job Then you don't worry about it [any] more and you go on to the next thing, okay?0:21:18So then you think there's a lot of constraints piling up on your interpretations number one They have to work for [the] creature that you are and so you know we can lay it sort of like maslow's hierarchy of needs0:21:28something like that's not exactly the same because I don't [think] [that] he got the hierarchy right for for very complex reasons, but it's it's reasonably obvious to to0:21:38Observe that well you're not going to work out very well if you don't have anything to eat And you know you've got about a week in you if you don't have anything to drink and obviously you need shelter0:21:47And you know you need you need companionship and by need what I mean is that if you don't have these things then you die The whole game comes to a halt [so] we can ground that in?0:21:57Self-evident reality without any real problem, and you might say well, what's the list of human necessities and that that's that's a difficult thing to parameterize0:22:06Because you can argue about the degree to which something is necessary, but there's some things that we know about Well, we covered the basics0:22:15Temperature regulation elimination food intake shelter right, but then there's more subtle things like well0:22:24children for example died without touch So there's there's something integral about Tactile interaction with other people so we could call that love if you want to do that. It's not optional0:22:35Right play is the same thing children do not develop properly unless they play and I would say that adults also can't maintain their mental health or physical health unless they play, [too]0:22:48And so you can say well, there's a core set of necessities, and then off of that. There's a secondary set of like What would you call them their own ultimate necessities?0:22:59But they're pretty hot they're going to be pretty highly valued by people and more or less universally pain avoidance for example under most circumstances [most] people don't really like to be in terror most people really don't like to be disgusted0:23:11You know you can lay out the basic emotions You can lay out the basic motivations And you can say well the [game] that you're going to play has to operate within a space That's defined by that set of a priori constraints fine now things are getting [pretty] constrained here0:23:25so they had the game you play house to satisfy that set of biological demands Intrinsic biological demands and it has to be something that you can utilize with other people0:23:40Voluntarily and it has to be something that will [be] playable across multiple iterations, and I would say there's a very limited number of0:23:50Interpretive interpretive structures that are going to satisfy all of those preconditions simultaneously, and to me that just blows out The two things it blows out the claims of Moral relativism, and it it it also0:24:04Demolishes and this is the same thing in some sense it demolishes this ideas that the manner in which people Organize themselves in the world as individuals and in societies is somehow0:24:14arbitrary doesn't look to me to be arbitrary at all and So in ampere days genius. I think in some part was observing that in children spontaneously in that when children0:24:26passed the egocentric phase which means after they're about two years of old old, [they're] maybe [they're] What they're approaching three years old they've more or less got their internal mechanisms organized so that there are0:24:41unitary being Roughly speaking at Three they start to develop the ability to use fictional frames of reference0:24:50So and that's an interesting thing because I would say that the fundamental biological systems come armed with their own frame of reference, so [if] you're hungry0:25:00Poof up comes [a] frame of reference [and] within that Your perceptions are shaped the action proclivities are are0:25:11primed and The world lays itself out around that particular Biological Necessity and you can lay those out same if you're thirsty same if you're too0:25:20Hot same if you want to play all those systems come built in but then the problem with that is that they compete because it isn't obvious which one should take priority and then0:25:31It's not that easy to organize them in a social space [and] so what seems to have happened to human beings is that we've been able to replace the frame that's0:25:40predicated on motivational necessity with abstracted frames that are more voluntary voluntarily constructed that Incorporate multiple motivational systems simultaneously0:25:51And that's in some [sense] That's also what it's the same thing as we learned how to think abstractly and so the frame that you're going to lay out on the world if it's a good frame is one that solves a whole set of problems at the0:26:01same time and so that [and] you can slot different frames you can you can experiment with [different] frames?0:26:10and that's a Precondition to being able to play because one of the things that piaget pointed out you can see this when children pretend play. It's like Four and even more clearly in games that have rules, but let's say they're there in pretend play, and they're going to say well0:26:24We're going to lay out a little fictional schema here We're going to play house And you can be the cat and all be the I'll be the dad and then you negotiate a bit to see if those rules Are acceptable and then you run it as a simulation, and that's what kids are doing when they're playing and they're experimenting with different0:26:39Superordinate frames of reference that are active all in the world, and they're in there they're [learning] how to develop those perceptual schemes and also how to Interact in a manner that allows the scheme that they're using to find its social acceptability and its successful0:26:56the child assumes that the Scheme is successful if both children have fun while they're doing it and So that's the volunteerism and so piaget made a very interesting point about that that I think is [absolutely] brilliant. He said that0:27:13there's a difference between a game that people will play voluntarily and One that has to be enforced and so then you can imagine an environment Where game a is played voluntarily it has a certain end and game b0:27:24is played by Force but both of them are moving towards the same end and Piaget his claim was the game that's played voluntarily or even more to the point the set of all games that are played0:27:37Voluntarily will out-Compete the set of all games that are played by Force if they're put head-to-head in a competitive environment [I] thought God that's such a brilliant observation because there you have the basis for a pragmatic grounding of0:27:52For the evaluation of ethics. It's like You can pick the Target. It doesn't matter whatever Target You pick if the game is voluntary and aimed at the target it will defeat a game. That's imposed by Tyranny now0:28:04It's a proposition, but it's a pretty good proposition and I would say there's a fair bit of evidence for this proposition and a fair bit of it is actually derived from observation of animal Behavior because I ran you guys through the emerging literature on the stability say of Chimpanzee hierarchies and the0:28:20Chimpanzee tyrant Hierarchy isn't very stable and the reason for that is that to subordinate chimps who are? 3/4 as strong as the dominant tyrant can take them out and they do and so then the question might be well0:28:33How do you have to conduct yourself as a high dominance chimp if you're not going to be torn apart by those who are? Hypothetically your subordinates and the answer to that is well. Don't be too much of a0:28:45Tyrant formulate some social connections engage in some reciprocity with regards to your social relationships0:28:54Don't oppress the females don't torment the children It said ETC because that makes you unpopular And then you'll get torn to shreds and so there are0:29:04practical limits on the expression of Tyranny that are a consequence both of biological limitations because people are going to object if the system is set up so [that] their fundamental needs are met and they're also going to object if0:29:18The game that's being played isn't functioning socially and so this is very very tight set of constraints And then the question might be okay if you take that set of constraints0:29:28What sort of systems can operate? What would you say well? Just that what set of systems can operate within those sets of constraints?0:29:38Then you might say if you take that the set of all systems that might operate within those constraints And you look at what's common across them then you could extract out what's essentially a universal morality0:29:50It's something like that and I Don't see how that proposition is precisely questionable. It seems to me [that] all of that's built on rock like there's no [doubt] that0:30:01Infants bring biological necessity to the table. I think that's fully established and it's established Physiologically, it's established0:30:10behaviorally it's established with regards to evolutionary history because we can take the Motivational systems that are part and parcel of our being and we can trace their development back in some cases half a billion years0:30:24so So the idea that the the infant is a blank slate when it's born and that's subject to infinite Sociological manipulation is a it's a dead in the water. That's just not the case0:30:38So okay, so far. So we've got that nailed down hard and then the idea that Your identity is also shaped0:30:48Sociologically well I don't think anybody disputes that it doesn't matter where they are on the interpretative framework they might dispute the degree to which [that] occurs and the mechanisms by which it occurs, but0:30:59The fact that it occurs. That's That's close enough to self evidence so we can just leave it there well then the question is what are the consequences of the0:31:11sociological of socio of socialization and Once you admit the nifty0:31:21existence of the realm of biological necessity you instantly put a set of constraints on How societies can structure themselves so that they will not be?0:31:31torn down and overthrown Well that if you look at. How kids are socialized. I think that psAys developmental observations are Bi and Bi correct0:31:43The first two years it's mostly interactions between the infant and the parents It's it's bi-directional though Because the infant has to come to terms with the mother but the mother also has to come to terms with the infant0:31:55So it's not even top-down at the level of infant maternal relationship Quite the contrary and if you watch a new mother adapt to a baby you can see that the mother is doing as much out apt ation to the baby as the baby is to the mother because the0:32:08Infant has this inbuilt character already and has to be Charmed into a relationship that's love does that and and attention0:32:18it's very little different than establishing a relationship with someone who's older it's it's lower resolution and It's harder to make the observations because of course the infant is only capable of behavioral display0:32:29[can't] can't speak but nonetheless the necessity for establishing the individual relationship Is there to begin with so even in the early stages of the infant's realization the process isn't?0:32:41State downward it's not great farther down work. It's Mutual and then of Course by the time the child is old enough to be launched out into [the] social world0:32:51Then all the constraints that are associated with the playground are immediately placed on that child and that's a very unforgiving landscape right because the last thing a child wants really the last thing a child wants is not to have any friends or0:33:05even perhaps equally seriously not to have a best friend [I] Read something so idiotic the other day that I couldn't believe it. So the newest prince0:33:15So [queen] [Elizabeth's] I guess great grandchild is off to daycare in in the uk and in this daycare They don't let the kids have best friends because that's unfair [I] thought you know0:33:28Something times you see something that's so stupid. You can't even believe it it Exists, and that was one of those examples because it's been known for quite a long time that one of the developmental Milestones0:33:40the children attained somewhere between say the age of five and ten is they pick a best friend and So they and and you know the hypothesis well that's unfair to all the other children0:33:52It's like well first of all you can't be the best friend to everyone because you didn't Maybe there's a billion children so each of them gets one second It's like that's just not a very deep relationship. So the idea that you can be equally friendly with everyone is0:34:06It's a preposterous, but even worse the thing is the thing [that] the child is doing is actually becoming there they're stepping out of their egocentricity because their best friend becomes more important than they are and that's a precursor for0:34:19Adult relationships where you know if you're married? [well] your your partner should be at least as important as you are and the relationship should be more important But then when you have children, it's like they're more important than you [that] that's that0:34:30It's unless there's something wrong with you. You come second and your children come first and their way first They're not just a little buddy. You're necessary because without you. They're not going to manage0:34:40So you have to take care of yourself? But you're not number one [anymore] once you have kids unless Seriously unless you didn't learn the lessons in the playground and when you have a best friend. You're not number one. They are and so0:34:52So anyways there are these constraints that Emerge in in the social landscape you have to have friends and also you have to single someone out as particularly unique among those friends and establish a0:35:04Genuinely reciprocal and caring relationship. I can't remember the psychiatrist who studied this so intently unfortunately0:35:14He was the first person [to] to do a detailed analysis of the best friend relationships that children established and I'd like to give him credit for his ideas, but unfortunately I can't remember his name, so0:35:29Okay, so what are the propositions so far? You inhabit a structure the [dorian] [Cu] in the world it has something. That's akin to a narrative structure. [I'm] here0:35:42[I'm] going there, and this is the [way] I did it its narrative if you describe it It's based in biological necessity, but it's shaped by Social socialization and the fact of that0:35:53Base and that shaping means that the set of interpretive schema that you can lay out in the world are bounded Those would be functional0:36:03Hypothetically functional systems and maybe they compete over over the evolutionary time span but there's something in common across that set of functional interpretations, and if you extract that out you can get the0:36:17Initial images of what you might describe as an archetype you never cilmi. That's what archetypes are fundamentally0:36:26So and to say all that is no more than to say that people can extract across instances, and we can obviously do that So then the question is can you start to develop an articulated picture of what that?0:36:40archetyPal structure of universal morality might be and so my answer [to] that was basically well let's look at old stories as many old stories as we can collect and0:36:53If their stories are stories that have survived for a very long period of time so much the better because it [that] indicates that they're acutely memorable and0:37:04Peculiarly functional because if they weren't memorable then they'd have been forgotten and if they weren't functional they wouldn't have managed to be the foundation stories for four0:37:14Cultures that lasted for thousands or even tens of thousands of years So and then we could say well Let's collect a whole variety of these stories and see if there's patterns across them now the danger that is0:37:26Have you collected an unbiased set of stories danger number one how do you know that you're not just reading into the stories? That's the postmodern problem Reasonable reasonable objections and so that those objections have been laid0:37:39against people like Wrote the Golden bough fraser who is the fraser who was one of the first? Anthropologists to collect stories from all over the world and to start to look for commonalities the same0:37:51Objection has been laid at the feet of people like [Richie]. Le odd or carl jung or Joseph Campbell it's like how do you know you just How do you know you're not just cherry-picking your damn interpretations perfectly reasonable?0:38:03Perfectly reasonable objection, and I would say that the reason I [don't] believe that I'm cherry-picking my interpretations is because I used a method and0:38:12it's a method that's akin to the Multi Trait Multi method method of [construction] that that clinical psychology and other disciplines of psychology rely upon0:38:22But it's also akin to a process put forward by E.O Wilson that he called consilience the process is something like Well pick your level of analysis0:38:32Does the phenomena manifest itself at that level of analysis? Yes? Pick another level of analysis and another level of analysis and another level of analysis and see if the same phenomena0:38:42Manifests itself at every single level and then assume that the probability that that will happen by chance Decreases with each additional level of analysis [that] fits that where this concordance, and I thought okay that that that makes sense0:38:56So it isn't only that you can look for patterns and stories because you know what if you're a hyperactive? Pattern detector Which basically means like there are people like that people who tilt towards Paranoia?0:39:06People who tilt towards conspiracy theories you can see it manifest itself in new age thinking all the time Because new age thinkers are very high in openness But not very good at critical thinking and so they see phenomena a and B and C and D0:39:18they think [Pad] then they think universal pattern but they don't attempt to Disconfirm their pattern prediction and so what I tried to do when I was starting to see Patterns Emerge in the stories0:39:30Informed by people like dealing in a leotta and so forth was to see if what [they] were describing Manifested itself at any other levels of analysis that [were] independent intellectually from that stream of thinking and I found it in two places0:39:44targeted cybernetics, and I found it in neuroscience and so On and that that and the neuroscience element that includes the physiology0:39:54But also the behavioral analysis that was done by by people most particularly like like like Jeffrey Gray and and the animal Experimental is who were brilliant Brilliant scientists, and who've done a very good job of laying out the manner in which0:40:08interpretive frameworks exist Within the realm of animal cognition and and and to describe how they manifest themselves in the world, so [I] thought okay0:40:18That's not too bad because we've got maybe four different levels of evidence all pointing in the same Direction So that's why I walk you guys through the neural psychology. It's like a story is you're going somewhere0:40:29You're somewhere, and you're going somewhere, and you're tracking your progress, [okay]? That's the story well what what happens when you look at how people lay out their called cognitive maps well0:40:39It's the same thing you specify a target an endpoint. You specify a beginning point Which is just where you are and then there's a mechanism a comparator mechanism that [operates] or multiple comparator mechanisms that operate?0:40:51Neural Physiologically to orient yourself towards that goal and [the] emotions Basically Emerge as a as a consequence of [that] positive emotions indicating that you're moving forward properly0:41:03Negative emotions indicating that you've encountered some kind of obstacle. It's like well. That's the basic. That's the basic structure of a narrative, okay fine So now we can see how its instantiated neural physiologically that adds a fair bit [of] credence to the to the entire0:41:18process so0:41:27now normally when you look at the Basic cybernetic work there's a hypothesis that the system is oriented towards a goal0:41:39And that it's comparing what is manifesting itself in the world to that desired end state as the system moves? but it's too simple because0:41:48People don't precisely have gold they have nested hierarchies of goals and so0:41:59The issue of emotional regulation becomes more complex than are you proceeding happily towards your current goal because your goal is composed of micro goals and it's a0:42:12Constituent element of a set of Macro goals and so that makes the problem of error Far more Complex than it would be if you only had one frame of [reference]0:42:21[and] you were only adjudicating your error within that frame of reference the question starts to become0:42:30what does it mean when you make a mistake and Answer to that The Behavioral answer to that was well you encounter a stimuli That's a threat or maybe a punishment or an incentive reward or a consumer [tori] reward something like that0:42:44It's very it's a it's a unit dimensional and oversimplified answer. I'm not complaining about it Has great [utility] but there's the problem0:42:53there's a problem and the problem is it doesn't take into account the nested structure of this of your goal hierarchy and What that means is that it underestimates the difficulty of responding to an error?0:43:06Because the problem with an error is that you don't know what the error signifies, and that's a huge problem And that's part of what I want to delve into even in more depth today0:43:16And so this is like Ellis and the what in wonderland going down the rabbit hole it's exactly the same thing That's the [hole] the rabbit hole is you made a mistake [right]? You made a mistake. You've got your0:43:27oversimplified Representation of the World Laid upon it it validates itself in its execution [if] it executes properly if it executes Improperly, [then] what does that signify and the answer isn't precisely that you've made a mistake0:43:41The answer is it signifies that there's something in the world that you excluded that shouldn't have been excluded and that's a big problem because when [you've] laid out a simplified0:43:51Schema on the world you've excluded virtually everything and so what that means is that as [soon] as you make an error the search space for the error immediately tends towards the infinite and you experience that0:44:04It's part of it human Existential experience and the way you experience that is especially if your mood is Shaky is you lay [out] a small plan like maybe you go out for coffee with someone that you're romantically interested in and they're0:44:19There, they're not they're not pleasant to you and and so that's an error. It means well. What does it mean well? You've construed yourself wrong. You've construed them wrong. You've construed the opposite sex wrong. You've construed human beings wrong0:44:33You're a walking catastrophe, [and] you might as well not even exist It's like well, that's that's pretty extreme, but it's not that extreme I'll tell you like it's not that uncommon for people to have exactly that set of catastrophic0:44:47Responses to even a minor Setback now. It's not good for them and I would say you know just because you Scraped your foot doesn't mean you should dig a grave and jump into [it] pull the dirt on on top of you. You know0:44:59So you don't want to start by taking yourself completely apart, but that doesn't mean people won't do it They do it all the [time] in fact to me. It's always a mystery that they don't do it every single time0:45:10Because the logical inference for why didn't you get someone interested in? You could easily be because you're a failure as a human being and at some level that's actually true now0:45:21It's all it's true in a way That's not that helpful [right] because it's just too catastrophic but it isn't obvious at all how people can defend themselves against that cascade of a0:45:32Kotak Catastrophizing, [I] mean after all if you are everything you could be then maybe everyone would be attracted to you I mean perhaps not but you get the point [and] no and no easy rationalization is going to let you just brush that away0:45:45Especially if you actually happen to be interested in the person because that's even worse because then not only are you rejected? But you rejected [by] someone Who's who upon whom you've projected an ideal or perhaps on?0:45:58From whom you've actually observed an ideal so it's worse you're you're rejected by someone that you want to have Be [attractive] to you to validate your old miserable existence. It's a non-trivial problem0:46:15So you're in this protected space that I? You know I made an analogy between that in the garden of eden Or the city that buddha was raised it. It's all protected and everything inside it is beautiful and functional and0:46:30That's by definition because if your frame of reference is working properly then what's within it is things you control that are functional and and and and0:46:42and they're serving your purposes, so When you're successful You're in the garden of Eden that's one way of [thinking] about it when the things that you're laying out in the world are delivering0:46:52What they're supposed to deliver That's what you inhabit, but the problem is is that there's always a snake inside the garden And it's that's the story that's echoed in the story of Buddha in that case0:47:02It's Buddha's own curiosity that happens to be the snake and you could actually say the same thing about human beings Maybe it wasn't the snake maybe it was eve's curiosity0:47:11They're the same thing in some sense And so it's Buddha's curiosity that drives them outside the city to find disease and death and to blow apart his0:47:20paradisal conceptualization of the world and so When we're looking at unit for universality The first thing we might say is well you have a frame of reference that you've laid on the world0:47:32it's a story you live inside a story and The second thing week it's and that's universally true the content of the story can differ. That's okay. I don't care about that it's the structural equivalence that I'm interested in you live inside the story and you have to because0:47:47you have to live in something like that because you are [goal-directed] and you have to be and You [have] to simplify the world because there you're just not Enough of you to take into account everything at once in fact you can hardly take into account anything at once so you0:48:02[have] to narrow things unbelievably and by narrowing And including only certain things you exclude virtually everything else, so you're always in the problem in the situation0:48:13where you have this little bounded universe that you inhabit, but outside of it is Chaos itself and And so that's the existential landscape order0:48:24surrounded by Chaos Right it's like a tree. It's like the The evolutionary home of primates the tree with the snakes on the ground0:48:35that's that's our landscape or it's the fire for tribal people and the terrors of the forest that are Beyond the that would be on the Light that the fire casts0:48:45It's explored territory versus unexplored territory and that's that's an archetype as well that that you can't not be in a situation where that's the case even0:48:55[if] you're among friends, you know You think that's explored territory. That's not exactly right because what happens if you're among friends is that0:49:04they Carefully reveal new parts of themselves all the time, so it's like. They're blasting little Elements of unexplored territory you territory at you constantly and if they don't then what happens0:49:19You get bored And you look for new people And we know there's empirical data on that with regards to intimate relationships because there was a nice study done a while back showing that0:49:29Looking at the ratio [of] positive to negative emotional experiences that were most predictive of long-term relationship success and the answer was now obviously it depends on how you would measure an0:49:41event and how you would measure positive and negative emotion, but that aside the finding was something like If you're in a relationship, and you only have five positive0:49:51Interactions [-] One negative interaction then the relationship will end. It's [too] negative, but if you have more than Eleven positive0:50:00Interactions - One negative interaction, then it also ends, and you think well That's pretty bloody [acuter] what why in the world would that be don't you want like a hundred to one positive to [negative]?0:50:11interactions and answer that is what makes you think that you want a relationship so that you could be happy or At least happy moment to moment. Why do you think that?0:50:20It's not it's certainly not the case as you [know] that - because You I mean I bet you there's not a person in this room who hasn't rejected someone because they were too nice to them0:50:31Something like that [person's] no challenge. It's something like that You want someone who you know you can get along with them, but now and then they bite you and you think oh? That's that's interesting you know0:50:40I didn't really expect that and then you go and puzzle over it for a while, [and] you torture yourself about it And that's one of the things that keeps you really linked [in] [to] the relationship and the reason for that is that0:50:50Part of the reason that you want the relationship isn't so that you're happy [right] now [it's] so that you can live a high-quality life across multiple decades And so you're looking for someone0:51:00[that] you have to contend with who's going to push you beyond what you already are and who's going to judge you harshly? Often for your limitations [now] [that'll] make you angry and all about you. You know and resentful0:51:11And maybe you'll take your revenge and and all of that But you don't want someone who thinks you're perfect in your current form partly because why would you want to go out with someone that?0:51:21deluded so okay, so [you've] got this interpretive schema laid out on the world and0:51:31It excludes the entire world and because it excludes the world the world tends to manifest itself inside that protected space on a in an uncontrollable manner and that0:51:44[can] take you down and it takes you down the rabbit hole and down the rabbit hole is where everything is because when you make an error what that is is the manifestation of the excluded world and0:51:55The problem with that is that's too much Right because if you step out of the lifeboat into the ocean then you drown, and that's that's not any good0:52:05You can't drown every time Something manifests itself that you didn't expect there has to be a mechanism for Orienting you in the face of error0:52:16all right, so What exactly does that imply the question is what do you discover when you go down the rabbit hole?0:52:27I was thinking about that [a] lot today. I Showed you that diagram that I thought was like a map of the phenomenological world0:52:40The the lowest resolution Category is something like the dragon of Chaos and so you might say Well what you discover when you make an error and the answer is0:52:50First it's a brief manifestation of the dragon of Chaos and that's no more to say then when you encounter the incursion of Unexplored territory into explored territory the circuitry you use is0:53:03the same circuits that we use to to respond instantaneously to the presence of Predatory Forces0:53:12We use that circuit and that makes perfect sense because the predator is almost by definition The thing that lurks Beyond the safe confines of the community and I told you I believe a story about rats0:53:25raised in naturalistic environments the Rats are We've got the burrows on one end of the little field That hierarchy they're doing their [little] rat social things they're playing and they're laughing and they're tickling each other and they're there you're you know0:53:39Raising the rat families, and that's all working out Just fine rats in that situation by the way are very difficult to get addicted to cocaine If you want to dick the rat to cocaine you have to put it in a cage and isolated0:53:51It's not really a rat any more than any more than you're a person if you're in solitary confinement, right? I mean, you're sort you're mostly [your] just misery Anyways in solitary confinement [you'd] be after cocaine non-stop and maybe under other circumstances0:54:05but like a normal [rat] it's not that interested in cocaine, so Let's just decide No [anyways] the rats are doing their thing and then they've learned that they can go out to the other side of the field and they0:54:16can get food [and] so one day the experimenters instead of putting food out there put a cat out there and the rat goes out and gets a whiff of the cat which they do not like and then the rat runs home and0:54:29Pokes is because of the burrow and screams for like two days Ultrasonic LI and all the other rats are like frozen stiff because of that They're not going anywhere, and so a 2-day rat screaming V is no a trivial [thing]0:54:41That's be I calculated that be the equivalent of use Screaming for two weeks, so you have to be pretty upset to scream for two weeks, right, so this is hard on the rat0:54:51But the reason I'm telling you this is the rat doesn't expect the cat to be there the rat goes out And there's a cat and what it uses is its predator Detection and alert systems to signify the presence of the cat and what we've done with the dragon imagery Roughly speaking is make an amalgam0:55:06Of predatory monsters and state that's a symbol for what lurks Beyond safety because we're observing our own responses in some sense and0:55:16And it's not only that we're observing our own responses, but we also have a category Categorical set of responses to Predator and we again0:55:25There's no speculation about this we already know this like if you go study monkeys for example they have Distinct sets of vocalization [that] are associated with Predator Detection that have distinct circuits0:55:39We know that there are predator Detection circuits, and it's not unreasonable [to] also Presuppose that they underlie the phenomena for example that human beings are [very] good at learning fear to snakes0:55:50Snake fear might be innate like that's pushing the argument but at minimum Psychologists have already concluded that even if snake fear isn't innate and it probably is that it can be learned like that0:56:02So you can condition people to be afraid of pictures of snakes? way faster than you can condition them to be afraid of pictures of electrical outlets or handguns, so0:56:13And that's well documented. I don't think anybody disputes that at all, so the first Assumption is when something unexpected0:56:24Emerges, so we'll call that the snake in the garden that Your prey and that's a predator and that the monster has come to get you. It's something like that now the0:56:34Representation of the Dragon is more complex than mere Monster because the dragon the mythological Dragon also is the thing that hoards Treasure, and I really like that symbol0:56:45I think it's I think that's also why it will never go away It's such a great symbol because it says well the unknown can take you down [it] can it can right you with its fiery breath like poisonous snake and it can burn things like fire0:56:57and it's a aerial predator that can take you from the air and it's a carnivorous predator that can take you from the ground and [it's] Reptilian it's the sort of thing that can pull you down into the water0:57:08And it's easy to see that as an amalgam of of the threats that have been Laid Forth for Human beings since the beginning of time and Monster is an amalgam of predator, and you might say well. There's no such thing as a dragon. It's like. Yes0:57:21There is it's just a loose category What's common across all [predators] equals dragon? It's not like it's a knot. They're not real. They're hyper real. They're more real than the phenomena themselves0:57:33Just like an abstraction can be more real than the phenomena the result and then the canonical dragon for human beings isn't just a predator We're not rabbits0:57:42You can imagine that the dragon for a rabbit is just a dragon There's no damn treasure there at all but for human beings its ambivalent because the thing that you don't know about is0:57:53Also, the thing that holds the greatest gift and why is that? It's [because] the unrealized world manifests itself when you make an error and the unrealized world is something that can take you down0:58:04Obviously, but it's also the source of all new information it's an infinite source of information, and that's a really useful thing [to] know error is an infinite source of information and0:58:15[that's] one of the things that can help you recalibrate the way that you interact [with] the world you think well, we're interacting let's say we're having a conversation and0:58:25It's flowing Melodically and all of a sudden. [I] say something, and there's a disjunction right you're offended by it There's some negative emotion that comes up or or0:58:34Or or you know maybe I've said something to impress you or to be arrogant, and you respond badly It's like we've got this melodic thing going on It's a consensual frame and something pokes itself up to put a disjunction in the conversation0:58:49It's like well, that's where the information is It's like something went wrong something didn't work out I'm not looking at the world properly or I don't know you well enough or as well as I thought there's something0:59:01There and if I have any sense, I'm going to focus my [attention] on that like not obsessively or anything like that But where all the information is because as long as what we're doing is working then we both know enough already0:59:15As soon as what we're doing together It'll working then that's instant evidence that there's something about us that needs to be updated and you might think [well] [that's] a terrible thing and the answer is yes of course it is0:59:24It's a terrible thing But it's also the thing and this is the next stage of the development of this let's call it universal morality. It's like The universal morality might be found in the answer to the question. What should you do when you make a mistake now?0:59:39[one] answer is catastrophic dissolution. That's that's a collapse into Chaos well, that's No one is going to pick that voluntarily let's put it that way that's it unbelievably unpleasant terribly anxiety-Provoking0:59:57shameful and painful all at the same time Worse it can mean [the] absence of positive emotion because if you really collapse into Chaos not only are you overwhelmed by negative emotion?1:00:11but the positive emotion system shut off and that that's what happens to someone who's Extraordinarily depressed and also hyper anxious at the same time not only are they suffering from an excess of negative emotion?1:00:23But they've got no incentive movement forward Whatsoever [okay], [so] that's not an optimal solution because it takes you out The other possible and so I would call that a nihilistic solution or a chaotic solution1:00:36It's not a solution. It's a dissolution, and you could think about it as a precursor to a potential solution But it's very easy to get stuck there and that's why [Jonah] could have stayed in the belly of the whale along with all the other people that were eaten by the whale and never got1:00:49Back out, and you see people like that all the time their error [has] come along blown out their frames of reference they've collapsed into the underworld into the chaotic underworld and1:01:00They don't know how to get out they have post-traumatic stress disorder or they're depressed or they're hyper anxious or or they're they're resentful and aggressive and destructive like there's any number of1:01:11states of being that can overwhelm you when the bottom has fallen out [of] your life, [so] [it] isn't something that people are going to1:01:21It's not an optimal solution. Let's put it that way well [that] the other That's a nihilistic solution a collapse the other solution is1:01:32We're talking and I don't get what I want from you, and so I say you'd better not do that again I don't want to see that from you again and so that's a tyrannical attitude right what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my1:01:44universe of order and its predictions, and I'm going to say you go along with this or I'm going to punish you [and] That's that's a no there is a an element in1:01:56Society Like Society is made up of threats like that to some [degree] It's an erratic level in Erratic apart of Society that would be the tyrannical aspect of the Greek king let's say you know1:02:09We've organized a set of punishments and threats that keep each of us in alignment however Generally speaking in a society that's functional we've decided to adopt1:02:20Agreement with that set of principles more or less voluntarily? We say well you have rights and responsibilities, and I have rights and responsibilities And I'm willing to pay a price for yours including the acceptance of punishment if I transgress1:02:32But you're going to do the same for me. So there are there are intelligent ways that punishment and threat can be used and bounded so1:02:41but it that could easily degenerate into Tyranny and one of the methods that I can choose to [use] if I don't want to encounter error is just to enforce my will on everyone else and1:02:52I think when that happens personally and in the family and in the community and in the state all at the same time then you get the emergence of a Tyranny and1:03:06So I would consider those two counterproductive Reactions to the emergence of the unrealized world. It's like you say something. I don't like I collapse completely1:03:19Children don't like other children who do that by the way right? It's something that's very interesting to [observe] So let's say kids have organized themselves to play a little game of baseball with a plastic bat in a ball1:03:30And you know one child pitches and the other child hits the ball The child Catches it and puts the puts the batter out and the batter bursts into tears1:03:39Well, what happens is the other kids you know the first time that happens they'll be sympathetic [the] third time that happens They won't invite that kid out to play baseball anymore1:03:49so the answer to We're not getting along is not you get to burst into tears and and and manifest extraordinary emotional distress because if you do that1:04:00no, one's going to want to play with you and [that's] a lesson that many people could stand learning again one of the things. I think that's really destabilizing our society right [now]1:04:09Maybe is that I'm not sure [that] Kids have been encouraged or allowed to play enough in the last1:04:18[2530] Years and I think a lot of this identity stuff is actually Fantasy play, it's delayed fantasy play because it's sort of what you do when you're seven years old. It's like well1:04:28I'm going to be this identity That's what you're doing when you pretend you're going to go along with that because we're going to play this out It's like that's fine You don't impose that though right not not if you're a kid that has a clue you invite people to play you don't insist on1:04:41Your identity and their compliance with it It's not a playable game and You don't burst into tears and run off when [someone] won't play your game because then they won't play with you1:04:51And then you have to turn [to] force, and that's that's fine. If that's what you want to do, but you better look out because You better be ready to use it1:05:00Those crazy me were some morality come to responses insurance [applied] in [your] [city] and [will] [thank] [you] [buy] this if we can say1:05:10Researcher a is better than this structure being from a pragmatic perspective Does it come with responses of making sure that people who are trapped perhaps the [treadle]?1:05:22restructuring Somewhere else that we have a responsibility [against] Good question. I mean that that's part of the question that that I in some sense1:05:32Motivated in some sense motivated the American incursion into Iraq Right so what's our responsibility in relationship to tyranny that's a good question all of the increases of families are1:05:45Getting is for non processing about the situation of [human] and say solidarity yeah, you know I think that's I [think] that criticism is more emerging because of because it's apparently1:05:57it's apparently paradoxical and they've laid out a set of principles to which in principle they they adhere and1:06:06One of those principles is to reduce the destructive power of the patriarchy it's like okay There is some destructive Patriarchy for you radio silence. It's like hmM now1:06:17What am I supposed to do about that am I supposed to question your adherence to those principles? Which is exactly what should be done, so I think it's a it's it's a criticism of performative contradiction1:06:27[you] say you're for this, but when it comes to acted out you don't selectively in this situation, so there's something wrong There's something about your game that you're not being straight about that's the criticism, and maybe there's rejoinders to that you know1:06:43Well, okay, okay? Well responsibility well you know then you'd have to look at different levels of Analysis with regards to interactions. You definitely have a responsibility to your partner and1:06:56Your children okay, so your responsibility to your children as far as I'm concerned is don't it's twofold one don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them and1:07:08There's a corollary to that which is don't be an idiot you know so that's partly why you need a partner because your partner has to tell you when your Demands on your children are excessive because you're kind of you know you're not 100% oriented properly1:07:22but still you're their target adult and So it's up to you to help them choose a path that makes you want them to be around right?1:07:32And that that's your critical responsibility, and hopefully you're enough of an an analog of the broader community so that if they can figure out how to get along with you it radically increases the1:07:44Probability that they'll be able to get along with everyone so for example if you're playing with your children two years old You you help them you encourage them to play in a manner1:07:55That's fun And if you get that down, then you know when you introduce them to another child don't know how to play in a manner That's fun, and so great1:08:04You've solved the problem the problem is to get your child to enter into the collaborative social world, and so yes You have a primary responsibility for that and then with regards to your partner. Here's something to think about1:08:17With regards to role so my wife and I have had this discussion many times and one of the discussions is well How are we to treat each other in public? And it isn't her name is Tammy the discussion isn't1:08:28How should Jordon treat Tammy in public or how should tammy treat Jordan that's not the discussion this isn't personal It's how should a wife treat her husband, and how should a husband treat his wife1:08:39It's impersonal and it's partly you don't put your partner down in public Why well it's not because you're hurting that person's feelings1:08:48That's not why it's that you're denigrating the relationship that you are in voluntarily You know I've some of the most painful days. I've ever spent one in particular1:08:57I spent with a group of men who had been in therapy for their marriage and who bloody well needed that I can tell you that and They spent their whole day complaining about their wives. I could just made me sweat the whole day1:09:09I thought I can't believe I'm here with you guys that I Can't tell you why I was it's just you know it was just happenstance more than anything And I thought how can you be so damn dumb it's like1:09:19It's certainly possible that you marriage barbaric married Barbarian witches fine You don't have you're so lacking in sense that you would discuss that in public not noticing that you picked them1:09:32So basically all you're doing is holding up a sign and waving it constantly that says I'm an idiot. I'm an idiot right and so1:09:41well back to responsibility You have a responsibility to those whom you love and are obligated to1:09:52To ensure that they manifest themselves in a manner that's most beneficial to them over the long run Now you have the same responsibilities. I would say to yourself, but you'll have blind spots other people have to help you with that1:10:06But so the rule is you know you don't let you don't you help your wife figure out? How not to make [a] fool [of] herself in public and she extends to you the same courtesy and it's partly1:10:18Maintenance of the sacred Nature of the relationship it has nothing to do with you or her precisely It's broader and wider than that okay, so then that's two levels of responsibility child1:10:30partner next level of responsibility You're asked at your workplace to go uncut to undergo unconscious bias retraining1:10:39You say yes, it's like okay You've just admitted that you're a bigot right because you're acting about it's like I'm a racist bigot obviously I need [to] be retrained and so you might say well1:10:51I'm not going to make a fuss about it right or I've been told to do it for maybe you agree with it fine and If that if you agree with it, no problem, you can make a case for it1:11:01I [think] it's a weak and appalling case personally, but you can make a case [for] it you could say well, you know why I'm interested in my Biases and how to rectify them and like fair enough, you know people are biased1:11:13But if you object to it, and you don't say anything then you're complicit and then it's on you, and you know like a1:11:26Causes [B] and C and B causes C and D and so forth the thing tends does noise? But it has this tendency to expand and you'll come home angry and upset and [you'll] go to the training program1:11:37And you'll think this is ridiculous because that is what you'll think in all likelihood, and you won't say anything But it eats at you well Gated your responsibility and so and then you might say well1:11:48So then then that's how the community becomes corrupt that's how the community starts to be corrupt is that people turn a blind eye to Emergent Pathology when they know it's pathological. That's exactly what the egyptian story says1:12:02Osiris is overcome by Seth Because he's willfully blind Willfully blind which means he knows?1:12:11But refuses to he knows quote his predator Detection systems have gone off Monster well, then you're supposed to look okay? Exactly what sort of monster is this what doesn't have wings?1:12:23it doesn't have a tail you know you cut it down into the You cut it from the monster that it could be into the monster that it is That's the first step and then you take the appropriate steps and then you also notice the other monsters because here's something [to] think about1:12:41You're going to pay a price for speaking up But you're going to pay a price for not speaking up So it's like monsters on the right monsters on the left pick the ones you want to battle with if you decide not to1:12:53Make your stand You weaken yourself if you do it a hundred times Then even if the monster was only this big now1:13:02You're this big it's going to eat you you know when it was this big you probably could have kicked it across the room It's too late for that you've capitulated and capitulated you know and so what what you've done?1:13:12And this is a way to think about it from a union perspective This is what jung was trying to get [at] when he was talking about elka elka me. It's like the thing that pops up1:13:22to object to you is this incredibly complex Entity it's it's the entire world encapsulated in the event1:13:33If you interact with it You unpack it you differentiate your sense of the world and you and you you gather new skills, so for example1:13:42Let's say there's something going on at your workplace, and you need to object to it cuz it's driving you crazy And you talk it over with your wife so that you've got your head screwed on straight say1:13:51Oh, I've got to say something and you go there, and you say something And you know you're stumbling and awkward and all of that But but you watch the response and maybe you get what you're aiming at. Maybe you don't but you've learned a bunch1:14:02You've learned while I noticed coherent as I could be I'm not as good at putting my arguments together My boss is more of a son of a bitch than I that he thought it was this is a worse problem that I knew about it's like1:14:11Differentiated differentiated so now the landscape is higher resolution and so are you? Well so good So maybe you're a little bit next1:14:20Better prepared the next time you have to do that and so the issue here to some degree is Don't lose an opportunity to grapple with something that objects to you, especially when the object1:14:33Objection is rather small Because that's something you can you say well, I can put up with it It's like fair enough like you don't want to make everything into a war I usually use a rule of three if we're interacting and you do something that I find disruptive. I'll note it1:14:47It's like potential dragon go on and I'll leave it be and then if you do it again. I think oh yeah That probably wasn't merely1:14:57Situation but I'll leave it be because that's still not enough evidence, but if you do it a third [time], then I'll say hey I just noticed this and you'll say no that didn't happen and I'll say yeah, not only did it happen1:15:09But it happened here, and it happened here, [and] I'm not making this up So there's something going on here like I'm not ignoring it and we can get to the bottom of it And then they'll come [up] with a bunch of objections about why that isn't necessary and you push those aside1:15:22[and] they'll come up with [a] few more objections, and they'll push those aside And then usually they'll get mad or burst into tears and if you push that aside1:15:31Then you get to have a conversation Right and then you can solve the problem but man it's you got to be a monster because first of all you need six arguments about why they're objections aren't going to stop you and1:15:44then you have to not be intimidated by the Anger and you have to not be swamped by compassion about the tears and1:15:53Then you can have a conversation and people don't do that They won't do that And so they don't solve the problems and so then the problems accrue1:16:02Right and if they accrue over 15 years of a relationship then that then they end up fat ugly and in divorce court so and that's you know, that's not a1:16:12That's not a great outcome. It's an it's Divorce Court and cancer are similar in their in their seriousness, not always, but1:16:22But sufficiently often so when that error emerges it's a it's a glimmering now1:16:31You know we talked a lot about the hierarchical structure of goals you know and so Here's something here's something to think about so1:16:40the thing that Announces itself is error has a two-fold nature That's because it's Chaos and order at the same time or it's because it's all the archetypal structures at the same time1:16:51It's dragon of Chaos. It's the great mother positive and negative. It's the great father positive and negative. It's the Individual hero and adversary all of that manifests itself in the moment of error1:17:02Right the architects come forward did you make an error because you're a bad person? Could be now so so one of the things to [think] about with regards to that is you know in the mesopotamian creation story?1:17:14when When when time out comes flooding back. It's so interesting that story You think about what she does?1:17:23So she's the archetype of error. Let's say the error that can take you out that can dissolve you in salt water tears Well, she's irritated because absolute was destroyed so that the structure is gone carelessness is destroyed the structure up comes time at she's not happy1:17:40What does she do she prepares a Phalanx of Monstrous Monsters? It's exactly what the story says she produces a whole horde of monsters to come at you1:17:50and she [puts] king you at their head and Kenya was the king of the Monsters and Later so he's the ultimate bad guy he's satan for all intents and purposes in the mesopotamian version. It's out of him that1:18:04Marduk makes human beings out of his blood that marduk makes human beings. That's a critical issue man the mesopotamian said1:18:13Imagine the worst monster you can possibly imagine the king of all the monsters That's the blood of human beings Wow1:18:22So what does that mean? Well it means that one of the terrible things that lurks Let's say that you've been in a long-term1:18:31Relationship and it collapses let's say you were You know you had a tendency towards alcoholism. You weren't so great with regards to your drug use [you]1:18:41[know] that conscientious, and you had like four or five kind of low-rent affairs, and you know it your marriage collapses bang1:18:52Well who do you first meet when you fall into Chaos? You meet king of the monsters and he's you it's like. Why did my marriage fall apart?1:19:01[what] did I do wrong bang bang bang bang? [I] [did] all these things well? Why? Because that thing inhabits me. What is it well? That's the most horrifying question1:19:12Well, that's why So down there in the archetypal space all these things lurk The hero and the adversary you've just met the adversary right well1:19:22Maybe your tyrant that's certainly possible. Maybe everything around you was chaotic. So what do you encounter when things fall apart you?1:19:31[encounter] the adversary you encounter the tyrant you encounter the catastrophe of nature and you encounter the dragon of the Chaos, and they're all intermingled1:19:40You have to sort that out. That's what happens to Ellis when she goes down the rabbit hole right she meets the Red Queen [and] the red queen is always running around1:19:50Off with their heads off with her heads and she says in my kingdom you have to run as fast as you can just to Stay in the same place right down the rabbit hole you meet the archetypes and1:20:00so Okay, so back to [responsibilities] well one of the things solzhenitsyn detailed. We said well, how does societies. Go corrupt said it's easy1:20:11one Little sin at a time You go to work someone's lording it over you you know that they're tyrannical? You don't have the wherewithal to stand up. It's like okay1:20:22You're a slave And so if you continue to agree [to] be a slave you will continue to generate tyrants1:20:32Right and the only thing that can stop you from doing that. I think is the right kind of terror. It's like careful What you give up? Because that's this [logos] okay, so so [alright]1:20:42that's this logos the logos is the thing that enables you to mediate between a Between order and Chaos and maybe you have to have some faith in that it's like well What should you do [if] someone is harassing you?1:20:53Well, you should fight back okay? What is that? What's the most effective way to fight back well sometimes it's physical, but that's not necessarily for the best1:21:03Maybe it's through articulation Maybe it's through analysis right you want to be sharp you want to be able to decompose a problem you want to be able to? Formulate an argument and a counter response and maybe you want to be so good at that that people don't mess with you to begin1:21:16With and then you're a perfectly articulate counter monster, and you never have to take your sword out That's that's the place that you want to be. It's like people should know1:21:28after three seconds of interacting with you that harassing you [would] be a seriously bad idea and then You'll have a perfectly fine time with them1:21:37So and that's part of you know, so there's some utility in meeting the devil in the underworld Right because maybe he's got something to teach you that's certainly possible that1:21:47[and] one of the things that you can be taught is that your Normative morality which is basically your harmlessness and your naivety masquerading as virtue is1:21:57Completely insufficient to protect you in the world especially against the sorts of things [that] you're talking about which are tyrant tyranny Tyrants will push until you push back. It's in their nature1:22:09They don't have internal controls So they just push and push and push and push and push and push even kids do that like little kids Do that all the time they'll just push you until they hit that wall they're actually quite1:22:20Happy when they hit a wall because the last thing a child wants is a universe without walls It terrifies them right they want to see while I'm in a swimming pool. There's an edge1:22:30They don't want to see oh, no this isn't a swimming pool This is [an] ocean [I'm] in the middle of an ocean I'm going to drown That's a terrible thing for children. That's why they need discipline and structure because1:22:42It's consistency and predictability and routine and all the things that are extraordinarily helpful to them okay, so now think of that hierarchy [that] we talked about so1:22:55You're not in a story. You're in nested stories And the nested stories round themselves in action [in] actual embodied action, so if you're going to sit if you're going to be a good1:23:07partner maybe you help Prepare the meals and to help prepare the meals means you pick up a plate with your hand And you move it physically through space, and you put it on the table. That's where it stops being an abstraction1:23:20So at the bottom of an ethical Hierarchy of value are actions not things that's the scientific world, but actions and1:23:31then you can label the actions with abstractions as you move up the hierarchy, so You're good at setting the table so that means you're good at making dinner1:23:41so that means that you've got one element of good being a good partner [in] place and being a good partner is one element of being a good person and so You you're not so good at setting the table, and you say well. I'm [not] a good person. It's like well1:23:54No, you should go down [to] the higher resolution levels of the hierarchy and start there and that's what you do when you're arguing with [people], but there's another thing that's really useful about conceptualizing the Hierarchy in this manner, so1:24:08So I think what we'll do is We'll stop now [for] 10 minutes and all because I want to bring up this diagram because what I want to do next is it's a bleak story at the moment because the story is something like1:24:20You're going to lay out oversimplifications in the world, and they're going to be prone to catastrophic error, and then you have to encounter What's terrifying in order to Progress and so what that means is that progression is always dependent on terror something like that1:24:32And there's some truth [in] that and that's why people don't progress, but it's not a sufficient truth And I want to unpack that when we come back, so let's come back in 10 minutes, and then I'll die can unpack that1:24:44There's this parable in the new testament [that] just came to mind I'm going to mangle it a bit because it's not one that I have well memorized but1:24:53And I'm probably going to conflate two or three stories together, but I think I think [I've] got it, right Christ is walking down the road and someone picks them up1:25:03the person is rich and and like well wealthy and He has a talk they have a talk and the wealthy man, basically1:25:14tells him all the things that are wrong with his life and then he asks him what he should do about it and Chris says to him you have to give up everything you own and follow me1:25:27And that's often be read as a criticism of wealth And that's actually not what the story means what the story means is this this guy has a lot of wealth1:25:36but he's still miserable and so that means that what he has is the Obstacle to what he could be and so that's the message of the [story] is that if you're miserable with what you have then you?1:25:46have to let go of what you have so that maybe you could have something else and And so and then there's some commentary on that story I think other people are listening and they say well if that's the price to be paid then1:26:01no one is ever going to pay it, and I think that's where the statement it is easier for a man to go through the eye of a needle for a camel to go through an eye of1:26:11The eye of a needle than for a rich man to [enter] paradise. [I] believe that's the derivation of that Story and like I said that's been read as a critique of wealth, but it isn't it's a critique of attachment now1:26:23You know in the buddhist doctrine one of the impediments to enlightenment is attachment and1:26:33People read that as saying. Well you shouldn't care for anything in the world, and that's there's a nihilism That's associated with that and not and there is a strong nihilistic tendency in buddhism that has to do with1:26:47Abandonment of the world do you see that in? Christianity to some degree with people going off to lead ascetic lives and to you know it's part of multiple religious traditions that idea of asceticism1:26:56and there's some utility in it if it is your attachment say to material things or status or whatever that's Interfering with your pSychological progression now the idea is that you [should] let go of whatever it is that's interfering with your pSychological1:27:11Progression because no matter how valuable what it is. That's interfering is It's not as valuable as what you're giving up1:27:20Okay, however the Criticism still stands and the Criticism was well if the task is that difficult then no one's going to do it and1:27:30so in in the Brothers karamazov, [there's] a famous story called the Grand inquisitor and1:27:39it's a story told by Ivan karamasoff to his brother [Elia] and Ivan is a very1:27:49High-status intelligent attractive Tough minded Soldier and Alyosha is his younger brother and he's kind of softer and less rational1:28:03more spiritual and also training to be a no vitiate at the local monastery and Ivan likes to tear strips off it because he's a1:28:13cynic and an atheist and and and in Dostoyevsky's normal Brilliant Manner he makes Ivan an incredibly powerful1:28:23articulate and Admirable character, so when dostoyevsky wants to take someone on in his literary investigations He doesn't take his enemy and turn him into some sort of weak1:28:34Puppet he takes his enemy and turns them into the strongest possible enemy he can imagine and then Goes to battle against that it's a hallmark of Great literature1:28:44It's what distinguishes dusty sp for example from [Ain] Rand Because what ain't rand does is she takes her she's a darling of the I would [say] libertarian, right?1:28:54She takes her enemies And they're all the same first of all every single one of her negative characters is exactly the same as every other one And they're all bad you know there's there's no redeeming qualities whatsoever in them1:29:06And they also I would say make their weak characters who make weak arguments That's not the way to progress the way to progress is to take your enemy Seriously and to even inflate them into something Beyond their [capacity] to inflate themselves1:29:20and then see if you can hammer out a solution to the genuine problem that's being posed anyway, so Dusty else he does that brilliantly always and what makes him, so absolutely remarkable1:29:32But anyways, I even tells le Osha this story He calls it the [grand] [inquisitor] and that in the story christ comes back to [Earth] in the Spanish inquisition [and] he's he's out by a fountain and1:29:44People sort of notice him and he starts performing miracles and a big crowd Gathers around and it's like happy days. You know But then the inquisitor shows up this old, you know harsh1:29:55Tyrannical guy and he has his guards arrest him [he] [throws] them in Prison and so now christ is in prison and the1:30:05Inquisitor comes down and says to him while you're probably wondering why which are you in prison you know? especially given that were the members [of] the you know were the representatives of the church that you hypothetically found it and and1:30:17christ remains silent through this entire episode and the inquisitor basically says look you know you laid down this ethic that1:30:29it's wonderful, but it's Superhuman no one can do it It's asking way too much, and so you're you put the burden you put on people was just far too great1:30:38And so what we've done in the catholic church in the centuries since the church was founded is was lightened the load we said well we take ordinary people and say well there here are some things you can do to be a little bit better and1:30:48You [know] we've instituted confession and repentance and all that we've kind of toned it down So that the average person has some hope of progress And we're making Headway and the last bloody thing we need around here is you coming back and like?1:31:01Screwing up all our all our good efforts is like. It was nice to have you around once but once was plenty man We don't need you around anymore and so christ listens to this doesn't say anything and then the inquisitor turns to leave and1:31:13Christ grabs him and kisses him on the lips and the inquisitor turns white and Then leaves and when he leaves the door he leaves the door open And that's the end of the story and it's an amazing story1:31:25It's an absolutely remarkable story in every possible way and and you know Dostoevsky was objecting to some degree to the tyranny [of] the catholic church or even of the Christian church for that matter1:31:37But the thing that he did [that] was so damn brilliant is that he even made the inquisitor leave the door open No, and as a [bellas] critique of Catholicism even during the inquisition. It's so brilliant1:31:47It's so emblematic of dostoyevsky's take on the world that he criticized the inquisitorial Aspect of Christianity and of course, it's the tyrannical aspect of any belief system, but noted that they bloody well left the door open1:32:02Right so it's Brilliant. It's Brilliant It's it's it's remarkable. So anyways the whole point that I'm making here. Is that there are terrible?1:32:12impediments to enlightenment and the light is the impediments are the necessity of sacrifice and the necessity area of Necessity of the Voluntary acceptance of suffering [I] mean you see that in buddhism1:32:24You know because one [of] the canons of [buddhist] one of the fundamental [principles] of buddhism Is that life is suffering and that attachment makes it worse and well?1:32:33It isn't it isn't precisely attachment [its] Attachment to things such that you cannot release the things when it's time to let them go [right] [so] like you're a Phoenix1:32:45You're [a] hundred years old your feathers. They're not working anymore, right? You're all wrinkly you're done It's time to burst into flames and be reborn but you don't want to burn off your feathers you want to cling to them and1:32:57That's not good because you have to be willing to undergo that Transformation process and that involves Like you know if you if you take your po self apart because you've made a mistake and you find out1:33:08What it is about you that's not? Set up properly And that's why the mistake occurred that's really going to happen for example when an intimate relationship breaks down1:33:17then you have to be in a position where you're willing to let the Errors that are part of your character that define you right they might even be part of your [identity] you have to let you have1:33:27To be willing to let them go you have to be willing to let them burn off and that's a hell of a thing to Ask and so then the [question] might be well is there a less radical solution to the problem then then then?1:33:39Crucifixion and resurrection or the total emulation and regeneration because that's the archetypal What's that's the archetypal end point that if you want to put your self together you have to die and be reborn?1:33:51[I] mean that in that motif comes up all the [time] In in popular popular stories and in mythology and so they here's here's1:34:02How I think that problem can be? resolved so Let's go back to the Enochian Story momentarily1:34:12so what happens and that the pinocchio story to me [is] analogous in its structure to the sermon on the mount so I'm going to make a Parallel between those two things so basically what the [sermon] on the [mount] suggests is that?1:34:25you should conceptualize the highest good that you're capable of conceptualizing and orient yourself towards that and That having done that you [should] live in the moment1:34:36So it's not like you should live in the moment It doesn't say [that] because that's often christ the hippie You know so the hippies who have adopted that or that?1:34:45That's sort of that that element of Christianity say well you live for the moment you know and and And in meditation and other practices some of the attempt is to get you to live in the moment1:34:56But you know just to tell people to live in the moment It's like what what the hell kind of advice is that what about the future? You know that is not helpful advice1:35:05Somebody comes to you, and they're suffering dreadfully because you know their mother has alzheimer's and they're unemployed well live in the moment It's like that's just not helpful. It's it's and because it's even worse than that1:35:15It's judgmental you say well the only reason you're suffering is because you haven't oriented yourself property to live in the moment like no you're suffering because your Mother has alzheimer's and you don't have a job. It's like. It's not because you aren't living in the moment, so1:35:29Living in the moment isn't the right answer The right answer is something more like orient yourself towards the highest good that you can imagine and then act in the moment1:35:40That's a whole different story now. That's what happens in the pinocchio story, basically what happens is that Geppetto? sees the star beckoning in the distance And he orient's himself towards the highest good he can imagine he wants to take this creation of his and so this is1:35:56Manifesting itself conceptually at multiple levels simultaneously because there's a there's a story about the destiny of humanity in relationship to God Nested in the story. It's like take your1:36:07fallible creation your puppet and Set [up] the pre. Set up the condition such that. It's capable of taking on full functional independence. It's something like that1:36:21So that's what you do if you're a good parent with your children. You don't protect them. You don't offer them safety You don't do any of that except insofar as it's necessary to facilitate1:36:30their Development as Fully confident and courageous beings the purpose of the protection is only to allow that developmental process to to continue1:36:41So you you orient [Geppetto] orient's himself and so the farther orient's himself and then the son undertakes the voyage and so1:36:50[alright], so let's say that that's the case you orient yourself first then you can start to rely on your1:36:59Then you can start to concentrate more on your orientation to the moment now I'm going to tell you another story. So you know I was just watching harry Potter the other day the first one and1:37:12I was watching the quidditch game And the quidditch game is very interesting because there's a game and a meta game going on at the same time So the game is just the standard quidditch game1:37:22It's kind of like basketball played on brooms right you have to throw balls through hoops and if you get enough points you win But at the same time so there's the normal players1:37:31and then there's two seekers one from each team and the seekers aren't playing the same game the Game is nested inside the seeker game actually because if you're a seeker, and you perform your task that everyone wins right you win1:37:45But everyone wins and so you're not even playing the normal game You're playing the seeker game and the thing that that that Harry Potter chases is this thing called the snitch and the snitch. This is one of the things that's I can't1:37:58I don't know how the hell Jk. Rowling figured this out I cannot figure it out because that snitch is a winged ball right and there's there's actually a symbol of that winged Ball1:38:08Called the round Chaos which jung describes in his works on alchemy and his works on healthy are really really difficult It's [not] [easy] to figure out what he's talking [about] at all, but the round Chaos which is a winged ball is1:38:20it's it's a manifest a of the spirit Mercury and Mercury is an emissary of the God, so you can think about mercury [uh] the Unconscious manifesting itself in your in your field of experience something like that1:38:34In any case the the round Chaos is the container of the primordial Material from which the world is made and I think about it like this1:38:46It's this thing there, it's [that] So when you encounter an anomaly an error?1:38:56It's a container. That's a way of conceptualizing it and what is it contained? Well it contains in some sense it contains the whole world but but here's an example like look let's say1:39:09God let's say that you've had repeated fights with your wife about how domestic duties are going to be arranged among around meal time and1:39:18you believe me you're going to have those fights and So and so what's happening? Is that mealtimes are unpleasant because there's a war for power going on in the kitchen1:39:29right and So then you think one day while you're going to you know? note that and you're going to1:39:38Do an archeological investigation and find out just what the hell is going on and so you start? unpacking the fact that mealtimes are not pleasant and1:39:49So what's in that little thing that you're unpacking that package well? the entire power dynamic between men and women in the Modern world is inside [that] dispute and1:40:01you might find that part of the reason [that] your wife is upset about the way that mealtimes are arranged because is because Her [grandmother] was beat by her grandfather1:40:10And that's playing a role in it played a role [in] determining her unconscious expectations And that's pathologizing one of the day to day rituals in the house1:40:21and if you're going to unpack that you're going to have to unpack all of that into you take a Little Monster, and you decompose it you find out it's a hydra1:40:30it's got 50 heads then you have to work through every single one of those it's really really difficult, so It's a container that [contains] everything, but the thing is if you unpack it1:40:40Successfully let's say and you deal with it you go see eight a consensus Then all of a sudden you get you get peace say around your mealtimes. Which is a major accomplishment1:40:49Man, because you have to eat three times a day And it's the center of the household and all of them, so but the thing is is that often1:40:58when you're especially in the context of an intimate relationship Things will Emerge that produce discontinuities and the question is what should your attitude towards that discontinuity be?1:41:08Well you can punish the person for manifesting the discontinuity That's the tyrannical aspect or you can let it take the whole thing apart and that will happen I mean that's often how relationships end. Is that a discontinuity emerges and1:41:22People get into it and things go sideways so badly that the whole relationship descends into [Chaos] and people bail out of it so it's no wonder that people want to ignore it and1:41:34It's also no wonder that. They want to tyrannize it. It's like quit bothering me with that well Possibly, but probably not and also if my attitude towards you is quit bothering me with that your attitude towards me when I?1:41:50Have the same sort of problem in reverse. It's going to be exactly the same and so we're not going to get anywhere with it All right But that still is1:42:01painful now, let's go back to the Quidditch issue now. Here's what happens is that? harry Potter is picked to be the seeker so that means he is the seeker whatever he represents is the seeker [and]1:42:16He's an interesting character [because] he's touched by evil, and he's a rule breaker, and he's also kind of a normal kid He's not [a] hyper intellect or anything like that. That's hermione's rule, right?1:42:26so he's normal but but super normal at the same time and he gets picked to be the seeker and and Then you think about what is it he seeks, and he seeks this thing that glimmers rioted it flashes in front of him1:42:38It's made out of gold and it has wings and if he grabs it then he wins and so the question is What does [that] represent?1:42:48Now it's interesting that when people watch that movie They actually find that you know they think that that's kind of cool that it's a cool game and It is [a] cool game. She laid it out very nicely and the idea is that well1:42:59There's a game and if you play it normally you win the game But in that game is a meta game and if you play that properly then not only do you win? But everybody wins so then the next rule is the meta game supersedes the game and that's the same idea that1:43:12I'm chasing here with you today about this Meta morality it's the it's the morality that emerges as a consequence of the analysis of a set of morality or it's the morality1:43:22It's the morality to which other all other morality should [be] subjugated that's another way of [thinking] about it, and [I] said well That's a terrible thing because it involves painful sacrifice or maybe it involves confronting the thing you least want to confront1:43:35That's the union dictum right if your life, isn't all that it should be then you should find out the thing that you least want to confront that you're avoiding and confront that and that's the1:43:45Easy to say but it's a terrible thing because it means you're going to have to turn your gaze [to] the place where you are Weakest and most vulnerable that is asking a lot [of] people1:43:55so then you might say [well] is there an alternative and I think there is an alternative, so this is the anomaly right this is the ball that contains everything1:44:04I think there is an alternative. I think it's associated with this idea, so Imagine Imagine we have a we could have a conflict if we were in a relationship1:44:16We could have a conflict that would blow the relationship apart all right So we don't want to have that conflict and then we could have no conflict whatsoever [which] means that you would never get to say what you wanted and I would never get to say what I wanted because1:44:28We're either Identical which is just not happening or we're going to have conflict because you're going to want some things that I don't want and vice-versa So if there's no conflict, we are not in a relationship1:44:39[all] right, so zero conflict is the wrong amount and conflict it destroys the [relationship] is the wrong amount and then you might say well1:44:48Okay, what's the optimal amount of conflict? Well, so so so then we can think about how people respond emotionally1:44:57So let's say if you go after the person that you're arguing with and you say you're a bad person And you really make that case [you're] bloody well [hammered] home you remember 50 things they've done that1:45:07We're bad and you lay them out like I'm going to stomp you You're a bad person you really need to change okay? Well first of all you're going to meet tremendous resistance And that's like you've got the hydrogen you bring in a hydrogen bomb to the war right and maybe1:45:20Unless you want to destroy everything maybe that's not the most logical solution, but then by the same token Everything is [alright], and we never have any conflict that's not helpful either, and you're going to get bored of that1:45:30And you're not going to develop and so then the [question] is well. Maybe there's some happy medium here Maybe you want to be repairing this structure. You know the structure that goes from micro actions up to higher-order?1:45:45Conceptualizations, maybe you want to be updating that on a constant basis, and you want to update it in a manner that doesn't Drop you into Chaos or place you in too much spaces1:45:55And then that answer is well how then then the question is how is it that you can calibrate? your approach to error so that you get the benefits of doing it without the disadvantage of collapsing into Chaos and1:46:08then the issue the answer to that is something like it's something like1:46:19Once you have decided to adopt Responsibility for being and will say that what that means is that you have1:46:28conceptualized A Good that you're willing to devote yourself to and I think you you're perfectly welcome to do that on an individual basis1:46:37[I] think you should do it on an individual basis. You should consult with your ancestors [while] you're doing that because generally speaking1:46:46the route to optimal the route to to quality of Life and productivity Has been laid [out] by other people we kind of know what the parameters are1:46:58you need to do something that other people find is useful and and and you have to regard it as useful as well or At least you have to be entertaining there has to be something about you1:47:09Have value to other people that you have to pursue with a fair bit [of] diligence So you have to play a productive social role?1:47:18probably need friends Probably need an intimate relationship, and if it could be medium to long [term] in for an intimate relationship perhaps all the better1:47:28That's what most societies hold up as ideal could assume. Well. There's probably a reason for that I think one of the reasons is is that your life gets fragmented otherwise Badly fragmented you know it's1:47:38Because every time you have a long term relationship And it fragments. It's like your identity is blown into pieces you get fragmented across time it's it's not it's not good1:47:49It's it breaks you into pieces and you don't necessarily recover that well It makes everything much more in1:47:58permanent and Unreliable all of those things so it it introduces a tremendous amount of uncertainty into your life And it also means that you don't have anyone around that you can really trust1:48:07and that's bad because if you have someone around you can really trust and you have two brains instead of one and Like you probably need two brains to manage your way through life. It's pretty complicated1:48:19So you orient yourself towards some good? The highest good that you can conceptualize and it has to be Through a consultation with your ancestors because you need to do the things that people have always done1:48:30[and] you need to do them properly and You need to assume that that's the way that you should live unless you have a very good reason To change it dramatically and maybe you do, but you got to start with some1:48:42Axiomatic set of presuppositions because otherwise you have to invent everything on your own, and you don't have enough time to do that So you have to use normative guidelines and if you don't then people won't know what to do with you1:48:53That's another big problem. If you live completely outside the norm. I mean you know Remarkable artists manage that to some degree, but of course they pay [for] the privilege by being remarkable artists1:49:04so if there's something truly remarkable about you perhaps you could justify deviating from the normative path, but if there isn't First of all there's nothing remarkable enough about you to justify deviating in every way [from] the normative path no matter how remarkable you are1:49:19so So that's part of the the rescuing of the father from from the depths is to Reunite yourself with the structures of your community you can do that in a way that you feel1:49:33Suits your own needs best, but I don't think you cannot do it because it makes you weak, and then you'll drown1:49:42All right, so let's say you have oriented yourself But not perfectly because you're full of mistakes and errors So then what do you do because you have to fix those errors, but you still have to be oriented1:49:56And this is why I started getting to to get interested in the phenomena of meaning As a phenomenological experience to experience something as meaningful, it's not exactly obvious what that means to experience something is meaningful1:50:09[I] think that you can you can approach it obliquely You know like if I said watch yourself for two weeks and notice when you're doing something that you regard is meaningful1:50:18I could say well. Here's some here's some Markers you lose a sense of time you lose a sense of vulnerability, you're deeply engaged in it it seems1:50:27It seems worth the effort right you forget yourself while you're doing [it] Maybe you forget your existential concerns while you're doing it you're not1:50:38Ruminating or obsessing about the meaning of your life, right so so there's markers for it's like the flow states that [cSIkszentmihalyi] described1:50:47and Then you can experience it you experience it under certain Sort of ritualistic conditions You might experience it when you go see a great movie you might experience it when you listen [to] music1:50:58I think music is a very very standard pathway for people to have that kind of experience because Virtually everyone gets intimations of mute of meaning from music and I think music1:51:10music is Hierarchically structured patterns that are representative of being laying itself out properly It's something like that, so it's an abstract representation of proper being and so1:51:23We can we can grapple with the phenomena of music and we can we can bach or phenomena of meaning we can box it in? A little bit and start to conceptualize it1:51:33We can start to conceptualize it perhaps as the manifestation of a deep instinct, and so I would say well Meaning is what NFS itself?1:51:43when you are when you've oriented yourself properly and when you've optimized the1:51:53flow of information between you and you between you and Chaos that might be the right way of thinking about it because [literally] you think about a piece of music because you1:52:03Want it to be predictable? but you don't want it to be perfectly predictable you want to be it to be predictable with some interesting variations and Predictable with some variations that make sense. Maybe you can conceptualize that as something like this. It's like1:52:15it's predictable at this order of Stability, but it's it's varying down here from time to time and so you've got stable stability there1:52:25But variability there and you can handle that so you want an overarching structure of stability with some internal variability and1:52:34Maybe that's the way that you update yourself without falling apart and then I would say you can find the pathway to the optimal rate of1:52:43Update by relying on your sense of meaning. That's what it's for what it tells you is that you're you're wandering your way through the world between the1:52:54Catastrophes of Chaos and the catastrophes of order and now and then you swing into the proper locale You're where you should be and what happens is you get engaged by that you get meaningfully engaged by that and it's fragile1:53:06It'll move on you right because it's very difficult to exist at that point Constantly your bad habits all sorts of things your situation1:53:15There's all sorts of things that are going to interfere [with] that But that doesn't mean that that isn't where you should be and so then you might say well That's where you should strive to be all the time and then the question might be well1:53:27What would it be like if you [were] there all [the] [time], and I [think] that's where intimations of Paradise Come from I mean when words think it was wordsworth talked about intimations of immortality and childhood people tend to romanticize1:53:41their childhood because of the sense of Intense engagement that goes along with [being] a child and it's one of the wonderful things about being around children actually it's it's one1:53:52They pay you for their care and the way the children pay you for their care Is that they turn normal things into Magic again when you're around them because you've seen it a hundred times before1:54:04And so when you see it, you don't see it You see what you already know But when a child sees it they don't because they don't know they see it and then when you watch them see it1:54:13You see it too, and so it's just tremendous fun Leading a small child around to do things that you've done before because they're [sold] you know, they're like this1:54:23They're like all the time, and you know maybe that's too much and they cry and they get upset and all of that but a good part of the time It's just wild-eyed wonder and then you can see the world through their eyes1:54:33And it's payment, and so that's that sense of being engaged like that is something that people love about children and rightly so, but it's also a marker to1:54:42the proper way of being you know there's a dictum in the As a union idea that there's no difference between the archetype of the wise old man and the archetype of the child1:54:52They're the same thing because the wise old man is the person who found what he had in childhood, but lost Right it said that's a very powerful motif is that the purpose of maturation is to return to the state of childhood as a mature?1:55:06Being not to stay in the state of childhood That's peter pan, but to make the sacrifice is necessary for Maturation and then return1:55:16So well how do you do that? Well you do that in part by noting what it is That's meaningful you for you to engage in I would say it's your nervous system reporting to you right hemisphere and left hemisphere1:55:27Balanced that the balance between Chaos and order produces an output that says you are [in] the right place It's a perception the meaning is a perception of being in the right place. It's the genuine thing however1:55:40because it can be Pathologized that's the thing and that's why I think there's a call to virtue in most great religious traditions if you're going to rely [on] Your sense of meaning to orient you you have to play a straight game because otherwise you warp and twist1:55:54The inputs and then the mechanism won't function properly you [know]. It's like if you if you were only if you're if you've blinded yourself to half the world you can't use your1:56:06Perception story and your self properly because the half the world that you're ignoring is going to pop up at you unexpectedly and take you down, and so if your Relationship with the world isn't pristine1:56:17Honest primarily, then you can't rely on your own internal orienting mechanisms And then you either fall into Chaos which is an absolute catastrophe Or you have to rely on some kind of external authority and that makes you prone to1:56:30Possession by Tyrannical Ideologies for example which give you that sense of meaning that you should in fact have as a consequence of your own action1:56:45but okay, so if if all relationships are our sort of1:56:55predicated on of this balance between no, conflict and conflict that destruct1:57:04[that] if we will look if we were to look at this at a more macro level We see this sort of matte effect in in history in our world like with conflict in between countries in the two systems1:57:19Ideology EtC But what is this sort of navigation between? The exact line of no consequences [conflicts] how does that not imply that some people are inherently?1:57:32due to Chaos It might imply that you know what are the things so look so1:57:42sometimes Sometimes you don't have an answer [that] works you can answer that produces the highest probability of success and1:57:52Like I could view the archetypal world from a religious perspective and say that There's such a thing as ultimate and final [redemption]. That's a metaphysical claim. I don't I don't want to do that1:58:03I think it's independent of what I'm talking about what I'm saying. Is that there's an archetypal path That's laid out in in the mythology of the hero, and it's your best bet1:58:12That's all it's your best bet. It doesn't mean that if you apply it that everything is going to turn out The way you might want it to turn out but but I would say this1:58:23There's a way of there's an interesting twist on that, too this is one of the things that I came to understand about trying to speak the truth is that1:58:32You can make an assumption you can make a fundamental assumption based on your ignorance Let's say and the in eradicable quality of your ignorance, but you can't compute the best possible outcome1:58:45What you can do instead is make a decision and one decision is well I'm going to say what I think and see what happens and Then you can define that as the best possible outcome1:58:54Now you might say well now and then that's going to lead you into Chaos. It's like yeah, it is It is it's a strange. It's a strange inversion1:59:04But regardless of all doubt I would still say Human beings are finite and limited and mortal you know and death is final. Let's say1:59:13I'm not saying that but we could easily say [that] Doesn't matter this is still the best pathway forward it isn't certainty there's no certainty and1:59:23It's very frequently in life you have poison a or poison B Like you get to pick [your] poison [you] don't get to pick the elixir of life but I would but I would say I would also say I don't think there's any reason to be particularly pessimistic because1:59:36We don't know what would happen if [people] really tried hard to get their acts together Like if they understood the [necessity] of that and really put it forward I mean I Mean I've had lots of experience with my clinical clients now. You know I've seen dozens and dozens of [people] and1:59:50We have tried jointly To get their lives straighter, and it works almost inevitably now that doesn't mean I've had clients who died. You know we were2:00:01three-quarters through A Wonderful process of psychological renovation and they got cancer and died so so there's there's no certainty associated with this2:00:10But it's the best solution available [and] And it's also possible that it's a good enough solution2:00:20Now I was talking to my class yesterday about this you know so you If you pursue the things in [your] life that [are] meaningful once you've oriented yourself and that means accepting the challenges that come along with2:00:31That because one of the things that you'll find you even find this in music if you know a piece of music completely Then you can not want to listen to it anymore this still has to be some challenge in it2:00:41You still have to track it and sometimes music is so complex you just can't it just sounds like noise Modern music is often like that because it's so Well it tends towards the chaotic and so it's I find it difficult to listen to because I can't get a handle on it2:00:55But then you know so it's too challenging, and then there's other music pop music is often like this It's Catchy the first two times you hear it then you never want to hear it [again]. It's too much There's too much predictability and not enough Chaos and hopefully you find a piece of [music]. That's somewhere in the middle2:01:08You can listen to it 50 or 100 times and each time you listen to it There's still some new nuance in it that you didn't that you didn't Expect before and so well you kind of want to set up your life like that, so that2:01:21And I think you see that the phenomena of meaning manifests itself at the area at the Locale of Optimal challenge2:01:31So if the thing so one of the things for example, or might say well Let's say you want to set some goals for yourself. [we] say well. They're remarkable goals, but they're all there to unattainable2:01:42You're just going to find it frustrating to pursue them It's going to be too punishing, and then we might say well. Here's a goal, and you think well, I could do that You know standing on my head. There's nothing in it2:01:53well both of those two extremes are going to leave you in a state that isn't characterized by the Optimization of engagement and meaning one is too difficult [too] punishing2:02:02It's the judge and nothing else and the [other] is the ultimate and merciful mothers. It's like you win, no matter How you play so then you calibrate and say well? You know [I] need?2:02:12I'm I'm up for a challenge at this level I Wouldn't recommend that because that's just a bit like people do that you [want] it might want to2:02:23Investigate your character in detail and decide you know What's going on at this level of analysis? That's pretty harsh, but you can certainly continually retool yourself at more micro levels and2:02:35That and I think what you do is you pick the level of retooling that optimizes your willingness to be engaged in it and2:02:44then what's so interesting about that is that I think is that you get the benefits of perfection so to speak while still being imperfect2:02:54The imperfect your actual imperfection has nothing to do with it what's relevant is the Jerk is the journey that you're undertaking to rectify the imperfection so instead [of] aiming to be the entity without flaws2:03:07You're aiming to be the entity that continues to realize its flaws and overcome them. Well. That's a game You can play forever and that's maybe the ultimate in being an unplowed entity2:03:17It's something like that so so I want to show you some pictures [that] I think are associated [with] that so this one to begin with2:03:26This is an absolutely amazing picture. I think so this is bert hold [firt] meier tree of life flanked by Eve and Mary Ecclesia and2:03:35This in some [sense] this this picture summarizes the biblical stories in one picture which is that's pretty amazing that that a picture can do that and2:03:44So let me explain the picture a little bit so the first thing you see [here]. Is [that] this is the tree? this is the tree of life and2:03:54So it echoes the tree of the [of] the knowledge of good and evil But this is [post-fall] so we interpreted the story of Adam and Eve already2:04:04is that human beings became self conscious they discovered death they discovered morality it was all a consequence of Interacting with the fruit and the snake something like that, and you can read that as an as an evolutionary tale2:04:16you can at least read it as a Representation of the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, so what does that mean well it [means] that? the2:04:26[Apple] in some sense was equivalent to death, and that's what you see here You see eve is picking fruit from the tree here But the fruit is it's on the skull side of the tree and so eve. It's the vulnerability of Eve2:04:38She's naked there and displayed to the world. It's the vulnerability of Eve That's one way of thinking about it was the vulnerability of Eve That was the catalyst to the development of human self-consciousness, and I think that that's true2:04:51It seems to me to be a reasonable proposition and so Eve eve's relationship with the fruit and the snake2:05:01Doomed human beings to the realization of mortality that's what this side of the picture represents and So it's a catastrophe, and it's associated with here with the snake in the fruit2:05:13It's human beings attempts to understand how it is that they emerged into a self-conscious world? Okay, so fine. So that's on this is on the the fall end of the story and this is on the2:05:25Solution end of the story now what you see here [in] there's a skull there, and there's a Crucifix here, and you see There's all these little fruits on this tree, so it's the apple of death that eve is handing out on this side2:05:36and it's the host that plays a role [in] the cannibalistic right that's at the center of Christian ritual that mary as the church is handing out as a medication for yes2:05:47So she's handing out the antidote Well, what's the antidote well? It's a strange thing. It's associated with this Crucifix, and that's2:05:57Translated into this wheat and host so you're supposed to eat that and that That is the incorporation of whatever this represents well the question, then is what does that represent it to assist?2:06:08It's a symbol of suffering obviously it's a symbol of the ultimate in suffering. It's the weirdest thing because the picture proposes that to ingest the ultimate in suffering is to2:06:21simultaneously Ingest the antidote to the catastrophe of the knowledge of death It's a very strange paradox but but it's the it's the proper paradox. It's at the center of this of the great drama2:06:34that's represented by this picture a Little knowledge of Death destroys you2:06:44Full voluntary acceptance of it is the [cure] That's the idea Well, that's a that's a hell of an [idea]2:06:55It's not only to and to accept it is Simultaneously in some sense to take responsibility for it2:07:05Because you don't take responsibility for things that you don't accept You only take responsibility [for] things that you do accept say well, the world is fundamentally flawed because it's fundamental nature is2:07:20Vulnerability Intolerable vulnerability, I'm not going to take any responsibility for that, but that's really [kane's] attitude in the in the story of2:07:29cain and Abel he externalizes responsibility for the catastrophe of his life and Therefore he doesn't make the right sacrifices and so the paradoxical injunction here is2:07:41accept responsibility for the catastrophe of your life and That way you transcend it Simultaneously, and there's a there's an unbelievably hopeful message in there and the message is you're actually strong enough to do that2:07:54You just don't know it, and you won't find out till you do it. You can't find out till you do it But if you did it you'd find out that it was true. It's a massive risk2:08:03It's the ultimate in risks right you have to be willing to lose your life in order to find it. It's like exactly right So that picture when I started to understand that picture look every time I look at it. Just blows me away. I can't2:08:17Unbelievably, it's an unbelievably sophisticated set of ideas But I don't think it's much different really [than] this idea. I mean buddha finds his enlightenment under a tree2:08:32It's not fluke that that's the case that's his natural [environment], and he's sitting in that lotus here the lotus [opens] up [it's] [a] this thing that springs up from the depths. He sits there illuminated the same way. He's got a halo2:08:44that's the sun that stands for higher consciousness and he's Transcended by accepting the fact that life is suffering he's transcended2:08:55the limitations that [are] part of mortality You see that symbol there That swastika you see it there. It's reversed the Nazis reversed it2:09:08Well think about that. I mean they weren't stupid as symbolism They're symbols had meaning is what the swastika were represented was what this represents?2:09:18reversed Well, that's a very bad idea This is the thing that this this idea is what enables people to transcend their suffering and buddha said well2:09:29Don't don't be too attached to things and what does that mean? It doesn't mean deny the world it might mean deny the world if you're too in love with the material2:09:38like with material well-being Let's say then your pathway to transcendence and meaning might be to Abandon that because it's [it's] constraining you it's making you less than you could be but the2:09:50Fundamental lesson the more fundamental lesson that's underneath that is don't let what you are stop you from being what you could be Right and so then the [question] is well. What do you identify with do you identify with what you are?2:10:05then [your] tyrant You identify with with Chaos because that's the opposite of order say Then [you're] nihilistic2:10:15Well, you don't identify with either of those you know that they're both necessary You know that you have to live with both of them, but you would you identify? With the capacity to continually transcend what you are and then you seek out error2:10:29That's what humility is like. I'm error ridden It's like so I want to see I want [to] put myself in the [situation] where I can discover one of my errors hopefully not2:10:39In [a] way that's going to knock me completely out of the game right. I want to I want to seek out a challenge I want to find out where my limits are I want to find out where there's not enough of me yet2:10:49And I want to do that in a way that's engaging because you know you can wear yourself out fighting dragons Obviously, you can exhaust yourself completely, and that's not helpful. You know [what] one of the things I learned for example when I was coaching2:11:02when I was coaching Warriors who these were people who had very [high-end] careers and so they had an infinite workload no matter how much they worked? Flat-out there was always way more work that they should do. It's very difficult thing to learn to manage and2:11:15So they were exhausting themselves, and I said well, you know you have to work less per day. It's like well No, that's not happening. I can't do that and so2:11:24What I learned over time was [ok] So this is what you have to do every three [months] you have to block off [4] days and go have a vacation [you] have To plan that in advance, so it's in your calendar so that your secretary doesn't book your time2:11:36and then you need that because you have to recuperate enough so [that] you can work as hard as you're going to work and of Course they were nervous about that And I said well look we can we can calibrate this2:11:45Let's keep track of your billable hours over the next year and see if they increase or decrease Because I bet you if you take more time off, you'll actually have more billable hours, you'll actually have your cake and eat it2:11:56too you'll get to have a vacation and you'll be more productive and That inevitably that was what happened? [and] so that's a matter of calibrating the game properly right you want to play [a] game that you can [play] today?2:12:07But also one that you can play next week and next month. We're not talking about You know your your career this week? We're talking [about] you having a career that lasts 30 years that doesn't kill you that doesn't make you hate yourself or the job that2:12:20Doesn't make you better that doesn't wear you to a frazzle so it has to be optimized and so I think that you can Fact decide to take on the load that's optimally meaningful if you want and then you get to have your cake and eat it2:12:33Too you're on the pathway to continual incremental improvement You only have to burn off a feather at a time instead of having the whole bloody thing burst into flames2:12:42But it's a constant It's a constant source of renewal, and there's an idea that to be renewed you have to drink the water of life, [right]? That's an old mythological idea and what's the water the water of life?2:12:54Chaos is water water water is Chaos water is what washes away too much order And to stay continually let's say2:13:04refreshed by the water of life is to take on exactly the right [amount] of Chaos [to] make sure that your Garden is properly nourished, and I think meaning is actually the marker of that and and as I said you know that2:13:17[I'm] not I wouldn't consider myself either naive or particularly optimistic person I don't think I'm [either] of those, but this is an actually an idea This is one of the only ideas that I've ever found that I really believed to be rock-solid2:13:29I actually think that it's true And [it's] very optimistic because it says you can use your sense of meaning to calibrate your progress through life2:13:38It but there's rules you have to aim at the highest possible good that you can conceive Now in that subject update because what the hell you know but you start by aiming at the star you can see rather than the dimmer one that you can't yet perceive and2:13:51Then you decide that you're going to do that honestly right. There's that that's a big decision, so the first decision I think in some sense is a decision of love You're going to decide that being is worthwhile, and that you're going to work [for] [its] betterment, and that's a decision2:14:05That's based on love and the second decision is based on truth having made that decision You're going to play a straight game having made those two decisions I think that you can allow your sense of meaning to calibrate your pathway2:14:16And then what's so interesting is [that] you hit a state that's as close to paradise unless you're going to hit Right away, because being engaged like that2:14:25It's better to be engaged in the solution of a complex problem than not to have a problem at all And that's that's no different than saying it's better for there to be being that non-being because being is a problem2:14:40and so if you want to have no problems then you have no being and You could say well being is so miserable that maybe that's the route We should take and fair enough, but maybe you can have your cake and eat it, too2:14:50You can have the damn problem. It could be a problem [we're] [solving] and you can be so engaged in solving the problem that it justifies the fact that the problem exists and2:15:00Then you get then you get to have you get to have the problem and the solution at the same time and maybe that's better than not having the problem at all and I [believe] that because one of the things I have seen and I've seen this so interesting2:15:11Being so interesting when I'd be lecturing to people especially More recently and and this is also manifested on you itself on YouTube I'm talking to people a lot about responsibility, and it's young men in particular that seem to be responding to that2:15:25And I [think] that's partly because I [think] that young women in some sense have their responsibility map already laid out for them It's also less voluntary in some sense for women because they have more complicated problems to solve in the first part of their life2:15:37Right because they have to get the family problem solved but whatever I've been talking very in a very delineate 'add Matter about2:15:47responsibility, which is a strange thing to sell to people but Responsibility is what gives your life meaning and so then you might say well then take on ultimate responsibility2:15:56and what happens you have an ultimately meaningful life and then you might say well if your life is ultimately meaningful doesn't matter if it's Punctuated by tragedy or even predicated on tragedy. It's worth it2:16:09and I think that's true and everything I've seen indicates to me. That's true Every time I get my clients to take on more [responsibilities]. You know it and it isn't an injunction2:16:20You're a bad person. You should take on responsibility have nothing to do with that you can define the damn responsibility It isn't something that that someone else should impose on you2:16:29It's not a matter of doing what you [should] do in some abstract Manner. It's not that It's the choice of what game you're going to play and you know you can play the game of the seeker?2:16:39I would say and if you play that game then everyone wins and it's the best game you can play and so the The answer in some sense to the tragedy of life to the catastrophe of life to the fall is2:16:51to Adore the responsibility of mortality that goes along with that and to play that game maximally and2:17:00Paradoxically, it's in the willingness to do that that the solution emerges And I don't you know I have [done] my best with every single thing I've talked to you [guys] about I have done my best to do what does tSD does in his novels?2:17:11Which is I make a proposition, and then I spend months or Years trying to figure [out] if I can take the bloody thing apart [if] there's something wrong with it because I want to find out2:17:21I want to hit it with a [hammer] and see if it breaks and what I've been trying to do is to tell you all the [things] that I've Gathered let's say or laid out or2:17:30articulated or discovered over the last [thirty] years that I have not been able to break with the biggest hammer that I could take to them and I guess that's the fundamental one. Is that I believe [that] the the2:17:43the idea that lurks in these images derived from very different cultures2:17:53It's the same idea Life is suffering right indisputable2:18:03What do you do about that? you you voluntarily accept it and then strive to overcome the suffering that's a2:18:14Consequence of that and you do that for [you] and you do that in a way that makes it better for other people and then that works and One question might be well, how well does it work and the answer is?2:18:26You the only way that you can find out is by trying it That's it. That's [the] essential element of it the proof is to be derived by the2:18:35incarnation of the attitude in your own life no one can tell you How it will work for you? It's the thing that your destiny is to discover that and2:18:45You have to make you have to make the decisions to begin with it's like because you can't do this without Commitment you have to commit to it first. That's the act of faith that the kierkegaard was so insistent upon2:18:58You have to say I'm going to act as if being is good I'm going to act as if truth is the pathway to enlightenment [I'm] going to act as if I should pursue the deepest meaning possible in my life, [and] there's reasons to do none of those2:19:12They're real reasons. So it's really a decision But you can't find out what the consequence of the decision is unless you make the decision I think the same thing happens [when] you get [married] by the way, so2:19:23if you think you might leave you're not married and Then you think well the marriage didn't succeed. It's like well Maybe you were never married because the rule is you [don't] get to leave and there's a reason [for] that rule now2:19:36I'm not saying that there aren't situations where there should be exceptions made for that that's not the point the point is that there's some games you don't get to play unless you're all-in and2:19:46The other thing that's so [interesting] about being alive is that you're [all-in] No matter what you do you're all-in this is going to kill you2:19:56So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game. You can While you're waiting because do you have anything better to do really?2:20:07Why not pick the best thing possible that you could do? Why not do that maybe you could justify your wretched existence to yourself that way I think [you] could that's what it looks like you know people find such meaning in the responsibilities2:20:21They adopt it stops making them ask questions about what life is for if you have a newborn child for example Like unless you're really in a bad way2:20:31Psychotically depressed or maybe your personality really needs some retooling you stop thinking about anything but ensuring that that baby is doing well and2:20:43If someone comes along and asks you an existential question about your commitment to that the right response is why are you asking me such stupid questions when when2:20:52When this this is manifesting itself right in front of your eyes like how blind can you be that isn't a time for? For questions about the meaning [of] life the answer is right in [front] of you, and if you can't see it2:21:04It's not because life has no meaning. It's because you're blind. I mean, that's what the image of The virgin [mother] and the child is all about it's like what's the answer to the meaning of life?2:21:16Here's an answer. It's like well, I'm going to criticize that well go right ahead You know it's like. It's like what you're like, a you like a2:21:25What do you call that a termite? Going on a temple there's no, there's no utility in that sort of criticism, you're2:21:35It's blindness and it's the same thing with regards to the path of the hero It's like it glistens in front of you, and you can criticize it. It's like2:21:46fine put the cart before the horse and and see how far you get So I thought to bring full closure to the class. I was trying to solve2:22:00this terrible puzzle that confronted me for and many other people about How it was [that] human beings got themselves in such a tangle about what they believed such a tangle that we were pointing2:22:13The ultimate weapons of destruction at one another which by the way, we are still doing [I] Thought okay. Well I understand that we need their belief systems they orient us and2:22:26That means there will be conflict between belief systems and that can be a catastrophe And that's being played out everywhere again in very many ways What's the solution to that well one possibility is there's no solution. It's just2:22:39Mayhem all the way around could be the case but [it] seemed to me as I delved into it that the proper solution to that was to live properly as2:22:48An individual because you're more powerful than you think Way more powerful than you think I mean God only knows what you are in the final analysis2:22:58You're blind to your own Weaknesses, but you're also blind to your own strengths and so then I think well if you've got your act together It'd be better for you, and instantly it would be better for your family assuming2:23:08They wanted you to get your act together and not everyone does but and then it would be better for the community It's like how far could you take that if you stopped wasting time and if you [stopped] lying and if you oriented yourself to to2:23:20The highest possible good that you could conceive of and you committed to that how much good could you do? Well, I would say might find out2:23:32So that's what I think you should do You should find out You don't have anything better to do and there's nothing in it as far as I've been able to tell there's nothing in it2:23:42But good so Maybe you could sort yourself out. So that you wanted nothing, but the good and2:23:52and then maybe you could help make that manifest in the world and maybe we wouldn't have all these terrible problems then at least we'd have fewer of them, and that would be a start, so2:24:05It's it's that the answer to the problem of humanity Is that is the is the integrity of the individual?2:24:14That's the answer so and states that are predicated on that realization are healthy, so [in] states that aren't are doomed to stagnation and catastrophic collapse and2:24:30personalities that are predicated on self Tyranny and the Tyranny of others are doomed and doomed to collapse2:24:41[so] and then you think well, what's the barrier the barriers are you willing to accept the responsibility and Part of the answer to that is reduce the Dam2:24:51Responsibility until it's tolerable you don't have to fix everything at once you could just start by fixing the things that you could fix Or you could even do it more?2:25:03You can do it with even less self-sacrifice. You could start by fixing only the things that you want to fix God you can get a massive way that way So do it see what happens that's what you should have been talking university right from the beginning2:25:17[it's] like a mathias good tool yourself into something [that] can attain it and go out there and manifest it in the world And everything that everything that comes your way will be2:25:30Everything that comes your way will be a blessing and so All you have to do is give up your resentment and your hatred I know that's a hard thing to give up2:25:40Because you have plenty of reason [for] it That's probably a good place to stop so to the pleasure0:00:00Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God
0:00:00 [CLASSICAL MUSIC]0:00:09[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]0:00:29Well, thank you all very much for coming to this. It's really shocking to me that you don't have anything better to do on a Tuesday night. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]0:00:38No, but seriously, though, it is. I mean, it's very strange in some sense that there's so many of you here to listen to a sequence of lectures on the psychological significance of the Biblical stories.0:00:52It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but it still does surprise me that there's a ready audience for it.0:01:03So that's good, so we'll see how it goes. I'll start with this because this is the right question. The right question is why bother doing this.0:01:13And I don't mean why should I bother doing it. I have my own reasons for doing it, but you might think, well, why bother with this strange, old book at all?0:01:24And... That's a good question. You know, Umm It's a contradictory...0:01:35document that's been cobbled together over thousands of years. It's outlasted kingdoms, many, many kingdoms, you know? It's very interesting, it turns out that a book is more durable than stone.0:01:48It's more durable than a castle. It's more durable than an empire. And that's really interesting. That something, in some sense, so evanescent, can be so long living.0:02:00So there's that, that's kind of a mystery. I'm approaching this whole scenario, this Biblical stories as if they're a mystery, fundamentally.0:02:10Because they are, there's a lot we don't understand about them. We don't understand how they came about. We don't really understand how they were put together.0:02:20We don't understand why they had such an unbelievable impact on civilization. We don't understand how people could have believed them. We don't understand what it means that we don't believe them now, or even what it would mean if we did believe them.0:02:34And then, on top of all that, there's the additional problem, which isn't specific to me, but is certainly relevant to me,0:02:44that no matter how educated you are, you're not educated enough to discuss the psychological significance of the Biblical stories.0:02:53But I'm going to do my best. Partly because I want to learn more about them, and one of the things I've learned is that the best way to learn about something is to talk about it.0:03:05And when I'm lecturing, I'm thinking, you know, I'm not trying to tell you what I know for sure to be the case. Because there's lots of things I don't know for sure to be the case.0:03:15I'm trying to make sense out of this. And I have been doing this for a long time. Now, you may know, you may not,0:03:24that I'm an admirer of Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a devastating critic of, I would say, dogmatic Christianity. Christianity as it was instantiated in institutions.0:03:36I suppose... although he's a very paradoxical thinker. For example, one of the things Nietzsche said was that he didn't believe that the scientific revolution would have ever got off the ground0:03:48if it hadn't been for Christianity. And more specifically, for Catholicism because he believed that over the course of, really, a thousand years,0:03:59the European mind, so to speak, had to train itself to interpret everything that was known within a single, coherent framework.0:04:12Coherent if you accept the initial axioms. A single coherent framework. So Nietzsche believed that that Catholicization of the phenomena of life and of history produced the kind of mind that was then capable of transcending its dogmatic foundations0:04:30and then concentrating on something else. Which, in this particular case, happened to be the natural world. And so Nietzsche believed that, in some sense, that Christianity died at its own hand that spent a very long period of time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth.0:04:47Absent corruption and all of that, that's always part of any human endeavor. And then the truth, the spirit of the truth that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity.0:04:58And everyone woke up and said or thought something like, "Well how is it that we came to believe any of this?" It's like waking up one day and noting that you really don't know why you put the Christmas tree up.0:05:11You'd been doing it for a long time, and that's what people do, you know, and there are reasons that Christmas trees came about. But the ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten.0:05:25So, now Nietzsche, although he was a critic of Christianity, and also a champion of its disciplinary capacity, because you see, the other thing that Nietzsche believed was0:05:38it's not possible to be free, in some sense, unless you have been a slave. By that he meant that you don't go from childhood to full-fledged adult individuality.0:05:51You go from childhood to a state of discipline, which you might think is akin to slavery, to self-imposed slavery, that would be the best scenario, where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific,0:06:06before you might be able to re-attain the generality that you had as a child. And he believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization.0:06:18But, in the late 1800s, he announced that God was dead. And you often hear of that as something triumphant.0:06:30But for Nietzsche, it wasn't because he was too nuanced a thinker to be that simple-minded. See, Nietzsche understood that, this is something I'm going to try to make clear, is that0:06:44there's a very large amount that we don't know about the structure of experience, that we don't know about reality. And we have our articulated representations of the world, and then you can think of outside of that: there are things we know absolutely nothing about.0:06:59And there's a buffer between them. And those are things we sort of know something about. We don't know them in an articulated way, here's an example. You know sometimes you're arguing with someone close to you and they're in a bad mood, you know?0:07:12And they're being touchy and unreasonable and you keep the conversation up. And maybe all of the sudden they get angry, or maybe they cry.0:07:21And then when they cry, they figure out what they're angry about and it has nothing to do with you, even though you might have been what precipitated the argument. And that's an interesting phenomena as far as I'm concerned, because it means that people can know things at one level without being able to speak what they know at another.0:07:37So in some sense, the thoughts rise up from the body, and they do that in moods, and they do that in images, and they do that in actions. And we have all sorts of ways that we understand before we understand in a fully articulated manner.0:07:52So we have this articulated space that we can all discuss and then outside of that we have something that is more akin to a dream that we're embedded in. It's an emotional dream that we're embedded in.0:08:03That's based, at least in part, on our actions, I'll describe that later. And then outside of that is what we don't know anything about at all. And in that dream, that's where the mystics live, and that's where the artists live.0:08:14And they're the mediators between the absolute unknown and the things we know for sure. You see, what that means in some sense is what we know is established on a form of knowledge that we don't really understand.0:08:30And that if those two things are out of sync, so you might say if our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream, then we become dissociated internally.0:08:40We think things we don't act out and we act out things we don't dream. And that produces a kind of sickness of the spirit. And that sickness of the spirit, its cure is something like an integrated system of belief and representation.0:08:58And then people turn to things like ideologies, which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructure to try to organize their thinking, and then that's a catastrophe.0:09:07And that's what Nietzsche foresaw. You see, he knew that when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation, this "god ideal," let's say,0:09:19that we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism and the extremes of ideology. He was particularly concerned about radical left ideology.0:09:30He believed and predicted this in the late eighteen hundreds, which is really an absolute intellectual tour-de-force of staggering magnitude. He predicted that in the twentieth century that hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these0:09:44underlying dreamlike structures with this rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world. And we've been oscillating back and forth between left and right, in some sense, ever since,0:09:57with some good sprinkling of nihilism in there, and despair. In some sense, that's the situation of the modern Western person and increasingly, of people in general.0:10:09You know, I think part of the reason that Islam has its back up, with regards to the West to such a degree, I mean there's many reasons, and not all of them are valid, that's for sure,0:10:18but one of the reasons is that they, being still grounded in a dream, let's say, they can see that the rootless questioning mind of the West poses a tremendous danger to the integrity of their culture.0:10:32And it does, I mean, Westerners, us, we undermine ourselves all the time with our searching intellect. And I'm not complaining about that.0:10:43There isn't anything easy that can be done about it. But it's still a sort of fruitful catastrophe.0:10:52And it has real effects on people's lives. It's not some abstract thing. Lots of times, when I've been treating people with depression, for example, or anxiety, they have existential issues, you know?0:11:05It's not just some psychiatric condition. It's not just that they're tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is faulty, although sometimes that happens to be the case.0:11:14It's that they are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life and they're not sure why it's reasonable to continue with it.0:11:23They can feel the terrible negative meanings of life, but are skeptical beyond belief about any of the positive meanings. I had one client who's a very brilliant artist and as long as he didn't think he was fine.0:11:36Because he'd go and create, and he was really good at being an artist. He had that personality that was continually creative and quite brilliant, although he was self-denigrating.0:11:47But as soon as he started to think about what he was doing, then, it's like a drill or a saw, he'd saw the branch off that he was sitting on.0:11:59He'd start to criticize what he was doing, even the utility of it, even though it was sort of self-evidently useful. And then it would be very, very hard for him to even motivate himself to create.0:12:10He alway struck me as a good example of the consequences of having your rational intellect divorced in some way from your being.0:12:23Divorced enough that it actually questions the utility of your being. And it's not a good thing, it's not a good thing. It's really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathology, but also in social psychopathology,0:12:39and that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of, they're like crippled religions, that's the right way to think about them.0:12:49They're like religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along. And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent.0:12:59And it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true. That's how it looks to me, anyways. So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.0:13:12I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done that. I've thought that for a long, long time. Probably since the early eighties,0:13:24when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health. You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.0:13:38It's like, why the hell do they care, exactly? What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?0:13:47People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak. [LAUGHTER] And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why.0:13:58But there's some, it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on. It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs.0:14:07They're afraid they're going to fall in and drown. It's like, drown in what? What are the logs protecting them from? Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?0:14:21These are not obvious things. So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time. I've done some lectures about that are on Youtube; most of you know that.0:14:31Some of what I'm going to talk about in this series you'll have heard, if you've listened to the Youtube videos. You know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.0:14:40So Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially. Now he understood that we understood that we have bodies and we have motivations and emotions.0:14:51Like, he was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology,0:15:02constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body. He understood that. But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values.0:15:18And he thought about the person who creates their own values as the over-man or the super-man. And that was one of the parts of Nietzschian philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology.0:15:38And we know what happened with that. That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure. I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung. It was through Jung and also Jean Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist, that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought0:15:55are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream was informed, in a complex way, by the way we act.0:16:05We act out things we don't understand all the time. If that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that because we would be completely transparent to ourselves.0:16:15And we're clearly not. So, we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.0:16:25And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.0:16:37Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity. And trying to represent them, partly through imitation, but also drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that.0:16:50To represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like. That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories.0:16:59And it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes the book so complex. But I see in it a struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears, say, and to become conscious of what it means to be human.0:17:18And that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are or what we are or where we came from or any of those things. The light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years.0:17:28It's an absolutely unbelievable thing. Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years. It's absolutely unbelievable.0:17:38We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are, conscious, but not knowing. And we're trying to figure out who we are. A story, or several stories, that we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer.0:17:53And so, when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say, in some sense with the beginner's mind. It's a mystery, this book.0:18:02How the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for two thousand years, and to transform the world.0:18:11What's going on? How did that happen? It's by no means obvious, and one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously.0:18:21And it's a serious phenomena. Not least because people have the capacity for religious experience, and no one know why that is. I mean, you can induce it reliably, in all sorts of different ways.0:18:32You can do it with brain stimulation. You can certainly do it with drugs. There's, especially the psychedelic variety, they produce intimations of the divine extraordinarily regularly.0:18:43People have been using drugs like that for God only knows how long, fifty thousand years, maybe more than that, to produce some sort of intimate union with the divine.0:18:53We don't understand any of that when we discovered the psychedelics in the late sixties. It shocked everybody so badly that they were instantly made illegal and abandoned, in terms of research, for like fifty years.0:19:03And it's no wonder, because who the hell expected that? Nobody. Now,0:19:12now Jung was a student of Nietzsche's, you see, and he was also, I would say, a very astute critic of Nietzsche. He was educated by Freud, and Freud0:19:24Freud, I suppose, in some sense, started to collate the information that we had pertaining to the notion that people lived inside a dream. You know, it was Freud who really popularized the idea of the unconscious mind.0:19:36We take this for granted to such a degree today that we don't understand how revolutionary the idea was. But what's happened with Freud is that we've taken all the marrow out of his bones, so to speak, and left the husk behind.0:19:50And now when we think about Freud, we just think about the husk because that's everything that's been discarded. But so much of what he discovered is part of our popular conception now, including the idea that your perceptions and your actions and your thoughts are all, what would you say,0:20:05informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that are not part of your voluntary control. And that's a very, very strange thing. It's one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories0:20:18is the psychoanalytic theories are something like, you're a loose collection of living sub-personalities, each with its own set of motivations and perceptions0:20:27and emotions and rationales, all of that. And you have limited control over that, so you're like a plurality of internal personalities that's loosely linked into a unity.0:20:39And you know that because you can't control yourself very well, which is one of Jung's objections to Nietzsche's idea that we can create our own values is that is that Jung didn't believe that, especially not after interacting with Freud.0:20:51Because he saw that human beings were affected by things that were- deeply, deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control. An no one really knows how to conceptualize those things.0:21:01The cognitive psychologists think about them in some sense as computational machines. The ancient people, I think, thought of them as gods, although it's more complex than that.0:21:10Like rage would be a god. Mars, the god of rage, that's the thing that possesses you when you're angry. It has a viewpoint, it says what it wants to say.0:21:21And that might have very little to do with what you want to say when you're being sensible. And it doesn't just inhabit you, it inhabits everyone. And it lives forever, and it even inhabits animals.0:21:31So it's this transcendent psychological entity that inhabits the body politic, like a thought inhabits the brain.0:21:40That's one way of thinking about it. A very strange way of thinking, but it certainly has its merits. And so in some sense, those are deities, although it's not that simple.0:21:52And so Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths. Because he would see in his clients' dreams echoes of stories that he knew because he was deeply read in mythology.0:22:06And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes, the dream and the story, and storytelling.0:22:17Well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them. Some people remember dreams all the time, like two or three a night. I've had clients like that.0:22:26They often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures. I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable, at the time.0:22:36Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it.0:22:46So it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking, that's a good way of thinking about it. So because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear. It's doing its best to formulate something. That was Jung's notion,0:22:59as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors that were hiding the dream's true message. That's not what Jung believed, he believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension.0:23:15Because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about. But what the hell does that mean?0:23:24A thought appears in your head. What kind of ridiculous explanation is that? It just doesn't help with anything. Where does it come from?0:23:34Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head. Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out. So you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from?0:23:45Well, they're often someone else's thoughts, right? Someone long dead, that might be part of it, just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who've been long dead.0:23:55And so you're informed by the spirit of your ancestors, that's one way of looking at it. And your motivations speak to you, your emotions speak to you, your body speaks to you.0:24:05And it does all that, at least in part, through the dream. And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.0:24:14They don't just come from nowhere fully fledged, right? They have a developmental origin, and God only knows how lengthy that origin is, even to say something like, "I am conscious."0:24:27Chimpanzees don't say that. It's been seven million years since we broke from chimpanzees, something like that, from the common ancestor.0:24:36They have no articulated knowledge at all and very little self-representation in some sense, and very little self-consciousness. And that's not the case with us at all.0:24:45We had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that, you know, seven million year voyage. And I think some of that's represented and captured, in some sense, in these ancient stories.0:24:59Which I believe were part of, especially the oldest stories, in Genesis, which are the stories we're going to start with, they were... that...0:25:08some of the archaic nature of the human being is encapsulated in those stories, and it's very, very instructive as far as I can tell. I'll give you just a quick example.0:25:18You know there's an idea of sacrifice in the Old Testament. And it's pretty barbaric, you know, I mean the story of Abraham and Isaac, there's a good example of that because Abraham is called on to actually sacrifice his own son,0:25:30which doesn't really seem like something that a reasonable God would ask you to do, right? God in the Old Testament is frequently cruel and arbitrary and demanding and paradoxical,0:25:40which is one of the things that really gives the book life because it wasn't edited by a committee, you know, a committee that was concerned with not offending anyone, that's for sure.0:25:51[LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE]0:26:04So Jung believed that the dream was the birthplace of thought and I've been extending that idea because one of the things I wondered about deeply was,0:26:14you know, you have a dream and then someone interprets it. You can argue about whether or not an interpretation is valid, just like you can argue about whether your interpretation of a novel or movie is valid, right?0:26:26It's a very difficult thing to determine with any degree of accuracy, which accounts in part for the post-modern critique. But my observations being that people will present a dream and sometimes we can extract out real useful information from it that the person didn't appear.0:26:44And they get a flash of insight. To me that's a marker that we've stumbled on something that unites part of that person that wasn't united before. It pulls things together, which is often what a good story will do, whereas sometimes a good theory, you know if things snap together for you, there's a little light goes on,0:27:01and that's one of the markers that I've used for accuracy in dreams. In my own family, when I was first married, you know, I'd have fights with my wife, arguments about this and that.0:27:15I'm fairly hot-headed and so I'd get all puffed up and agitated about whatever we were arguing about, and she'd go to sleep, which was really annoying, it is so annoying!0:27:26[LAUGHTER] Because I couldn't sleep, right? I was like, chewing off my fingernails, and she'd, like, sleeping peacefully beside me and it's so maddening.0:27:35But often she'd have a dream, you know, and then the next morning, she'd discuss it with me, and then we could unravel what was at the bottom of our argument. That was unbelievably useful, even though it was extraordinarily aggravating.0:27:49So you know, I was convinced by Jung. It looked to me like his ideas about the relationship between dreams and mythology and drama and literature made sense to me and the relationship between that and art.0:28:00I know this native carver, he's a Kwakwaka'wakw guy. He's carved a bunch of wooden sculptures, totem poles and masks that I have at my house.0:28:10He's a very interesting person. Not literate, not particularly literate, and really still steeped in this ancient, 13,000 year old tradition. He's an original language speaker and the fact that he isn't literate has sort of left him with the mind of someone who's pre-literate.0:28:26Pre-literate people aren't stupid, they're just not literate, so their brains are organized differently in many ways. And I've asked him about his intuition for his carvings, and he's told me that he dreams, like, you've seen the Haida masks, you know what they look like,0:28:42well, his people are mostly related to the Haida, so it's the same kind of style. And he said he dreams in those kind of animals, and can remember his dreams.0:28:53And he also talks to his grandparents, who taught him how to carve, in his dreams quite often. If he runs into a problem with carving, his grandparents will come and he'll talk to them.0:29:02But he sees the creatures that he's going to carve living, in an animated sense, in his imagination. I mean, it's not difficult. First of all, I have no reason to disbelieve him. He's a very, very straightforward person.0:29:15And he doesn't the motivation or the guile, I would say, in some sense, to invent a story like that. There's just no reason he would possibly do it. I don't think he's told that many people about it. He thinks it's kind of crazy, you know?0:29:26He said when he was a kid, he thought he was insane because he'd have those dreams all the time. About these creatures and so forth. And so it wasn't something he was trumpeting.0:29:36But I found it fascinating because I can see in him part of the manifestation of this unbroken tradition. We have no idea how traditions like that are really passed along for thousands and thousands of years, right?0:29:48Part of it's oral and memory, part of it's acted out and dramatized and then part of it's going to be imaginative. And people who aren't literate, they store information quite differently than we do.0:29:59We don't remember anything. It's all written down in books, right? But if you're from an oral culture, especially if you're trained in that way, you have all of that information at hand. So you can speak and you can tell the stories, and you really know them.0:30:11You know, modern people don't really know what that's like any more. I doubt if there's maybe more than two of you in the audience that could spout from memory, like, a thirty line poem.0:30:20You know, and poetry was written so that people could do that. That's why we have that form, is so that people could remember it and have it with them.0:30:29But we don't do any of that any more. Anyways, back to Jung. Jung was a great believer in the dream, and I know that dreams will tell you things that you don't know.0:30:40And then I thought, well how the hell can that be? How in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know? How does that make any sense?0:30:49First of all, why don't you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream? It's like you're not- there's something going on inside you that you don't control, right?0:30:59The dream happens to you just like life happens to you. I mean there is the odd lucid dreamer who can, you know, apply a certain amount of conscious control, but most of the time it's0:31:09you're laying there asleep and this crazy, complicated world manifests itself inside you. And you don't know how. You can't do it when you're awake.0:31:20And you don't know what it means! It's like what the hell's going on? And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts, because you get this with Freud and Jung, you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around.0:31:37You, you know, use a bit of reciprocal control, but there's manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life.0:31:47And you don't control it. And what does? Is it random? You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd.0:31:59Because there's nothing random about dreams. They're very, very structured and very, very complex. And not like snow on a television screen or static on the radio. Like, those things are complicated.0:32:13And also, I've seen so often that people have very coherent dreams that have a perfect narrative structure. You know, they're fully developed, in some sense. And so that theory just doesn't go anywhere with me. I just can't see that as useful at all.0:32:28So I'm more likely to take the phenomena seriously and say there's something to dreams. Well, you dream of the future and then you try to make it into a reality. That seems to be an important thing.0:32:39Or maybe you dream up a nightmare and try to make that into a reality because people do that too, if they're hellbent on revenge, for example, full of hatred and resentment.0:32:48And that manifests itself in terrible fantasies, you know, those are dreams, and then people go act them out. These things are powerful, you know, and nations can get caught up in collective dreams. That's what happened to the Nazis.0:33:00That's what happened to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It was absolutely remarkable, amazing, horrific destructive spectacle. And the same thing happened in the Soviet Union, the same thing happened in China, it's like, we have to take these things seriously, you know?0:33:14Try to understand what's going on. So Jung believed that the dream could contain more information than was yet articulated.0:33:25Artists do the same thing, you know. People go to museums and they look at paintings, Renaissance paintings, or modern paintings. And they don't exactly know why they're there.0:33:34I was in this room in New York, I don't remember which museum, but it was a room full of Renaissance art. Great painters, the greatest painters and I thought maybe that room was worth a billion dollars, or something outrageous, because there was like twenty paintings in there, you know?0:33:50Priceless. And the first thing is, well why are those paintings worth so much, and why is there a museum in the biggest city in the world devoted to them, and why do people come from all over the world and look at them? What the hell are those people doing?0:34:03One of them was of the Assumption of Mary, beautifully painted, absolutely glowing work of art, and just, like, twenty people standing in front of it, looking at it.0:34:12You think, what are those people up to? They don't know, why did they make a pilgrimage to New York to come and look at that painting? It's not like they know! Why is it worth so much?0:34:21I know there's a status element to it, too, but that begs the question: Why did those items become such high status items? What is it about them that's so absolutely remarkable?0:34:32Well, we're strange creatures. So I was trying to figure out in part, well where did the information that's in the dream come from? Because it has to come from somewhere, and you can think about it as a revelation.0:34:44Because it's like it springs out of the void, it's new knowledge, it's a revelation. You didn't produce it, it just appears. See, one of the things that I want to do with this series is, like, I'm scientifically-minded, and I'm quite a rational person.0:34:59And I like to have an explanation for things that's rational and empirical before I look for any other kind of explanation. And I don't want to say that everything that's associated with Divinity can be reduced in some manner to biology or to an evolutionary history, or anything like that.0:35:14But insofar as it's possible to do that reduction, I'm going to do that. And I'm going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air because they can't be pinned down and in that category of mystical and religious experience, which we don't understand at all.0:35:32So artists observe one another. They observe people and they represent what they see. And they transmit the message of what they see to us and they teach us to see it.0:35:42We don't necessarily know what it is that we're learning from them. But we're learning something, or at least we're acting like we're learning something. We go to movies, we watch stories, we immerse ourselves in fiction constantly. That's an artistic production.0:35:57And for many people, the world of the arts is a living world, and that's particularly true if you're a creative person. It's the creative, artistic people that do move the knowledge of humanity forward.0:36:08And they do that with their artistic productions first. They're on the edge. The dancers do that, and the poets do that, and the visual artists do that, the musicians do that, and we're not sure what they're doing.0:36:19We're not sure what musicians are doing. What the hell are they doing? Why do you like music? It gives you a deep intimation of the significance of things. And no one questions it. You go to a concert and you're thrilled, it's a quasi-religious experience,0:36:32particularly if people really get themselves together and get the crowd moving, you know? There's something incredibly intense about it. It makes no sense whatsoever.0:36:41It's not an easy thing to understand. Music is deeply patterned, patterned in layers, and I think that has something to do with it because reality is deeply patterned in layers.0:36:53And so I think music is representing reality in some fundamental way and that we get into the sway of that and sort of participate in being. And that's part of what makes it such an uplifting experience.0:37:05But we don't really know that's what we're doing, we just go do it. And it's nourishing for people, right? Young people in particular, lots of them live for music, it's where they derive all their meaning, their cultural identity.0:37:19Everything that's nourishing comes from their affiliation with their music. It's part of their cultural identity. So that's an amazing thing.0:37:29The question still remains: Where does the information in dreams come from? I think where it comes from is that we watch the patterns that everyone acts out.0:37:43We've watched that forever and we've got some representations of those patterns. That's part of our cultural history, that's what's embedded in stories, in fictional accounts, of the story between good and evil.0:37:53The bad guy and the good guy. And the romance, you know? These are canonical patterns of being for people. And they deeply affect us because they represent what it is that we will act out in the world.0:38:04And then we flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people. And so it's like there's waves of behavioral patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd across time.0:38:18The great dramas are played on the crowd across time. And the artists watch that and they get intimations of what that is and they write it down and they tell us, and then we're a little clearer about what we're up to.0:38:30A great dramatist like Shakespeare, let's say, we know that what he wrote is fiction. And then we say, well, fiction isn't true. But then you think, well, wait a minute. Maybe it's true like numbers are true.0:38:42You know? Numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality but no one in their right mind would really think numbers aren't true. You can even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent, right?0:38:54Because the abstraction is so insanely powerful. Once you have mathematics, you're just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. It's not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality.0:39:09I mean, take a work of fiction, like Hamlet, and think it's not true because it's fiction. But then you think wait a minute, what kind of explanation is that?0:39:18Maybe it's more true than nonfiction. Because it takes the story that needs to be told about you and the story that needs to be told about you and you and you and you0:39:28and abstracts that out and says look, here's something that's a key part of the human experience, as such. Right? So it's an abstraction from this underlying, noisy substrate.0:39:39And people are affected by it because they see that the thing that's represented is part of the pattern of their being. That's the right way to think about it.0:39:48And then with these old stories, with these ancient stories, it seems to me like that process has been occurring for thousands of years. It's like we we watched ourselves and we extracted out some stories.0:39:59We imitated each other and we represented that in drama, and then we distilled the drama and we got a representation of the distillation. And then we did it again and at the end of that process that took God only knows how long- I think some of these stories...0:40:15They've traced fairy tales back ten thousand years, some fairy tales, in relatively unchanged form. And certainly seems to me that the archaeological evidence, for example,0:40:25suggests that the really old stories that the Bible begins with are at least that old and likely embedded in a pre-history that's far older than that.0:40:34And you might think, well, how can you be so sure? And the answer to that in part is that cultures that don't change, like the ancient cultures, like they didn't change as fast as...0:40:45They stayed the same! That's the answer. So they keep their information moving generation to generation, that's how they stay the same.0:40:54And so we know, again in the archaeological record, there are records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken through up to twenty thousand years, was discovered in caves in Japan that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe.0:41:09So these things can last for very long periods of time. We're watching each other act in the world.0:41:18And then the question is well how long have we been watching each other? And the answer to that in some sense is, well, as long as there's been creatures with nervous systems.0:41:28That's a long time, you know? That's some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that. We've been watching each other trying to figure out what we're up to across that entire span of time, some of that knowledge is built right into our bodies.0:41:40Which is why we can dance with each other for example, right? Because understanding isn't just something that you have as an abstraction , it's something that you act out, you know?0:41:51That's what children are doing when they learning to rough-and-tumble play. They're learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious way and learning to cooperate and compete and that's all instantiated right into their body.0:42:03It's not abstract knowledge, they don't know that they doing that. They're just doing it. And so we can even use our body as a representational platform.0:42:12So we've been studying each other for a long time, abstracting out what is it that we're up to, and that's... What is it we're up to, what should we be up to? That's even a more fundamental question.0:42:24If you're going to live in the world and you're going to do it properly, what does properly mean and how is it that you might go about that? Well, it's the right question, right? It's what everyone wants to know.0:42:34How do you live in the world? Not what is the world made of. It's not the same question. How do you live in the world? It's the eternal question of human beings.0:42:43And I guess we're the only species that has ever really asked that question because all the other animals, they just go and do whatever they do. Not us! It's a question for us.0:42:52We have to become aware of it, we have to be able to speak it. God only knows why but thats seems to be the situation.0:43:01So... We act, that acting is shaped by the world, that acting is shaped by society into something that we don't understand, but that we can model.0:43:11That we can model. We model it our stories, we model it with our bodies. And that's where the dream gets its information. The dream is part of the process that's watching everything0:43:22and then trying to formulate it and trying to say, well, trying to get the signal out from the noise and to portray in dramatic form. Because a dream is a little drama. And then you get the chance to talk about what that dream is.0:43:35And then you have it... you have something like articulated knowledge at that point. And so the Bible I would say is... It's sort of...it exists in that space that's half into the dream and half into articulated knowledge.0:43:48It's something like that. Going into it to find out what the stories are about, Then... We can aid our self-understanding.0:43:59The other issue is that if Nietzsche was correct, and if Dostoevsky, or Jung was correct and Dostoevsky as well,0:44:08without the cornerstone that that understanding provides, we're lost! And that's not good, because then we're susceptible0:44:17to psychic pathology. That's psychological pathology. You know, people who are adamant anti religious thinkers0:44:27seem to believe that if we abandoned our immersement in the underlying dream, that we'd all instantly become rationalists like Descartes or Bacon, you know?0:44:36Intelligent, clear thinking rational, scientific people and I don't believe that for a moment, because I don't think there is any evidence for it. I think we would become so irrational so rapidly that the weirdest mysteries of Catholicism would seem positively0:44:51rational by contrast and I think that's already happening. So. [CLAPPING]0:45:03Okay. So, this is the idea essentially, you know, that you have the unknown world. That's just what you don't know at all.0:45:13That's the outside, that's the ocean that surrounds the island that you inhabit. Something like that, it's chaos itself. And then You act in that world and you act in ways you don't understand.0:45:24There's more to your actions then you can understand. One of the things Jung said, I loved this, when I first understood it, He said "Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is."0:45:35And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy. And maybe you don't want it to be. And that's really worth thinking because thinking about because your...0:45:44You have a pattern of behaviour that characterises you, you know? And God only knows where you got it. Partly it's biological, partly it's from your parents. It's your unconscious assumptions.0:45:53It's the way the philosophy of your society shaped you. And is, it's aimed, it's aiming you somewhere. Well, is it aiming you somewhere you want to go?0:46:02That's a good question, that's part of self-realization, you know? We know we don't understand our actions. That's almost every argument you have with someone is about that.0:46:12It's like "Why did you do that?" And you come up with some half baked reasons why you did it. You're flailing around in the darkness, you know? You try to give an account for yourself, but you can only do it partially. It's very, very difficult because0:46:25you're a complicated animal with the beginnings of an articulated mind, something like that. And you're just way more than you can handle.0:46:37All right, so you act things out, right? You act things out. And that's a kind of competence. And then you imagine what you act out. And you imagine what everyone else acts out, and so0:46:47there's a tremendous amount of information in your action. And then, that information is translated up into the dream and into art and to mythology and literature.0:46:56And there's a tremendous amount of information in that. And then some of that is translated into articulated thought. And I'll give you a quick example of something like that.0:47:06I think this is partly what happens in Exodus, when Moses comes up with the law. You know, he's wandering around with the Israelites forever in the desert. They're going left and going right and worshiping idols and having a hell of a time.0:47:18You know, getting rebellious. And Moses goes up on the mountain and he has this tremendous revelation sort of, in the sight of God and it illuminates him and he comes down with the law.0:47:29You think, well, Moses acted as a judge, I know this is a mythological story. Moses acted as a judge in the desert. He was continually mediating between people who are having problems.0:47:39Constantly trying to keep peace. And so what are you doing when you're trying to keep peace? You're trying to understand what peace is. Right? You have to apply the principles.0:47:48Well what are the principles? Well you don't know. The principles are whatever satisfies people enough to make peace. And maybe you do that ten thousand times and then you get some sense of "Oh! Here's the principles that bring peace."0:48:00And then one day it blasts into your consciousness like a revelation. Here's the rules that we're already acting out. That's the Ten Commandments. They're there to begin with.0:48:10And Moses comes forward and says "Look, this is already basically what we're doing but now it's codified, right?" That's all a historical process that's condensed into0:48:20a single story but, obviously, that happened Because we have written law! Right? And that emerged, in good legal systems, that emerges from the bottom up.0:48:30English Common Law is exactly like that. It's single decisions that are predicated on principles, that are then articulated and made into the body of law.0:48:40The body of law is something you act out. That's why it's a body of law. if you're good citizen you act out the body of law. And the body of law has principles.0:48:50Okay, so the question is, there's principles that guide our behavior. What are those principles? Well I think if you want the initial answer of what the archaic Israelites meant by God,0:49:03that's something like what they meant. Now it's not a good enough explanation. But imagine if you're a chimpanzee and you have a powerful,0:49:15dominant figure at the pinnacle of your society. That represents power, more than that. Because it's not sheer physical prowess that keeps a chimp at the top of the hierarchy.0:49:26It's much more complicated than that. And you can say, well there's a principle that the dominant person manifests.0:49:35And then you might say, well, that principle shines forth even more brightly if you know ten people who are dominant. Powerful. And you can extract out what dominance means from that.0:49:46You can extract out what power means from that. And then you can divorce the concept from the people. And we had to do that at some point because we can say power, in a human context, and we can imagine what that means.0:49:59But it's divorced from any specific manifestation of power. Well how the hell did we do that? That's so complicated! If you're a chimp,0:50:08the power is in another chimp, it's not some damn abstraction. So the question is, think about it, we're in these hierarchies, many of them, across centuries.0:50:19We're trying to figure what the guiding principle is. Trying to extract out the core of the guiding principle And we turn that into a representation of a pattern of being.0:50:29Well it's something like that that's God. It's an abstracted ideal. And it's put in personified form, manifests itself in personified form, but that's okay because what we're trying to get at is the0:50:44in some sense, the essence of what it means to be a properly functioning, properly social, and properly competent individual.0:50:53We're trying to figure out what that means. You need an embodiment. You need an ideal that's abstracted that you could act out0:51:02that would enable you to understand what that means. And that's what we've been driving at. So that's the first hypothesis, in some sense. I'm going to go over some of the attributes of this abstracted ideal that we formalized as God, but that's the first sort of hypothesis, is that0:51:19a philosophical or moral ideal manifests itself first as a concrete pattern of behavior that's characteristic of a single individual. And then it's a set of individuals.0:51:30And then it's an abstraction from that set. And then you have the abstraction. It's so important. So here's a political implication, for example.0:51:45One of the debates, we might say, between Early Christianity and the Late Roman Empire was whether or not an Emperor could be God, literally, right?0:51:58To be deified to put in a temple. And you can see why that might happen because that's someone at the pinnacle of a very steep hierarchy who has a tremendous amount of power and influence.0:52:09But the Christian response to that was, never confuse the specific sovereign with the principle of sovereignty itself.0:52:20It's brilliant. You see how difficult it is to come up with an idea like that so that even the person who has the power is actually subordinate to something else. Subordinate to, let's call it a divine principle, for lack of a better word.0:52:33So that even the king himself is subordinate to the principle. And we still believe that, because we believe that our President, or our Prime Minister, is subordinate to the damn law.0:52:44Whatever, the body of law, right? There's a principle inside that that even the leader is subordinate to. Without that, you could argue you can't even have a civilized society because your leader immediately turns into something that's transcendent and all powerful.0:52:58That's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union, and what happened in Maoist China, and what happened in Nazi Germany. Because there was nothing for the powerful to subordinate themselves to.0:53:08You're supposed to be subordinate to God. So what does that mean? Well, we're gonna tear that idea apart, but partly what it means is that you're subordinate, even if you're sovereign, to the principle of sovereignty itself.0:53:20And then the question is, what the hell is the principle of sovereignty? And I could say, we have been working that out for a very long period of time. And so that's one of the things that we'll talk about.0:53:30Because the ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians had some very interesting dramatic ideas about that.0:53:41Just for example, very briefly, there was a deity known as Marduk. And Marduk, he was a Mesopotamian deity, and imagine this is sort of what happened is that as an empire grew0:53:53out the post-Ice Age age, say fifteen thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago, all these tribes came together. And these tribes each had their own deity, their own image of the ideal.0:54:04But then they started to occupy the same territory, right? And so then one tribe had god A and one tribe had god B and one could wipe the other one out.0:54:13And then it would just be god A who wins. But that's not so good because, well, maybe you want to trade with those people, or maybe you don't want to lose half your population in a war,0:54:22something like that. So then you have to have an argument about whose god is going to take priority. Which ideal is going to take priority? What seems to happen is that's represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in sort of celestial space.0:54:36But from a practical perspective, it's more like an ongoing dialog. You believe this, I believe this. You believe that, I believe this. How are we going to meld that together?0:54:46So you take god A and you take god B, and maybe what you do is extract god C from them. And you say, well, god C now has the attributes of A and B.0:54:56And then some other tribes come in. And then C takes them over too. Like with Marduk, for example, he has a multitude of names. Fifty different names. Well, those are names, at least in part, of the subordinate gods that represented the tribes that came together to make the civilization.0:55:13That's part of the process by which that abstracted ideal is abstracted. You think this is important, and it works because you're tribe's alive. And you think this is important, and it works, because your tribe's alive.0:55:23And so we'll take the best of both if we can manage it, and extract out something that's even more abstract that covers both of us if we can do it.0:55:32One of the things that's really interesting about Marduk, I'll just give you a couple of his features. He has eyes all the way around his head. He's elected by all the other gods to be king god, so that's the first thing, that's quite cool.0:55:45And they elect him because they're facing a terrible threat. Sort of like a flood and a monster combined, something like that. And Marduk basically says that if they elect him top god, then he'll go out and stop the flood monster.0:55:58And they won't all get wiped out. It's a serious threat, it's chaos itself, making its comeback. And so all the gods agree and Marduk has a new manifestation. He's got eyes all the way around his head.0:56:10And he speaks magic words. And then he also goes out and when he fights, he fights this deity called Tiamat. And we need to know that because the word "Tiamat" is associated with the word "Tehom," T, E, H, O, M.0:56:24And Tehom is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time in Genesis. So it's linked very tightly to this story. And Marduk with his eyes and his capacity to speak magic words goes out to confront Tiamat, who's like a watery sea dragon.0:56:39Something like that. It's a classic St. George story, go out and wreak havoc on the dragon.0:56:48And he cuts her into pieces. And he makes the world out of her pieces, and that's the world that human beings live in. And the Mesopotamian emperor acted out Marduk.0:56:57He was allowed to be emperor insofar as he was a good Marduk. And so that meant that he had eyes all the way around his head, and he could speak magic. He could speak properly.0:57:07And so we're starting to understand there at that point the essence of leadership, right? Because what's leadership? It's the capacity to see what the hell's in front of your face and maybe in every direction.0:57:17And then the capacity to use your language properly, in a transformative manner, and to transform chaos into order. And god only knows how long it took the Mesopotamians to figure that out.0:57:28The best they could do is dramatize it. But it's staggeringly brilliant. You know? It's by no means obvious. And this chaos, this chaos is a very strange thing.0:57:38This is the chaos that God wrestled with at the beginning of time. Chaos is what- it's half psychological and half real. There's no other way to really describe it.0:57:49The chaos is what you encounter when you're thrown into deep confusion. When your world falls apart. When you encounter something that blows you into pieces, when your dreams die, when you're betrayed.0:58:00It's the chaos that emerges. And the chaos is everything at once, and it's too much for you. And that's for sure, and it pulls you down into the underworld and all, that's where the dragons are, and all you've got at that point is your capacity to bloody well keep your eyes open,0:58:14and to speak as carefully and clearly as you can. And maybe if you're lucky, you'll get through it that way and come out the other side. And it's taken people a very long time to figure that out.0:58:24And it looks to me like the idea is erected on the platform of our ancient ancestors, maybe tens of millions of years ago. Because we seem to represent that which disturbs us deeply using the same system that we use to represent serpentile or other carnviorous predators.0:58:44You know, we're biological creatures, right? When we've formulated our capacity to abstract, our strange capacity to abstract and use language,0:58:53we still have all those underlying systems that were there when we were only animals. And we have to use those systems, they're part of the emotional and motivational architecture of our thinking.0:59:06Part of the reason we can demonize our enemies who upset our axioms is because we perceive them as if they're carnivorous predators. We do it with the same system.0:59:15And that's chaos itself, the thing that always threatens us, right? The snakes that hang through the trees when we lived in them like sixty million years ago. It's the same damn systems.0:59:26So the Marduk story is partly the story of using attention and language to confront those things that most threaten us.0:59:36And some of those things are real-world threats. But some of them are psychological threats, which are just as profound but far more abstract. But we use the same systems to represent them.0:59:47It's why you freeze if you're frightened. Right? You're a prey animal. You're like a rabbit. You've seen a something that's going to eat you, you freeze.0:59:56And that way you're paralyzed, you're turned to stone, which is what you do when you see a medusa with a head full of snakes, right? You're turned to stone, you're paralyzed.1:00:05And the reason you do that is because you're using the predator detection system to protect yourself. Your heart rate goes way up, and you get ready to move.1:00:16Things that upset us lie on that system. And then the story, the Marduk story, for example is the idea that if there are things that upset you, chaotic, terrible, serpentine monstrous underworld things that threaten you,1:00:29the best thing thing to do is to open your eyes, get your speech organized, and go out and confront the thing, and make the world out of it. And it's staggering when I read that story and started to understand it, it just blew me away.1:00:42That it's such a profound idea, and we know it's true too because we know in psychotherapy, for example, that you're much better off to confront your fears head on than you are to wait and let them find you.1:00:53And so partly, what you do, if you're a psychotherapist, is you help people break their fears into little pieces, the things that upset them, and then to encounter them one by one and master them.1:01:03And so you're teaching this process of eternal mastery over the strange and chaotic world. And all of that makes up some of the background for, we haven't even gotten to the first sentence of the Biblical stories yet.1:01:15[LAUGHTER] [CLAPPING] But all of that makes up the background.1:01:24So you have to think that we've extracted this story, this strange collection of stories, with all its errors and its repetitions, and its peculiarities, out of the entire history that we've been able to collect ideas.1:01:38And it's the best we've been able to do. I know there are other religious traditions, but I'm not concerned about that at the moment because we can use this as an example.1:01:49But it's the best we've been able to do, and what I'm hoping is that we can return to the stories in some sense with an open mind and see if there's something there that we actually need.1:01:59And I hope that that will be the case. As I said, I'll approach them as rationally as I possibly can. So this is the idea to begin with.1:02:08We have the unknown as such, and then we act in it, like animals act. They act first. They don't think, they don't imagine, they act. That's where we started, we started by acting.1:02:19And then we started to be able to represent how we acted. And then we started to talk about how we represented how we acted. And that enabled us to tell stories because that is what a story is, it's to tell about how you represent how you act.1:02:35And so you know that because if you read a book, what happens? You read the book and images come to mind of the people in the book behaving, right? It's one step from acting it out.1:02:46You don't act it out because you can abstract and represent action without having to act it out. It's an amazing thing, and that's part of the development of the prefrontal cortex.1:02:55It's part of the capacity for human abstract thought is that you can pull the behavior, the representation of the behavior, away from the behavior and manipulate the representation before you enact it.1:03:07That's why you think, so that you can generate a pattern of action and test it out in a fictional world before you embody it and die because you're foolish.1:03:16Right? You let the representation die, not you. And that's why you think. And so that's partly what we're trying to do with these stories.1:03:27What do I hope to accomplish? I hope to end this twelve-lecture series knowing more than I did when I started.1:03:36That's my goal. Because I said I'm not telling you what I know, I'm trying to figure things out. This is part of the process by which I'm doing that.1:03:48And so I'm doing my best to think on my feet, you know? I've come prepared, but I'm trying to stay on the edge of my capacity to generate knowledge and to make this continually clearer1:03:59and to get to the bottom of things. I'm hoping that that's what I'm going to accomplish. It seems like people are interested in that, so then we're going to try to accomplish that together.1:04:10And so that's the plan. And the idea is to see if there's something at the bottom of this amazing civilization that we've managed to construct.1:04:21That I think is in peril for a variety of reasons. And maybe if we understand it a little bit better we won't be so prone just to throw the damn thing away.1:04:31Which I think would be a big mistake. And to throw it away because of resentment and hatred and bitterness and historical ignorance and jealously and desire for destruction, and all of that.1:04:42It's like, I don't want to go there. It's a bad idea to go there. We need to be grounded better. Hopefully, well, we'll see how this works.1:04:54All right, so how do I approach this? Well, first of all, I think in evolutionary terms, you know? As far as I'm concerned the cosmos is fifteen billion years old and the world is four and a half billion years old.1:05:07And there's been life for three and a half billion years and there were creatures that had pretty developed nervous systems three hundred to six hundred million years ago.1:05:16And we were living in trees as small mammals sixty million years ago. We were down on the plains between sixty million and seven million years ago and that's about when we split from chimpanzees.1:05:28And modern human beings seem to emerge about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago And civilization pretty much after the last Ice Age, something after fifteen thousand years ago.1:05:37Not very long ago at all, you know? And that's the span across which I want to understand. That's the span across which I want to understand.1:05:48I want to understand why we are the way we are, looking at life in its continual complexity right from the beginning of life itself. There's some real utility in that because we share attributes with other animals, even animals as simple as crustaceans, for example,1:06:04have nervous system properties that are very much like ours, and it's very much worth knowing that. And so I think in an evolutionary way. I think it's a grand and remarkable way to think because it has this incredible timespan.1:06:17It's amazing that people at the end of the nineteenth century, middle of the nineteenth century, say, really thought the world was about six thousand years old.1:06:29Fifteen billion years old, that's a lot more, right? It's a lot grander, it's a lot bigger, but it's also a lot more frightening and alienating in some sense. Because the cosmos has become so vast, it's either easy for human beings to think of themselves as trivial specks on a trivial speck1:06:45out some misbegotten hellhole end of the galaxy, among hundreds of millions of galaxies, right? It's very easy to see yourself as nothing in that span of time.1:06:56That's a real challenge for people. I think it's a mistake to think that way. Because I think consciousness is far more than we think it is, but it's still something we have to grapple with.1:07:09I'm a psychoanalytic thinker. And what that means is that I believe that people are collections of sub-personalities, and that those sub-personalities are alive.1:07:19They're not machines. They have their viewpoint, they have their wants, they have their perceptions, they have their arguments, they have their emotions.1:07:28They're like low-resolution representations of you when you get angry. It's like, it's a very low resolution representation of you. It only wants rage, or it only wants something to eat, or it only wants water, it only wants sex.1:07:42It's you but shrunk and focused in a specific direction. And all those motivational systems are very, very ancient, very archaic, and very, very powerful.1:07:53And they play a determining role in the manner in which we manifest ourselves. And as Freud pointed out with the id, we have to figure out how to take all those underlying animalistic motivations and emotions and1:08:06civilize them in some way so that we can all live in the same, general territory without tearing each other to shreds, which is maybe the default position of both chimpanzee and humanity.1:08:19So I take that seriously, the idea that we're a loose collection of spirits. You know, it says in the Old Testament somewhere that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and I think this is akin to that.1:08:32If you know that you're not in control of yourself thoroughly, that there are other factors behind the scenes, like the Greeks thought that human beings were the playthings of the gods.1:08:43That's the way they conceptualized the world. And they sort of meant the same thing. They meant that there are these great forces that move us that we don't create.1:08:52That we're subordinate to, in some sense. Not entirely, but we can be subordinate to them, and they move our destinies. That was the Greek view, and there's something...1:09:03It teaches you humility to understand that. That there's a hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes and you're the driver of a very complex vehicle, but you don't understand the vehicle very well.1:09:13And it's got its own motivations and methods and sometimes you think it's doing something, and it's doing something completely different. You see that in psychotherapy all the time because you help someone unwind a pattern of behavior that they've manifested forever.1:09:28First of all, they describe it, then they become aware of it, then maybe they start to see what the cause is. They had no idea why they were acting like that. You know, they have to have the memory that produced the behavioral pattern to begin with.1:09:40It has to be brought back to mind, and then it has to be analyzed and assessed, and then they have to think about a different way of acting. It's extraordinarily complex.1:09:50So, psychoanalytic. Literary. Well, there's this new, this postmodern idea about literature, and about the world, for that matter, that1:10:07you take a complex piece of literature, like a Shakespeare play. There's no end to the number of interpretations that you can make of it. You know, you can interpret each word, you can interpret each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph.1:10:20You can interpret the entire play. The way you interpret it depends on how many other books you've read, depends on your orientation in the world. It depends on a very, very large number of things. How cultured you are or how much culture you lack.1:10:34All of those things. It opens up a huge vista for potential interpretation. And so the Postmoderns sort of stubbed their toe on that and thought, well, if there's this vast number of interpretations of any particular literary work,1:10:49how can be sure that any interpretation is more valid than any other interpretation? And if you can't be sure, then how do you even know those are great works? How do you know...1:10:58Maybe they're just works that the people in power have used to facilitate their continual accession of power, which is really a Post-modern idea, and a very, very cynical one, but it has its point.1:11:11But the thing is it's grounded in something real, right? It's like, yes, you can interpret things forever. I want to show you something here, just briefly. We'll go back to it later.1:11:20Look at this. This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. So at the bottom here, every single one of those lines is a Biblical verse.1:11:29Okay? Now, the length of the line is proportionate to how many times that verse is referred to in some way by some other verse.1:11:41So, you say, this is the first hyper-linked book. [LAUGHTER] Right? I'm dead serious about that! You can't click and get the hyper-links, obviously, but it's a thoroughly hyper-linked book and it's because, well the people who worked on these stories1:11:54that are hypothetically at the end, right? Which is the end can't affect the beginning. That's the rule of time, right? What happens now can't affect what happened to you ten years ago, even though it actually can, but whatever.1:12:06[LAUGHTER] Well, you re-interpret things, right, and then they're not the same, but whatever, we won't get into that. Technically speaking, the present can not affect the past, but if you were looking at a piece of literature, that's not right.1:12:19Because when you write the end, you know what was at the beginning, and when you write the beginning or edit it, you know what's at the end. And so you can weave the whole thing together. And there's sixty-five thousand cross-references, and that's what this map shows.1:12:32And so that's a great visual representation of the book. And then you can see, well why is it deep? Why is the book deep? Well, just imagine how many pathways you could take through that.1:12:42Right? I mean you'd just journey through that forever, you'd never ever get to the end of it. There's permutations and combinations, and every phrase is dependent on every other phrase and every verse is dependent on every, not entirely,1:12:53not entirely, but sixty-five thousand is not a bad start. And so Okay, well so that's another issue, in some sense, that seems to make the Post-Modernist critique correct.1:13:08How in the world are you going to extract out a canonical interpretation of something like THAT? It's like it's not possible. But here's the issue, as far as I can tell.1:13:18So the Post-Modernists extended that critique to the world. They said look, now the text is complicated enough, you can't extract out a canonical interpretation. What about the world?1:13:28The world's way more complicated than a text. And so there's an infinite number of ways that you can look at the world. And so how do we know that any one way is better than any other way?1:13:37That's a good question. Now the Post-Modern answer was we can't. And that's not a good answer because you drown in chaos under those circumstances, right?1:13:48You can't make sense of anything. And that's not good because it's not neutral to not make sense of things. It's very anxiety-provoking.1:13:59It's very depressing because if things are so chaotic that you can't get a handle on them, your body defaults into emergency-preparation mode and your heart rate goes up and your immune system stops working and you burn yourself out, you age rapidly because you're surrounded by nothing you can control.1:14:15That's an existential crisis, right? It's anxiety-provoking and depressing, very hard on people. And even more than that, it turns out that the way that we're constructed neurophysiologically is that we don't experience any positive emotion1:14:29unless we have an aim, and we can see ourselves progressing toward that aim. It isn't precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy.1:14:40As you all know if you've ever attained anything, because as soon as you attain it, then the whole little game ends, and you have to come up with another game. Right, so it's Sisyphus.1:14:50And that's okay. But it does show that the attainment can't be the thing that drives you because it collapses the game. That's what happens when you graduate from university. It's like, you're king of the mountain for one day, and then you're like, serf, at Starbucks for the next five years, you know?1:15:06[LAUGHTER] So what happens is that human beings are weird creatures because we're much more activated by having an aim and moving towards it than we are by attainment.1:15:18And what that means is you have to have an aim and that means you have to have an interpretation. And it also means that the nobler the aim, that's one way of thinking about it, the better your life.1:15:28And that's a really interesting thing to know because you've heard ever since you were tiny that you should act like a good person and you shouldn't lie, for example. And you might think, well, why the hell should I act like a good person and why not lie?1:15:40I mean, even a three year old can ask that question because smart kids learn to lie earlier, by the way. And they think well, why not twist the fabric of reality so that it serves your specific short-term needs?1:15:54I mean, that's a great question, why not do that? Why act morally if you can get away with something and it brings you closer to something you want? Well, why not do it?1:16:03These are good questions, it's not self-evident. Well, it seems to me tied in with what I just mentioned. It's like, you de-stabilize yourself and things become chaotic, and that's not good.1:16:14And if you don't have a noble aim, then you have nothing but shallow, trivial pleasures. And they don't sustain you.1:16:23And that's not because because life is so difficult, it's so much suffering, it's so complex. It ends, and everyone dies, and it's painful.1:16:33It's like without a noble aim, how can you withstand any of that? You can't. You become desperate, and once you become desparate, things go from bad to worse very rapidly.1:16:44And so there's the idea of the noble aim. And it's something that's necessary. It's the bread that people cannot live without, right? That's not physical bread, it's the noble aim.1:16:55And what is that? Well, It was encapsulated in part in the story of Marduk. It's to pay attention, it's to speak properly, it's to confront chaos, it's to make a better world, it's something like that.1:17:09And that's enough of a noble aim so that you can stand up without cringing at the very thought of your own existence so that you can do something that's worthwhile to justify your wretched position on the planet.1:17:22Now the literary issue is that... look, you take a text, you can interpret it in a variety of ways, but that's not right.1:17:31This is where the Post-Modernists went wrong because what you're looking for, in a text, and in the world, for that matter, is sufficient order and direction.1:17:41So then we have to think, well what does sufficient order and direction mean? Well you don't want to suffer so much that your life is unbearable, right? That just seems self-evident.1:17:51Pain argues for itself. I think of pain as the fundamental reality because no one disputes it, right? Even if you say that you don't believe in pain, it doesn't help when you're in pain.1:18:04You still believe in it. You can't pry it up with logic and rationality. It just stands forth as a fundament of existence.1:18:14And that's actually quite useful to know. You say, well, you don't want any more of that than is absolutely necessary. And I think that's self-evident. Then you say, wait a minute, it's more complicated than that.1:18:24You don't want any more of that than is necessary today, but also not tomorrow and not next week and not next month and not next year. So however you act now better not compromise how you're going to be in a year.1:18:37Because that'd just be counter-productive. That's part of of the problem with short-term pleasures, right? Act in haste, repent at leisure. Everyone knows exactly what that means.1:18:46So you have to act in a way that works now and tomorrow and next week and next month and so forth. And so you have to take your future self into account. And human beings can do that.1:18:56And taking your future self into account isn't much different than taking other people into account. I remember there's this Simpsons episode.1:19:05And Homer downs a quart of mayonnaise and vodka. [LAUGHTER] And he says1:19:15Marge says, you know, you shouldn't really do that. And Homer says, that's a problem for future Homer. I'm sure glad I'm not that guy.1:19:24[LAUGHTER] It's so ridiculous, it caught me, you know? But you see, we have to grapple with that, and so the you that's out there in the future is sort of like another person.1:19:37And so figuring out how to conduct yourself properly in relationship to your future self isn't much different than figuring out how to conduct yourself in relationship to other people.1:19:47But then we could expand the constraints. Not only does the interpretation that you extract have to protect you from suffering and give you an aim, but it has to do it in a way that's inerrable,1:19:58so it works across time, and then it has to work in the presence of other people so that you can cooperate with them and compete with them in a way that doesn't make you suffer more.1:20:07And people are not that tolerant. They have choices, they don't have to hang around with you. They can hang around with any one of these other primates.1:20:16And so, if you don't act properly, at least within certain boundaries, it's like, you're just cast aside. And so people are broadcasting information at you all the time about how you need to interpret the world so they can tolerate being around you.1:20:30And you need that because socially isolate, you're insane, and then you're dead. No one can tolerate being alone for any length of time. We can't maintain our own sanity without continual feedback from other people because it's too damn complicated.1:20:44So you're constrained by your own existence and then you're constrained by the existence of other people. And then you're also constrained by the world. If I read Hamlet and what I extract out of that is the idea that I should jump off a bridge, it's like it puts my interpretation to an end rather quickly.1:21:02It doesn't seem to be optimally functional, let's say. And so an interpretation is constrained by the reality of the world.1:21:11It's constrained by the reality of other people. And it's constrained by your reality across time. There's only a small number of interpretations that are going to work in that tightly defined space.1:21:22And so that's part of the reason that the Post-Modernists are wrong. It's also part of the reason, by the way, that AI people who've been trying to make intelligent machines have had to put them in a body.1:21:33Because it turns out you just can't make something intelligent, in some sense, without it being embodied. And it's partly for the reasons I just described. You need constraints on the system before1:21:44you need constraints on the system so that the system doesn't drown in an infinite sea of interpretation. Something like that. So that's the literary end of it.1:21:54Moral... Well, morality for me is about action. I'm an existentialist, in some sense. And what that means is that I believe that what people believe to be true is what they act out, not what they say.1:22:07And so there's lots of definitions of truth. I mean, truth is a very expansive word. And you can think of objective truth but behavioral truth isn't the same as objective truth.1:22:17What you should do isn't the same as what is, as far as I can tell, but people debate that. But I think the reason that that has to be the case is because...1:22:26Think about it this way. You're standing in front of a field. And you can see the field. But the field doesn't tell you how to walk through it.1:22:35There's an infinite number of ways you could walk through it. And so you can't extract out an inviolable guide to how you should act from the array of facts that are in front of you.1:22:45Because there's just too many facts. And they don't have directionality. But you, you need to know. You need to know how how not to suffer. And you need to know what your aim is.1:22:55And so you have to overlay that objective reality with some interpretive structure. And it's the nature of that interpretive structure that we're going to be aiming at hard.1:23:04I've given you some hints about it already. We've extracted it in part from observations from our own behavior and other peoples' behavior. And we've extracted it in part by the nature of our embodiment that's been shaped over hundreds of millions of years.1:23:17We see the infinite plain of facts and we impose a moral interpretation on it. And the moral interpretation is what to do about what is.1:23:28And that's associated both with security because you just don't need too much complexity, And also with aim. And so we're mobile creatures, right? We need to know where we're going.1:23:37Because all we're ever concerned about, roughly speaking, is where we're going. That's what we need to know. Where are we going, what are we doing, and why?1:23:47And that's not the same question as what is the world made of objectively. It's a different question and requires different answers. And so that's the domain of the moral, as far as I'm concerned, which is what are you aiming at?1:23:59And that's the question of the ultimate ideal, in some sense. Even if you have trivial little fragmentary ideals, there's something trying to emerge out of that that's more coherent and more integrated.1:24:12And more applicable and more practical. And that's the other thing, is that... You know, you think about literature and you think about art and you think those aren't very tightly tied to the earth.1:24:23They're empyrean and airy and spiritual, and they don't seem practical. But I'm a practical person. And part of the reason that I want to assess these books from a literary and aesthetic and evolutionary perspective is1:24:38to extract out something of value, something of real value that's practical. You know? Something, because one of the rules that I have when I'm lecturing is that1:24:48I don't want to tell anybody anything that they can't use. Because I think of knowledge as a tool. It's something to implement in the world. We're tool-using creatures and our knowledge is tools.1:24:59And we need tools to work in the world. We need tools to regulate our emotions and to make things better and to put an end to suffering to the degree that we can. And to live with ourselves properly, and to stand up properly.1:25:11And you need the tools to do that. And so I don't want to do anything in this lecture series that isn't practical. Now I want you to come away having things put together in a way that you can immediately apply it.1:25:24Not interested in abstraction for the sake of abstraction. Rational. Well, it's gotta make sense, you know? Because...1:25:36the more restrictions on your theory, the better. And so... I want it all laid out causally so that B follows A and B precedes C,1:25:50and in a way that's understandable and doesn't require a leap any unnecessary leap of faith. Because that's another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like the Bible.1:26:03It's that you're called upon to believe things that no one can believe. And that's not good because that's a form of lie, as far as I can tell. And then you have to scrap the whole thing because in principle the whole thing is about truth,1:26:14and if you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lies, then how in the world are you going to get anywhere with that? So I don't want any uncertainty at the bottom of this.1:26:25Or I don't want any more than I have to leave in it. Because I can't get any farther than that. So it's gonna make sense, rationally.1:26:35I don't want it to be pushing up against what we know to be scientifically untrue, even though we know that science is in flux. And that's somewhat of a dangerous parameter.1:26:46If it isn't working with evolutionary theory, for example, then I think that it's not a good enough solution. So..1:26:55And then, finally, it's phenomenological. Modern people, you know, we think of reality as objective.1:27:05And that's very powerful. But that isn't how we experience reality. We have our domain of experience.1:27:14And this is a hard thing to get a grip on, even though it should be the most obvious thing. For the phenomenologist, everything that you experience is real.1:27:24And so they're interested in the structure of your subjective experience, and you say well you have subjective experience, and you have subjective experience, and so do you. And there's commonalities across all of those, like, for example,1:27:35you're likely to experience the same set of emotions. We've been able to identify canonical emotions. And canonical motivations, and without that, we couldn't even communicate because you wouldn't know what the other person was like.1:27:47You'd have to explain infinitely. There's nothing you can take for granted. But you can. And phenomenology is the fact that in the center of my vision, my hands are very clear, and then out in the periphery they get.. they disappear.1:28:00And phenomenology is the way things smell and the way things taste, and the fact that they matter. And so you could say in some sense that phenomenology is the study of what matters,1:28:12rather than matter. And it's a given from the phenomenological perspective that things have meaning. And even if you're a rationalist, say, and a cynic and a nihilist, and you say, well, nothing has any meaning,1:28:26you still run into the problem of pain. Because pain undercuts your arguments and has a meaning. So there's no escaping from the meaning, you can pretty much demolish all the positive parts of it.1:28:38But trying to think your way out of the negative parts, man, good luck with that, because that just doesn't work. So.. Phenomenology, and the Bible story is, and I think this is true of fiction in general, is phenomenological.1:28:56It concentrates on trying to elucidate the nature of human experience, and that is not the same as the objective world. But it's also a form of truth, because it is true that you have a field of experience and that it has qualities.1:29:08The question is what are the qualities? Now, ancient representations of reality were sort of a weird meld of observable phenomena, the things that we would consider objective facts, and subjective truth,1:29:21the projection of subjective truth. And I'll show you, for example, show you how the Mesopotamians viewed the world. They had a model.1:29:31Basically the world was a disc. You know, if you go out in a field at night, what does the world look like? It's a disc. It's got a dome on top.1:29:41Well that was basically the Mesopotamian view of the world. And that view of the world that the people who wrote the first stories of the Bible believed too. And that on top of the dome, there was water.1:29:50Well, obviously, it's like, it rains, right? Where does the water come from? Well, there's water around the dome. And then there's land, that's the disc. And then underneath that there's water.1:29:59How do you know that? Well, drill! You'll hit water. It's under the earth, obviously, because how would you hit the water? And then what's under that? There's fresh water.1:30:08And then what's under that? Well, if you go to the edge of the disc, you hit the ocean. It's salt water. So it's a dome, with water outside of it,1:30:18and then it's a disc that the dome sits on, and then underneath that there's fresh water, and then underneath that, there's salt water. And that was roughly the Mesopotamian world.1:30:27And you see, that's a mix of observation and imagination, right? Because that isn't the world, but it is the way the world appears.1:30:37It's a perfectly believable cosmology. And the sun rises and the sun sets on that dome. It's not like the thing's bloody well spinning, who would ever think that up?1:30:47It's obviously the sun goes up and goes down and then travels underneath the world, it comes back up again. There's nothing more self-evident than that.1:30:56Well, that's that strange intermingling of subjective fantasy, let's say, right at the level of perception, and actual observable phenomena.1:31:05And a lot of the cosmology that's associated with the Biblical stories is exactly like that. It's half psychology and half reality.1:31:15Although the psychological is real as well. And to know that the Biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing because1:31:27you know, the poor fundamentalists, they're trying to cling to their moral structure, and you know, I understand why. Because it does organize their societies and it organizes their psyche, so they've got something to cling to.1:31:39But you know, they don't have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of what constitutes truth, and they try to gerrymander the Biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory, you know?1:31:54Promoting creationism, for example, as an alternative scientific theory. It's like, that just isn't going to go anywhere, you know? Because the people who wrote these damn stories weren't scientists to begin with.1:32:05There weren't any scientists back then. There's hardly any scientists now. [LAUGHTER] You know, it's... really! It's hard to think scientifically, man, it's like, it takes a lot of training.1:32:14And even scientists don't think scientifically once you get them out of the lab. And hardly even when they're in the lab, you know? You've got to get peer reviewed and criticized and, like, it's hard to think scientifically.1:32:25So however the people who wrote these stories thought was more like dramatists, more like Shakespeare thought. But that doesn't mean that there isn't truth in it, it just means that you have to be a little bit more sophisticated about your ideas of truth.1:32:37And that's okay, you know? There are truths to live by! Okay, well, fine, then we want to figure out what those are because we need to live and maybe not to suffer so much.1:32:49And so if you know that what the Bible stories and stories in general are trying to represent is the lived experience of conscious individuals, like the structure of the lived experience of conscious individuals, then that opens up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding.1:33:06And eliminates the contradiction that's been painful for people, between the objective world and, let's say, the claims of religious stories.1:33:16Okay, so let's take a look at the structure of the book itself. So the first thing about the Bible is that it's a comedy. And a comedy has a happy ending, right?1:33:26So that's a strange thing because the Greek god stories were almost always tragic. Now, the Bible is a comedy. It has a happy ending. Everyone lives. There's a heaven.1:33:37Now, what you think about that is a completely different issue. I'm just telling you the structure of the story. It's something like: there was Paradise at the beginning of time,1:33:46and then some cataclysm occurred and people fell into history, and history is limitation and mortality and suffering and self-consciousness. But there's a mode of being, or potentially the establishment of the state, that will transcend that.1:34:00And that's what time is aiming at. So that's the idea of the story, you know? It's a funny thing that the Bible has a story, because it wasn't written as a book, right?1:34:10It was assembled from a whole bunch of different books. And the fact that it got assembled into something resembling a story is quite remarkable.1:34:21And what the question is then, well what is that story about? And how did it come up as a story? And then, I suppose, as well, is there anything to it? It constitutes a dramatic record of self-realization or abstraction, I already mentioned that.1:34:35The idea, for example, of the formulation of the, let's say, the image of God, as an abstraction, that's how we're going to handle it to begin with. I want to say, though, because I said that I wasn't going to be any more reductionist than necessary,1:34:49I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible. But it's not explicable.1:34:58And so I don't want to explain it away, I want to just leave it, as a fact. And then I want to pull back from that and say, okay, well we'll leave that as a fact, and a mystery.1:35:07But we're going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to extract out the ideal,1:35:16and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation. And so, that's good enough. That's an amazing thing, if it's true.1:35:25But I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, let's say. It's a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors.1:35:34Well, what does that mean? Many people wrote it. There's many different books. And they're interwoven together, especially in the first five books, by people who, I suspect, took1:35:47the traditions of tribes that had been brought together under a single political organization, and tried to make their accounts coherent.1:35:57And so they took a little of this, and they took a little of that, and they took a little of this. And they tried not to lose anything, because it seemed valuable, it was certainly valuable to the people who had collected the stories.1:36:07They weren't going to, you know, tolerate too much editing. But they also wanted it to make sense, to some degree, so it wasn't completely logically contradictory and completely absurd.1:36:20And so, many people wrote it. And many people edited it, and many people assembled it over a vast stretch of time. And we have very few documents like that.1:36:30And so just because we have a document like that is sufficient reason to look at it as a remarkable phenomena and try to understand what it is that it's trying to communicate, let's say.1:36:42And then I said it's also the world's first hyper-linked text, which is that again. And it's very much worth thinking about for quite a long time.1:36:51All right. There's four sources, in the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible. Four stories that we know came together. One source was called the Priestly.1:37:03And it used the name Elohim or El Shaddai for God. And I believe El is the root word for Allah, as well.1:37:12And that's usually translated as God or the gods, because Elohim is utilized as plural in the beginning books of the Bible.1:37:21And it's newer that the Jahwist version. Now, the reason I'm telling you that is because Genesis 1, which is the first story, isn't as old as Genesis 2.1:37:30Genesis 2 contains, the Jahwist version, for example, contains the story of Adam and Eve. And that's older than the very first book in the Bible.1:37:39But they decided to put the newer version first. And I think it's because it deals with more fundamental abstractions. It's something like that. It's like, it deals with the most basic of abstractions, how the universe was created, and then segues into what the human environment is like.1:37:56And so that seems to be the logic behind it. The Jahwist version uses the name YHWH, which apparently people didn't say, but we believe was pronounced something like "Yahweh."1:38:09And it has a strongly anthropomorphic God, so one that takes human form. It begins with Genesis 2:4. This is the account of the heavens and the earth when, and it contains the story of Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, and Noah, and the Tower of Babel, and Exodus, and Numbers, along with the priestly version.1:38:27It also contains the form, just the form, of the Ten Commandments, which is like a truncated form of the law.1:38:38The Elohist source contains the stories of Abraham and Isaac. It's concerned with the heavenly hierarchy that includes angels. It talks about the departure from Egypt.1:38:48And it presents the Covenant Code, which is this idea that society is predicated (this was Israeli society), was predicated on a covenant with God, and that's laid out in a sequence of rules, some of which are the Ten Commandments,1:39:01but many of which are much more extensive than that. And then the final one is the Deuteronomist code, and it contains the bulk of the law, and the Deuteronomic history.1:39:12And it's independent of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. And so we know that at least for, now there's debate about this, like there is about everything, so I'm brushing over a very large area of scholarship,1:39:24but people generally assume that there were multiple authors over multiple periods of time, and the way they concluded that is by looking at textual analysis, you know?1:39:34Trying to see where there are chunks of the stories that have the same kind of style or the same referents. And people argue about that because, you know, obviously it's difficult to recreate something ancient.1:39:46But that's the basic idea. So it is an amalgam of viewpoints about these initial issues. And that's important to know.1:39:55So it's like a collective story. Okay, now, to understand the first part of Genesis,1:40:06I'm going to turn, strangely enough, to something that's actually part of the New Testament, and this is a central element of Christianity.1:40:19And it's a very strange idea and it's going to take a very long time to unpack. But the idea, this is what John said about Christ, he said "in the beginning was the Word."1:40:30So that relates back to Genesis 1, "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." That's some, well, three sentences like that take a lot of unpacking because, well none of that seems to make any sense whatsoever, really, right?1:40:45In the beginning was the word. And, the word was both with God. And, the word was God. So, the first question might be, what in the world does that mean?1:40:54In the beginning was the word, that's the logos actually. And the logos is embodied in the figure of Christ. So there's this idea in John that whatever Christ is, the son of God,1:41:04is not only instantiated in history, say, at a particular time and place, as a carpenter in some backwoods part of the world, but also, something eternal1:41:13that exists up, outside of time and space, that was there right at the beginning. And as far as I can tell, what that logos represents is something like modern people,1:41:23something like what modern people refer to when they talk about consciousness. It's something like that. It's more than that. It's like consciousness and its capacity to be aware and its capacity to communicate.1:41:35It's something like that, and there's an idea underneath that, which is that being, especially from a phenomenological perspective, so the being that is experience, can not exist without consciousness.1:41:45It's like consciousness shines a light on things to bring it into being. Because without consciousness, what is there? No one experiences anything.1:41:56Is there anything when no one experiences anything? That's the question. And the answer that this book is presenting is that, no, you have to think about consciousness as a constituent element of reality.1:42:08It's something that's necessary for reality itself to exist. Now, of course, it depends on what you mean by reality. But, the reality that's being referred to here, I told you already, is the strange amalgam of the subjective experience and the world.1:42:23But the question is deeper than that too, because it is by no means obvious what there is if there's no one to experience it. I mean the whole notion of time itself seems to collapse, at least in terms of something like felt duration.1:42:36And the notion of size disappears, essentially, because there's nothing to scale it. Causality seems to vanish.1:42:47We don't understand consciousness. Not in the least. We don't understand what it is that is in us that gives illumination to being. And what happens in the Old Testament, at least in part, is that that consciousness is associated with the divine.1:43:02Now you think, well, is that a reasonable proposition? That's a very complicated question, but at least we might know that there's something to the claim.1:43:13Because there is a miracle of experience and existence that's dependent on consciousness. I mean, people try to explain it away constantly, but it doesn't seem to work very well.1:43:22And here's something else to think about, I think, that's really worth thinking about. People do not like it when you treat them like they're not conscious.1:43:31Right? They react very badly to that. And you don't like it if someone assumes that you're not conscious, and you don't like it if someone assumes that you don't have free will.1:43:40You know, that you're just absolutely determined in your actions, and there's nothing that's going to repair you. And that you don't need to have any responsibility for your actions.1:43:49It's like our culture, the laws of our culture, are predicated on the idea, something like, people are conscious, people have experience, people make decisions and can be held responsible for them, if there's a free will element to it.1:44:02And you can debate all that philosophically, and fine. But the point is that that is how we act and that is the ideal that our legal system is predicated on.1:44:12And there's something deep about it, because you're a subject to the law. But the law is also limited by you.1:44:21Which is to say that in a well-functioning, properly-grounded democratic system, you have intrinsic value.1:44:32That's the source of your rights, even if you're a murderer. We have to say, the law can only go so far because there's something about you that's divine.1:44:41Well, what does that mean? Well, partly it means that there's something about you that's conscious and capable of communicating, like you're a whole world unto yourself.1:44:50And you have that to contribute to everyone else and that's valuable. That you can learn new things, you can transform the structure of society, you can invent a new way of dealing with the world.1:45:01You're capable of all that. It's an intrinsic part of you, and that's associated with this. That's the idea there, is that there's something about the logos1:45:12that is necessary for the absolute chaos of the reality beyond experience to manifest itself as reality.1:45:21That's an amazing idea because it gives consciousness a constitutive role in the cosmos. And you can debate that, but, you know, you can't just bloody well brush it off.1:45:33Because, first of all, we are the most complicated things there are that we know of, by a massive amount. We're so complicated that it's unbelievable.1:45:43And so, you know, there's a lot of cosmos out there, but there's a lot of cosmos in here too. And which one is greater is by no means obvious, unless you use something trivial, like relative size, which, you know, really isn't a very sophisticated approach.1:45:57And whatever it is that is you has this capacity to experience reality and to transform it, which is a very strange thing, you know? You can conceptualize a future, in your imagination.1:46:08And then you can work and make that manifest. You participate in the process of creation. That's one way of thinking about it. And so that's why I think, in Genesis 1, it relates the idea that human beings are made in the image of the divine, men and women,1:46:25which is interesting too, because the feminists are always criticizing Christianity, for example, as being inexorably patriarchal.1:46:36Of course, they criticize everything like that [LAUGHTER], so it's hardly a stroke of bloody brilliance. But I think it's an absolute miracle that right at the beginning of the document, it says straightforwardly, with no hesitation whatsoever,1:46:49that the divine spark, which we're associating with the word that brings forth being, is manifest in men and women equally. That's a very cool thing.1:46:59And you've gotta think, like I said, you actually take that seriously. Well, what you've got to ask is, what happens if you don't take it seriously? Right?1:47:09Read Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." That's the best... the best investigation of that tactic that's ever been produced1:47:20Because what happens in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" is that the main character, whose name is Raskolnikov, decides that there's no intrinsic value to other people.1:47:30And that as a consequence, he can do whatever he wants. It's only cowardice that stops him from acting. Right? Because, well, why would it be anything else if the value of other people is just an arbitrary superstition?1:47:42Then why can't I do exactly what I want, when I want? Which is the psychopath's viewpoint. Well, so Roskolnikov does. He kills someone who's a very horrible person, and he has very good reasons for killing her.1:47:52He's half starved and a little bit insane, and possessed by this ideology, it's a brilliant, brilliant layout. And he finds out something after he kills her, which is that the post-killing Raskolnikov and the pre-killing Raskolnikov are not the same person, even a little bit.1:48:08Because he's broken a rule, like he's broken a serious rule, and there's no going back. And "Crime and Punishment" is the best investigation I know of, of what happens if you take the notion that there's nothing divine about the individual seriously.1:48:23Now you... Most of the people I know who are deeply atheistic, and I understand why they're deeply atheistic, they haven't contended with people like Dostoevsky.1:48:35Not as far as I can tell. Because I don't see logical flaws in "Crime and Punishment." I think he got the psychology exactly right. Dostoevsky's amazing for this because1:48:45in one of his books, "The Devils," for example, he describes a political scenario that's not much different than the one we find ourselves in now. And there are these people who are possessed by rationalistic, utopian, atheistic ideas.1:48:58They're very powerful. They gave rise to the Communist Revolution. Right? I mean, they're powerful ideas. His character, Stavrogin, also acts out the presupposition that human beings have no intrinsic nature and no intrinsic value.1:49:14And it's another brilliant investigation. And Dostoevsky prophesized, that's what I would say, what will happen to a society if it goes down that road.1:49:23And he was dead exactly accurate. It's uncanny to read Dostoevsky's "The Possessed" or the "The Devils," depending on the translation, and then to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago"1:49:34because one is fiction and prophecy and the second is hey look it turned out exactly the same way that Dostoevsky said it would for exactly the same reasons So it's quite remarkable.1:49:44So, the question is: Do you contend seriously with the idea that, A: there's something cosmically constitutive about consciousness,1:49:54and B: that that might well be considered divine, and C: that that is instantiated in every person. And then ask yourself, if you're not a criminal, if you don't act it out?1:50:07And then ask yourself what that means. Is that reflective of a reality? Is it a metaphor? Like, maybe it's a metaphor, a complex metaphor that we have to use to organize our societies.1:50:17It could well be, but even as a metaphor it's true enough so that we mess with it at our peril. And it also took people a very long time to figure out.1:50:29This is Genesis 1. You know what, I'm probably going to stop there because I believe it's 9:30 And so we didn't even get to the first line.1:50:38[LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE]1:50:47[LAUGHTER] Yeah, yeah. Look, I want to read you a couple of things that we'll use as a prodroma for the next lexture1:50:57I'll just bounce through a collection of ideas that's associated with the notion of divinity And then we'll turn back to the first lines when we start the next lecture.1:51:06I have no idea how far I'm going to get through the biblical stories, by the way. [LAUGHTER] Because I'm trying to figure this out as I go along. There's an idea in Christianity that the image of God is trinity, right?1:51:20There's the Father, there's the element of the Father, there's the element of the Son, and there's the element of the Holy Spirit. And something like tradition, the spirit of tradition,1:51:29it's something like the human being as the newest incarnation of that tradition. Like the living incarnation of that tradition. And then it's something like the spirit in people that makes the relationship with this and this possible.1:51:44The spirit in individuals. So I'm going to bounce my way quickly through some of the classical, metaphorical attributes of God,1:51:53so that we kind of have a cloud of notions about what we're talking about when we return to Genesis 1 and talk about the God who spoke chaos into being.1:52:03So there's a fatherly aspect. So here's what God as a father is like. You can enter into a covenant with it. You can make a bargain with it.1:52:13Now you think about that. Money is like that. Because money is a bargain you make with the future. So we've structured our world so that you can negotiate with the future.1:52:24And I don't think that we would've got to the point where we could do that without having this idea to begin with. You can act as if the future is a reality.1:52:33There's a spirit of tradition that enables you to act as if the future is something that can be bargained with. That's why you make sacrifices. Sacrifices were acted out for a very long period of time and now they're psychological.1:52:46We know that you can sacrifice something valuable in the present and expect that you're negotiating with something that represents the transcendent future. And that's an amazing human discovery.1:52:57Like, no other creature can do that, to act as if the future is real. To note that you can bargain with reality itself and that you can do it successfully. It's unbelievable.1:53:07It responds to sacrifice. It answers prayers. I'm not saying that any of this is true, by the way. I'm just saying what the cloud of ideas represents.1:53:18It punishes and rewards. It judges and forgives. It's not Nature. One of the things that's weird about the Judeo-Christian tradition is that God and Nature are not the same thing at all.1:53:30Whatever God is, partially manifest in this logos, is something that stands outside of nature. And I think that's something like consciousness as abstracted from the natural world.1:53:42It built Eden for makind and then banished us for disobedience. It's too powerful to be touched. It granted free will. Distance from it is is Hell. Distance from it is Death.1:53:53It reveals itself in dogma and in mystical experience. And it's the Law. So that's sort of like the Fatherly aspect. And then the Son-like aspect.1:54:03It speaks chaos into order. It slays dragons and feeds people with the remains. It finds gold. It rescues virgins. It's the body and blood of Christ.1:54:13It's the tragic victim and scapegoat and eternally triumphant redeemer simultaneously. It cares for the outcast. It dies and is reborn.1:54:22It's the King of kinds and Hero of heroes. It's not the state, but is both the fulfillment and critic of the state. It dwells in the perfect house.1:54:32It is aiming at Paradise or Heaven. It can rescue from Hell. It cares for the outcast. It's the foundation stone and the cornerstone that was rejected.1:54:41And it's the spirit of the Law. And then it's spirit-like. It's akin to the human soul. It's the prophetic voice.1:54:51It's the still, small voice of conscience. It's the spoken truth. It's called forth by music. It is the enemy of deceit, arrogance, and resentment.1:55:02It's the water of life. It burns without consuming. And it's a blinding light. Okay, so that's a very well-developed, poetic set of poetic metaphors, essentially, right?1:55:13So these are all glimpses of the transcendent ideal, that's the right way of thinking about it. Glimpses of the transcendent ideal.1:55:23And all of them have a specific meaning. And well, in part, what we're going to do is go over that meaning as we continue with this series. And so what we've got now1:55:36is a brief description, at least, of what this is. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We know it's associated with the logos in this sequence of stories.1:55:46We know it's associated with the Word and with consciousness. And we know that it's associated with whatever God is. And then I laid the metaphoric landscape that, at least in part, describes God.1:55:58And so now we have some sense of the being that does this: creates the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void. That's that chaotic state of intermingled confusion.1:56:08The darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.1:56:17And so we'll stop with that. Because now we're ready to take a tentative step into the very first part of this book.1:56:26And it's important to have your conceptual framework properly organized so that you can appreciate where it's going and what it might possibly mean.1:56:35And so, well, I've done what I can today to, what would you say, elaborate on this single word, I suppose. [LAUGHTER]1:56:45But it's a big word, you know? It's not so unreasonable that it takes a long time to get to the point where you have any sense of what it means at all.1:56:55All right. That is nowhere near... I thought that I would get a LOT farther than that. [LAUGHTER] All right.1:57:04So thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]1:57:25So we do have time for some questions. We have to be out of here at 10:30. It's 9:30, so maybe we'll have questions until someone crazy grabs the microphone and [LAUGHS]1:57:37Or maybe we'll have questions for half an hour, something like that. So, if anybody has any questions, then, there's a microphone there, and there's a microphone there.1:57:47I'll try to answer them, to the best that I can. The best of my ability. Let's start.1:57:56Okay, so you talked about the idea of when you're confronting something that you fear, you face it head on and you destroy it.1:58:08But then you said that the idea is when you're confronting something, you make the world out of it, and I was wondering if you could just generally expound on what that means. You make your marriage out of the arguments.1:58:21Okay. You know, you have arguments with your wife, you have arguments with you children. That's that chaotic state. Because no one's been able to formulate a habitable order from that domain of controversy and confusion.1:58:34And then, through dialogue, you erect a structure that's a house that you can both live in. And so that's the idea, of making the world out of that chaos.1:58:43And it's frightening because if you really, this is why people often avoid having disputes with people they love, because it's frightening, right? You find out what the person's like and you find out what you're like.1:58:54It's like, god, who wants to do that? Nobody. And so, your heart rate goes up, and it's confrontation and conflict. And that's because you're encountering that domain that hasn't been properly mapped or configured.1:59:09And you're doing that with your predator-detection systems, essentially. And so that chaos that threatens the stability, say, of the marriage, is equivalent to, well, it's equivalent to the serpent in the tree, that's one form of equivalence.1:59:23And then, by dialogue and negotiation, you formulate the problem. What exactly's going on here? Where exactly are we? What exactly is the problem?1:59:33And so you keep talking until you reach a consensus about that, one that you can live with, one that you can act out. Right? And maybe you come up with the solution to the problem, and you've established peace again.1:59:45Peace, that's the house that you can both live in. And that's the chaos that people can fall into all the time, and often do. And it's the chaos that makes a marriage wash up on the shores and transform into, like, fifteen year divorce court.2:00:00A very horrible thing. So, that's the idea. Okay, thank you. Okay. [APPLAUSE]2:00:12Hi Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for the talk and thanks for your teachings. It's really helped me a lot. I had an experience in grad school, two English degrees, and the way you described the humanities, in my experience,2:00:23helped me understand my experience back then. So thank you. That's too bad, that's too bad that that happens to be the case. Really, you know, that's not good.2:00:34[LAUGHTER] You don't have to tell me that. Yep. But, you know, I survived, and I learned a lot Yep. And I'm not ungrateful for my experience, I've learned a lot.2:00:45But you said something, you described the collection of stories in the Bible in an interesting way, and I wondered if it was on purpose. You described it as an assembly of stories created by many people, over time, that's hyper-linked, into itself.2:01:02And it sounds a lot like a description of how the Internet works. Yeah, well it's not accidental, because the Internet's also a collective endeavor.2:01:15God only knows what personality it's going to manifest. But it's going to manifest some personality because it's learning to understand us very, very rapidly. So I think there's no reason not to think about it as a pre-cursor.2:01:29The distance between the Bible and the Internet is a lot less than the distance between a chimpanzee and a human being. And the difference between a book and the Internet is also, in some sense it's a matter of degree rather than kind.2:01:48[UNINTELLIGIBLE]2:01:59I can't speculate, because God only knows what's going to happen in the next twenty years. I certainly don't. I don't know what the pre-conditions are for consciousness. I have no idea.2:02:11And I don't think anybody knows. So, I guess we're gonna find out. Yep. [APPLAUSE]2:02:24Hi Dr. Peterson. I'm curious about the connection between aesthetic beauty and religious experience. I think you've hinted at it once or twice over the course of this lecture.2:02:34Is it possible for something that's incredibly beautiful to evoke a religious or mystical experience, or something in the same ballpark?2:02:46I think that's what they're for. If you look at the structure of a Renaissance cathedral, That's literally what I was just going to... that's my tag-on question to the next part was is that why we have cathedrals built like a spectacular buildings, as opposed to...2:03:06Yeah, well if you're going to house the ultimate ideal, you build something beautiful to represent its dwelling place.2:03:15And it should be beautiful. And this is something that people do not take seriously. This is especially something we don't take seriously in Canada. I mean, you think about all the hundreds of millions of dollars that were invested into beauty in Europe.2:03:30I mean, spectacular, excessive investment in beauty that's paid back God only knows how many multiples of times.2:03:39People make pilgrimages to Europe constantly because it's so beautiful that it just staggers you. Beauty is so valuable, and we're so afraid of it.2:03:49And I think we're afraid of it because it's a pathway, it's not the only pathway to the divine, I mean, there's pathways to the divine. Love is one of them, I suppose.2:03:58But beauty, especially for people who have an affinity for beauty, it's like music. It's one of those things that we can't argue against, right? You can't even understand, it just hits you.2:04:09And it shows you the ideal, that's one way to think about it. But it also shows you, I think, it's like a vision of the potential future.2:04:19It's something like that as well. That if we just got our act together and beautified things, that that's the place the we could inhabit. And that would ennoble us, and that's why Jerusalem, the heavenly city, is paved with gemstones, you know?2:04:31They're crystalline, they emit light, it's the proper dwelling place for an enlightened consciousness. Beauty is the proper dwelling place for an enlightened consciousness.2:04:41And we ignore it at our spiritual and economic peril. It's obvious that beauty, there's almost nothing more valuable than beauty.2:04:51Economically, practically, right? So, yeah. Why that is, who knows?2:05:00You know? Why we experience gemstones, for example, as beautiful, it's very mysterious. There're deep reasons for it.2:05:11[APPLAUSE] Hi. I have a bit of a similar question, actually. I know that one of the ways in which the Bible is appreciated, even by some of its harshest critics and deeply atheistic people,2:05:28is as a work of literature and as something, at least the King James authorized translation of the Bible, as something very aesthetically beautiful. And a great work of literature and a great work of poetry.2:05:39And I'm wondering, just from your study of it, and from your personal perspective, if there's any particular passages or parts of it that have struck you that way, or that you cherish more than any others, that you would be able to share.2:05:53Well the ones that have really opened up to me, I think, are the stories in Genesis. Right up to the Tower of Babel, because I think, well, and hopefully I'll talk to all of you about that, but I think I've got some sense of what they mean and why.2:06:08I know it's not exhaustive, obviously, but the story in Exodus as well. I also feel like I've got a handle on that.2:06:17And so those have hit me really, really hard. And just trying to understand this first part of Genesis, to try to understand what these concepts mean has been2:06:27Especially when I started to understand that the concept that human beings are made in God's image, that God has all those attributes that we just described,2:06:37that human beings are made in God's image, that that's actually the cornerstone of our legal system, that really rattled me. Because I didn't understand that clearly, that our body of laws has that metaphysical presupposition, without which the laws fall apart.2:06:54And that's starting to happen, it really is. You know, like the post-modern critique of law. The law schools are, I would say, they're overrun by post-modernists who are undermining the structure of Western law as fast as they possibly can because they don't buy any of this.2:07:09And so they're much more likely to just think of the law as something, like a casual pragmatic tool to be manipulated for the purposes of bringing forth the utopia.2:07:19It's a really, really, really bad idea. So it's very strange to me that we go off track when that metaphysical foundation starts to get rattled.2:07:29Do you think your appreciation of the aesthetic beauty of it comes from a belief in the truth in the underlying proposition? I mean, that's, because even the atheistic critics that I'm thinking of, like, even Dawkins or Hitchens, really appreciate the Bible as just a piece of really beautiful literature and just the quality of the writing, even if they totally reject the premise of it.2:07:53Yeah, well I don't think that you can see it as beautiful and poetic AND reject the underlying premises because if you see it as beautiful and poetic, you're accepting the underlying premises with your experience of the beauty and the poetics,2:08:07even though you may be fighting it with your articulated rationality. So I that indicates is a dis-integrated perspective on the book.2:08:17And it's not surprising that that's the case, it's the perspective that everyone has on the book, except with them it's more well-developed and well-thought-through.2:08:27But I think it's fundamentally... They're not approaching the thing with enough respect, that's my sense. And who knows, right? I don't know.2:08:36But what I've tried to do is to think there's probably more to this than I know. And then tried to understand it from that perspective, rather than to think, for example, well, it's a collection of superstitions that we've somehow outgrown.2:08:50It's like, no, sorry, that's not a deep enough analysis. Because it's got some truth, but it doesn't take into account the fact that the propositions still stand at the foundation of our culture.2:09:06It doesn't address Nietzsche's central concern, which is that if you blow out the notion of God, the entire structure crumbles. You can debate that, fine. But I'd just as soon that you debated it with Nietzsche, because he's a pretty tough customer to tangle with.2:09:22I don't think the atheist types, insofar as there's a type, I don't think they've wrestled with the real problems. Yeah.2:09:32[APPLAUSE] So I appreciate you set up some ground rules to keep things rational, and I think that's going to help us.2:09:44What I'm wondering is, so for instance, you said elsewhere, the New Testament, from what you can see, it's psychologically correct.2:09:54And that's quite astounding, I would say. There's a lot of truth in your depiction to these stories, elsewhere. You've pointed out deep truths, real powerful.2:10:06So what my question would be is if we can say Nietzsche took an order of magnitude of intelligence and depth to be able to predict what would happen in the next century,2:10:21rationally, if the Bible's not the inerrant word of God, what's going on? That's a good question. That's a really good question, and I'm going to try that rationally.2:10:34But, as I said, I don't want to leave people with the notion, because you know, some ways, this is something I've been thinking about a long time,2:10:44is I can't tell if I'm an advocate of the religious viewpoint or its worst possible critic. Because I am doing my best to make it rational, and there's a reductionistic element to that.2:10:55But I think that I'm doing that while also leaving the door open to things that I don't understand. Because that there's more to this story than I understand or can understand.2:11:06And I'm laying out what I can understand and I'm making it rational, but I do not believe for an instant that that exhausts the realm. It's like there are ways of interpreting these stories that work in the conceptual universe we inhabit right now.2:11:21But there's a lot of things that we don't understand. One thing I found about digging into these stories is that the deeper you dig, the more you find. And that's one of the things that convinced me that there was more to them than I had originally suspected.2:11:35Because things would click, and I'd think, wow, that's really something. And then I would take it apart further, and I'd think, oh, well, I thought THAT was something, but this is even more remarkable.2:11:46It just keeps opening and opening. So I'm gonna make it rational. I'm going to try to provide an answer to, and I think you're right about speaking about Nietzsche and his capacity for prophecy, and Dostoevsky's in the same category.2:11:59It's like there are prophetic elements to the Old and New Testament that seem to stretch over much vaster spans of time. And I'm going to try to produce a rational account of that.2:12:09But, I mean, one of the reasons that I think the New Testament is "psychologically true," let's say, is because, and this is one of the things that's deeply embedded in the structure of the Bible.2:12:20In the Old Testament, there's this idea, and I'm skipping ahead, that through a succession of states, the people who behave properly will eventually establish the proper state.2:12:33And so the state is viewed, in some sense, as the entity of salvation. But what happens in the New Testament is that idea gets, you could say, deconstructed.2:12:44And instead of a state being the place of redemption, a state of being becomes the test of redemption. And so the idea that human beings will be redeemed moves from the utopian state vision to the responsibility of the individual.2:13:01And I think that's correct. I believe that that's the right answer, and I think that the West, in particular, is predicated on that idea.2:13:11Because it makes the state subservient to the individual. I mean there's a continual dialogue, but in the final analysis the locus of the divine is the individual and not the state.2:13:25And I believe that's so true that if we don't act it out and believe it, then we all die painfully. And that's true enough for me.2:13:34So. [APPLAUSE] I thank you for the illuminating talk.2:13:43I'm going to keep you on the creation story, and if you don't mind, because we know this editing that was done, there was a purpose for the editing.2:13:52Can you give us your thoughts about the differences in the story of creation, especially pertaining to man, from the first chapter, which is very God-like, you know, by a word?2:14:05And to the second one, which is more like a fatherly type of creation. Is it the selling point? What was the reason for this type of editing to put the two together, one of them?2:14:16Well, I think that the more cynical criticisms of the Bible and the religious tradition, for instances like Marxists or Freudsian, for that matter, make the case that it's a manifestation of power and politics.2:14:34And that there's always a political or economic motivation behind the construction of the stories. And I think that that's true to some degree. But I don't think that it's true enough so that you can take that particular interpretive tack and be done with it.2:14:50And I would say that to the degree that there are political and economic motivations that have shaped the stories, the fact that multiple stories have come together, they're sort of corrective in some sense, and so even if at the level of detail, there's political intrigue and politics, say, with regards to the ascendancy of Israel,2:15:11when you step away from it, it becomes something that's more universal and escapes from that. And how that happened, I don't know. I mean, I think it's safe to say, it's reasonably safe to say that the people who put this document together, they did two things.2:15:26I think they were guided by their aesthetic taste and their conscience. I truly believe that. And the reason I believe that is because I think anything that was propagandistic would have been forgotten.2:15:39Because you can't remember propaganda. No one likes it, it's like it's dead ten years after you write it, or twenty years. And it isn't only that these books were assembled and written, it was that they were preserved and remembered.2:15:51And to me that means they have an affinity with the structure of memory. I mean, you think about it. How does the story last ten thousand years unless it's the kind of story you can remember?2:16:01It doesn't, because you forget all the forgettable stuff. And all you remember is the memorable stuff. And so there's this interplay between the document itself and its audience that shapes the document.2:16:17Now, I don't know how specifically I answered your question. We're going to hit the different stories as they come up in sequence and I think I'll shed some more light on the relationship between them doing that.2:16:30And we'll start with that next week. [APPLAUSE] Right, so um I've been really interested in a lot of the stuff that you've been saying about dreams because I've been lucid dreaming a lot for many years.2:16:48But always in a sort of atheistic way, as sort of like a game or something like that. But because of seeing your talks and everything, I've started to think of it from a different perspective, like you're now interfacing with something beyond the narrow scope of your conscious awareness, or something like that.2:17:05Maybe mythological or something like God. And so what I've been thinking about, and what I've maybe wondered what you'd think about, is that, in some ways, when you're lucid dreaming, you're getting beyond the limitations of a normal dreamer, sort of transcending limitations,2:17:23which maybe is not the purpose of people, right? Because as a person, you're supposed to be limited in some ways, as opposed to God, who's not limited.2:17:33And how, but on the other hand, it's a good opportunity to kind of have control over your interactions with this very special, interesting thing. So I guess the conundrum is that on one hand, you can control your interactions, but on the other hand, you ARE controlling them.2:17:48So I guess I'm wondering what you think about that, and also just in general what do you think about lucid dreaming as a thing, like, should you do it? I had a client who could really lucid dream, you know?2:17:58And one of the things, she used them now and then to solve problems, even though she didn't always pay attention to the answer. Sometimes she did. In one of her dreams, one of the characters told her that she would have to learn to live with a slaughterhouse.2:18:14She was very afraid of life, and one of the consequences of that was that we went and watched them bombing. So but one of the things she did, she'd ask the characters what they were up to, you know?2:18:26She was, instead of controlling, she would inquire. And so but I don't know what to say about lucid dreaming beyond that. I know it's a well-documented phenomena and many people can do it, and women seem to be able to do it better than men, that's what the research indicates.2:18:41But I think that what we don't know about lucid dreaming could fill a lot of books. So, I think there is some danger in controlling it, because you lose the spontaneous revelation, although not completely because you can't control it completely.2:18:57You might be interested in reading Jung's books on active imagination. Because he kind of learned to dream when he was awake. And he spent a lot of time in the world of imagination when he was awake, the Red Books, for example.2:19:11Red Book is a document of his experiences with awake dreaming. But he was very interactive with the dream, you know, instead of trying to bend it to his whim or his will.2:19:23He was exploring it, in some sense, like you'd explore a video game. Which are forms of dreams in and of themselves.2:19:32Yeah, I would say do it with an exploratory purpose in mind. You could always ask yourself what you could learn, too, which is a very dangerous question to ask a dream.2:19:41Because sometimes you'll find out what you have to learn. That's not so pleasant. But it's really worthwhile. [APPLAUSE]2:19:53Okay, so I think I'm going to take four more questions, only, because I'm running out of brain, and I don't want to say stupid things, or stupider things than I've already said, so.2:20:05Yeah, thank you for the talk. So in the beginning of your lecture, you talked about how society need this kind of dream-like religious base so we don't go between left and right violently, and we can kind of have this base.2:20:18And then you also said you admired Nietzsche for kind of chopping down these ideological and kind of dogmatic needs coming up from the base of Christianity.2:20:28And I was wondering what your thoughts are on how society can this kind of religious base without having these kind of dangerous ideologies that kind of spring up once in a while.2:20:39That's what I'm trying to figure out. No, really. That really, that's the serious answer to that question. You know, I mean, the reason that i'm an admirer of Nietzsche is because he was the spirit of his times, that's a good way of thinking about it.2:20:53It's not like Nietzsche killed God. It's that Nietzsche gathered what was in the air and articulated it, right?2:21:02Incredibly profoundly, and so he put his finger on the spot. And in doing so, he announced the problem. And once you announce the problem, then maybe you can come up with a solution, because you can't solve a problem unless you know what it is.2:21:16The fact that he made it so stark and so clear is horrifying in some sense, but at least we know where we stand.2:21:25And so, since then, and I would say in many ways particularly with the work of Jung, and everything that's come out of that, which is the deeper study of mythology and its meanings,2:21:38we've been trying to address the issue that Nietzsche brought up and trying to solve the problem. The problem is something like the reunification of the spirit of mankind, it's something like that.2:21:50We're slogging through it, man, that's why you're all here, at least in part, so we'll see how far we can get. By this rate, we'll get to, like, the twelfth verse in the first [LAUGHTER] but that's the aim, you know?2:22:04Okay? [APPLAUSE]2:22:15Yes, they'll be in the video. I can also make them available as slides.2:22:25Yeah, well that's okay. I'll return to this when we get going again. So.2:22:36Yeah, different colors represent the distance between the cross-references, yeah.2:22:51Well, I'll talk about that more next time. I mean, I think that then best answer to that is I'll talk more about that next time.2:23:00[LAUGHTER] I mean I think of them as overlapping metaphorical domains. You know, in the descriptions I put of the fatherly aspect, the son aspect, and the spirit aspect, you could swap a lot of those.2:23:11You know, it's kind of arbitrary. But I think the Trinitarian idea is trying to get forward the notion that the locus of the Divine is the same thing in its essence, but it exists in a multiplicity.2:23:25It exists as the spirit of tradition. It exists as the living individual, in time and space, and then it exists as the spirit.2:23:35And its consciousness, that we all share. Which, you know, Jung would have thought about that as something like the capacity for the individual to realize the tragedy and redemption of Christ in their individual life.2:23:51And that's something like your capacity to voluntarily accept the tragic conditions of your existence and to move forward to something resembling Paradise, regardless of that.2:24:02You know, as something that's intrinsic to you. And I think that's associated with the idea of the Pentecost. And the Holy Spirit, all of that, it's, so that's as good as I can do in a short period of time, so.2:24:16Yep. [APPLAUSE]2:24:34I think it's because of the gap between what we articulate and what we don't know. Something has to fill that gap.2:24:43I think the law could replace it if the law is total, but it isn't. It's bounded and incorrect, and it has to rest on something inside that's like this mediator between what we articulate and what we don't understand.2:24:59It's something like custom. It's something like expectation. It's something like the intrinsic sense of justice. You know, that the law itself is aiming at.2:25:08And those aren't fully articulated. But without them there'd be no grounding. Like, without the body, the law would be a dictionary .2:25:18And if you don't know what a word means, using a dictionary is helpful, but not that helpful, because unless you've had the experience of anger, the dictionary can't tell you what anger means.2:25:28It just refers to other words. But the words themselves refer to something else. And the law refers to something else. And without that, it has to be in tune with that something else, it has to be in accordance with it.2:25:41And so I don't think we can ever delineate the proper body of laws and that's also why ideological utopias,2:25:50see, ideological utopias dispense with the transcendent. They say, "This is what we need to do." It's like no, you don't know. That's not good. You have to leave space for what you kind of know and what you don't know.2:26:05And in the story of the Tower of Babel, human beings make this massive building that's supposed to reach up to the heavens so that it'll take the place of God.2:26:15Well that's the earliest warning we have of the danger of making things so vague that you confuse them with God.2:26:24And God gets irritated and comes down and makes everybody speak different languages and scatters them. It's like, well, that's what happens when you try to make something a totality, is that it starts to fragment inside and disintegrates into catastrophe.2:26:38So we have to maintain this articulated space inside the dream inside the custom, something like that. Because otherwise it doesn't work.2:26:47And I think that's the same as having respect for the fact that we have bodies. You know, we're not just abstract creatures that follow rules. We're not that at all.2:26:56You only follow certain rules. We won't follow the other ones, and our societies will crumble. And so, we just don't know enough to articulate the entire landscape of behavior with articulated rules, not at all.2:27:10We can't do it, it's beyond us. [APPLAUSE]2:27:20Hi, thanks for the talk. My question is also about dreams. You spoke about dreams as like a representation of truths and universal truths that can be interpreted into, like, myths and religion.2:27:36And, as you say it, it's very beneficial for the individual, and it sounds like also for society as well because not everyone can as easily remember their dreams, or interpret their dreams.2:27:53And also it's broadcasted to all of society for their benefit. So I guess I'm wondering what the evolutionary advantage of dreams are and my question might be, do you think that dreams suggest some sort of evolutionary group selection,2:28:16such that groups that don't have these dreams that are represented into myths and legend, do you think they didn't survive as well? Okay, so I'm not going to answer the second part of that question because I'd have to go far too far off at a tangent for me to manage right now.2:28:30But I can answer the first part. What happens when you're dreaming, there's a little switch, so to speak, in your brain that shuts off when you're dreaming and it stops you from moving.2:28:39Right? It shuts everything off except your eyes, because if you're moving your eyes back and forth, you're not going to run around and get eaten by a lion. It's okay to move your eyes.2:28:48But the rest of you is staying exactly where it is. Then you can run these simulations. And so what's happening at night, and this is a fairly well-accepted theory of dreaming, we know that dreams update memories and help consolidate memories.2:29:00They also help you forget. But what seems to be happening at night is you're running the underlying architecture of your cognitive ability in different simulations.2:29:12And it's cost free because you're paralyzed. You're not running around out there out in the world, investigating. So it's part of the manner in which your brain experiments with the way the world can be represented.2:29:24And so it seems absolutely necessary. I mean, if you deprive people of REM sleep, they don't stay sane very long.2:29:33There's something necessary about the dreaming process to maintenance of articulated sanity. So you're doing some sort of organization at night when you descend into that chaos.2:29:46Partly what seems to happen is that your categories have boundaries, right? But sometimes you don't have the categories correct. And so the boundaries have to loosen and other things need to be put into categories with some things shunted away.2:30:00And in the dream, the category structure loosens, which is why dreams are so peculiar. But they're experimenting. Your mind is experimenting with the underlying categorical structure of imagination.2:30:12And trying to update your mode of being in the world. Dreams often concentrate on things that provoke anxiety. So if you wake people up when they're dreaming, the most commonly reported emotion is anxiety.2:30:25So the dream is like the first stages of the attempt to contend with the unknown. So the dream is half unknown and half known. Which is also why it's so peculiar, you know, because you kind of understand it, but you don't really.2:30:38And it partakes of the unknown and the known. And it's the bridge between the two, something like that.2:30:47[APPLAUSE] Um, okay, so my question is kind of two parts.2:30:56The first one is just like a general question, and then just the application of the question. So my first question is, do you think that consciousness and being-hood are inextricably linked?2:31:07And then secondly, so if there something like a super-computer that one could house, theoretically, a perfect brain of a person in it, does that thing then become the same person as the person it was before.2:31:19So is there a transcendency to being-hood but not to consciousness? Okay, so the first question is, well, I would say that the kind of being that these stories are concerned with is absolutely dependent on consciousness.2:31:31Now whether or not that means that being as such is dependent on consciousness actually depends on how you define being. So it's always tricky when you ask is a, here's an example of meaning.2:31:43Those are tricky questions because it depends on how you define the two. But for our purposes the being that we're discussing, that's represented in these stories, is intrinsically associated with conscious experience.2:31:55And consciousness is given this constitutive role, the experience that we're talking about would not exist if consciousness did not exist.2:32:06So you can think about it as sort of a game, in a way, and then you have to decide for yourself whether that's a game that can be generalized. And I won't answer the second part, okay? If you don't mind.2:32:15[LAUGHTER] All right. [APPLAUSE] So, two part question. First one's very quick. If we want to read the Biblical stories that kind of you're referring to as a particular version, edition, source, publisher...2:32:29Oh I'll bring the thing I like next week. I think the Reader's Digest published it of all things. It lays out the narratives in a different format. It's easier, I find it much easier to read.2:32:43So I'll bring it next time and show it to you. My other question is, one of the main reasons why I'm interested in so much of your work and I think many are as well, is you leave literalism in the door and you open up another door to a much more deeper meaning.2:32:55In your interview with Transliminal Media, you mentioned Liz [UNINTELLIGIBLE] book, the serpent, uh, the tree, the serpent... Yeah, yeah. And you note that we as a species are very good at recognizing camouflage patterns of snakes, particularly in the lower field of vision.2:33:09And you further note that visual acuity is correlated with that and that it co-evolved. And you summarized thusly by saying the following, I'm paraphrasing you, you said "What gives you vision? Snakes do."2:33:20"That's what it says in Genesis. What else gives you vision? Fruit. That's also right." "That's why we have color vision. What makes you self-conscious if you're a man? Woman. That's Eve." And so, I understand at the elementary level some of the concepts that you have about representations, dreams, abstractions, etc.2:33:34But it kind of raises the question for me, I'm not accusing you of any creationism or literalism. Yep. You know, what's your point? Why did you make that connection? What's the meaning of the story of Genesis vis-a-vis Liz [UNINTELLIGIBLE] book?2:33:46No problem. As soon as I get past this first, this one, we're going to hit that hard. [LAUGHTER] So [APPLAUSE]2:33:57Well, partly2:34:06Yes, I'm suggesting that it foreshadowed it. And I think they're the same thing. I mean Liz [UNINTELLIGIBLE] in her books plays with that idea, metaphorically, but she never really takes it seriously, which is no problem.2:34:16I mean there's only so much you can take seriously, and she did a fine job of what she did. But I'll talk about that a lot. That's a very complicated issue. I mean, I would say, to begin with, that the systems that you use to deal with radical uncertainty are the same systems that your primate ancestors evolved to deal with snakes.2:34:35That's a good start. So, okay? Okay. One more, and then we're done. [APPLAUSE] I'm an aerospace science engineer and an expert computer programmer, and I have three rapid-fire questions so I'm going to get to them quick.2:34:51Based on your opinion of where the universities now stand in terms of humanities and social sciences, is mathematics more powerful than articulated speech?2:35:05I'm not exactly sure how the first... Oh, well, it depends on what you mean by power, I guess.2:35:17I mean, it's obvious that studying mathematics and computer science makes you insanely powerful. The question is: to what end? And I don't think that you can extract an answer to that from the study of mathematics.2:35:28The humanities are there to ground people in proper citizen-hood. That's a way of thinking about it. Yes it makes you powerful, but then the question is, who has the power?2:35:39Because it might not be you. It might be the mathematics, so to speak, you know? Because you never know what you're an agent of. Precisely. And so...2:35:49Yeah, well, look, I've got nothing against computer programmers, more power to you guys. And mathematicians as well, but I... Yes, it has to be a tool of something.2:36:01And what the humanities were for was to tell people what the tools should be used for. And so the tools themselves are crazily powerful.2:36:10But that's not necessarily an un-trammeled good, so. I have to stop, because... okay, quick.2:36:20[LAUGHTER] Okay, you were in this one room in New York where you had seen some original Renaissance artwork masterpieces and these are generally accepted as amazing artifacts.2:36:40Does an original work of art, as opposed to a high-fidelity reproduction, contain the spirit of the artist who created it, and does this account for the disparity in how much you have to pay for them?2:36:53It does in part. I know a good portrait artist, okay? And one of the things he pointed out about a great portrait is that it actually contains time.2:37:02Because a photograph is one instant. But portrait is you layered on you, layered on you. So it's got a thickness.2:37:11You know? And I think you can see that thickness in the original, but it's also a direct manifestation of that creative act of perception. I don't think you get that, you just can't get the fidelity of the original with the reproduction.2:37:24But there's more to it than that too, because the painting doesn't end with the frame. You know, like we tend to think of the painting itself as the object, but most objects are densely innervated with historical context.2:37:38And you can say, well, the historical context isn't the object, but it depends on what you mean by the object. And often people, when they buy a painting, are buying the historical context.2:37:49You just don't get that with a reproduction. It's a kind of magic. It's like, you want to have Elvis Presley's guitar or another guitar just like it? Well, you want to have Elvis's guitar.2:37:59Why? You can't tell it's Elvis's guitar by looking at it. [LAUGHTER]2:38:11Well, it is at the level of detail, but not at the level of context. That's how it looks to me. Okay, we gotta go. [APPLAUSE] Thank you.0:00:00Biblical Series II: Genesis 1: Chaos & Order
0:00:000:00:13Okay, well I thought this time that I would actually cover some of the biblical stories. So, and, hopefully a number of them. Um.0:00:23As I said last time, I'm going to go through this, well, as fast as I am able to, I want to do as complete a job as possible0:00:32and of course, the probability that I'll get through the entire Bible is very low. But we'll get through a lot of the major stories in the beginning of it and that's a good start. And then, you know, assuming that this all goes well0:00:43then maybe I'll try to do the same thing again either in the fall or next year. Assuming everything is still working out properly next year.0:00:52It's a long ways away. Alright, so... I guess we'll start.0:01:02So, last week I talked to you about a line in the New Testament that was from John, and it was line that was designed to parallel the opening of Genesis.0:01:11And it's a really important line and I thought I would reemphasize it. Because the Bible is a book that's been written0:01:21forward and backwards in time, in some sense, like most books. Because if you write a book, of course, when you get to the end, if you're the writer, you can adjust the beginning and so on.0:01:30So it has this odd appearence of linearity but it really isn't linear. It's like you're God, in some sense, standing outside of time,0:01:39that's your book, and you can play with time anywhere along it. And the people who put the books together took full advantage of that,0:01:49and that makes the story... It gives the story odd parallels in many, many places0:01:58And this is one of the major parallels, at least from the perspective of the Christian interpretation of the Bible, which of course includes the New Testament.0:02:07And so, there's this strange idea that Christ was the same factor or force0:02:17that God used at the beginning of time to speak habitable order into being. And that's a very very strange idea, you know,0:02:27it's not something that can be just easily dimissed as superstition partly because it's so strange. It doesn't even fit the definiton of a superstitious belief.0:02:38It's a dream-like belief, in some sense, and what I see many of the ideas in the Bible as is these dream-like ideas that0:02:47underlie our normative cognition and that constitute the ground from which our more articulated and explicit ideas have emerged.0:02:58And this one idea is so complicated that it's still mostly embedded in dream-like form But it seems to have something to do with the primacy of consciousness,0:03:07and this is one of the biggest issues regarding the structure of reality, as far as I can tell, because everyone from physicists to neurobiologists debates this.0:03:18The stumbling block for a purely objective view of the world seems to me to be consciousness. And consciousness has all sorts of strange properties, for example:0:03:27it isn't obvious what constitutes time or at least duration in the absence of consciousness. And it isn't also easy to understand what constitutes Being in the absence of consciousness,0:03:39because it seems to be the case... Well, if a movie is running, and there's no one to watch it - I know it sound like the tree in a forest idea, but it's not that idea at all -0:03:48if a movie is running and no one's watching it, then in what sense can you say that there's even a movie running? Because the movie seems to be the experience of the movie,0:03:59not the objective elements of the movie. And there's something about the world, at least insofar as we're in it as human beings,0:04:08that is dependent on conscious experience of the world. Now, of course, you can take consciousness out of the world and say: well, if none of us were here, if there was no such thing as consciousness,0:04:18then the cosmos would continue running the way it is running, but, of course, it depends on what exactly you mean by the cosmos when you make a statement like that,0:04:27because there's something about the subjective experience of reality that gives it reality. Or at least that's one way of looking at it. And since we're all pretty enamored of our own consciousnesses,0:04:38although they're painful, because they define our Being, it's not unreasonable to give consciousness a kind of metaphysical primacy. And it's a deeper idea than that,0:04:50because there are physicists and they're not trivial physicists, like John Wheeler, who believes that in some sense consciousness plays a constitutive role in transforming the chaotic potential of being into the actuality of Being.0:05:03He actually thinks about it - he's not alive anymore, but he actually thought about it as playing a constitutive role. And then, from the neurobiological perspective,0:05:13or from the scientific perspective, counsciousness is not something we understand, I don't think we understand it at all. It's something we can't get a handle on with our fundamental materialist philosophy.0:05:24And I don't know why that is. It's quite frustrating if you're a scientist, but it isn't clear to me that we've made any progress whatsoever in understanding consciousness,0:05:33even though, well, we've been trying to understand it for hundreds of years and even though psychologists and neurobiologists and so forth have really put a lot of effort into understanding consciousness from a scientific perspective0:05:43in the last 50 years. Anyways, what seems to me is the idea that God used the Word to extract habitable order out of chaos0:05:57at the beginning of time, which is roughly the right way of thinking about it, seems to me deeply allied with the idea that what it is that we do as human beings is encounter something like a formless and potential chaos,0:06:09I mean, we're not omniscient, obviously, and we can't just do whatever we want, but we encounter a formless and chaotic potential. That's always what we're grappling with0:06:19and somehow we use our consciousness to give that form, and this is how people act. Like, if you look at how they regard themselves, it's how they act,0:06:28because you say things to people, like: You shoud live up to your potential. And you make a case that there's something about a person that's more than what is, that yet could be,0:06:39if only they participated in the process properly. And everyone knows what that means, no one acts like a mystery has been uttered when you say that. And you can see a situation in your own life that's full of potential,0:06:51you're often extremely excited when you encounter something that's full of potential because what you see is something what could be, you see a future beckoning for you,0:07:00that could be if only you interacted with it properly, and it activates your nervous system, in a very basic way we even understand how that happens, to the degree that we understand how the nervous system works0:07:11because the systems that mediate positive emotion, which are governed roughly by the neurochemical dopamine and which have their roots way down in the ancient hypothalamus,0:07:22a very very archaic and fundamental part of the brain, that responds to potential, which is the possibility of accruing something new and valuable,0:07:32it responds to potential with active movement forward and engagement, and so we're engaged in the world that has potential and it looks like consciousness does that.0:07:41And so there's this idea that - - and this is the main idea that I think is being put forth in Genesis I - it's something like - and you see this in mythology:0:07:50from what I've been able to gather, there's always three causal elements that make up Being at the bottom of world mythology:0:07:59One is the formless potential that makes up Being once it's interacted with, and that's generally given a feminine nature, and I think that's because it's like the source from which all things emerge and rise.0:08:11It's something like that, it's more complicated than that, but it's something like that. And then there's some kind of interpretive structure that has to grapple with that formless potential,0:08:20and I think that's the sort of thing that was alluded to by Immanuel Kant when he was criticizing the notion that all of our information comes from sense data, which would be the pure empirical perspective.0:08:31Because when you encounter the world, you encounter it with that cognitive structure that already has shape, and so it's already in you, this structure,0:08:40and without that a priori structure you wouldn't be able to take the formless potential and give it structure and I think that's akin in some way to the idea of God the Father,0:08:50and I'll try to develop that idea more, it's the notion that there's something in all of us, that transcends all of us, that's deeply structural,0:09:00that's part of this ancient, I would say evolutionary and cultural process, that enables us to grapple with the formless potential and bring forth reality, roughly speaking.0:09:11And then there's the final element, and that element seems to be something like consciousness itself, the consciousness that actually inheres in the individual, so it's not only that you have a structure, it's that the structure has the capacity for action in the world.0:09:25And it's like... You're the spirit that gives the dead structure life, it's something like that. And, as far as I can tell, the triniterian notion that characterizes Christianity0:09:37is something like formless potential, which is never given the status of a deity in Christianity, and then the notion that there's an a priori interpretive structure0:09:46that's a consequence of our ancient existence as Beings, it goes back as far in time as you can go, the notion of a structure.0:09:56And then the idea of a consciousness that is the tool of that structure and that interacts with the world and gives it reality.0:10:06And that's the Word, as far as I can tell, and so the notion is that there's a father - and that's the structure - and that there's a son that's transcendent, that characterizes consciousness itself,0:10:16and that it's the son - the speaking of the son - that is the active principle that turns chaos into order. That's such a sophisticated idea, as far as I'm concerned,0:10:27because while there's something about it at least phenomenologically accurate, because you do have an interpretive structure and you couldn't understand anything without it, your very body is an interpretive structure, it's been crafted over, let's say, three billion years of evolution,0:10:42without that, you wouldn't be able to perceive anything and it's taken a lot of death and struggle and tragedy to produce you, the thing that's capable of encountering this immense chaos that surrounds us0:10:55and to transform it into habitable order. And then there's the idea, too, of course, that's deeply embedded in the first chapters of Genesis, which is a staggering idea, you know,0:11:04and certainly not one that's likely, that human beings were made in the image of God, both male and female were made in the image of God, and that's of course a very difficult thing to understand,0:11:14partly because the God that's referred to in those chapters has a kind of polytheistic element although it's an element that's moving rapidly towards a unified monotheism,0:11:26but it's not also obvious to me why people would come up with that concept, because I don't really think that when we think about each other we immediately think godlike, you know, the notion that every single human being,0:11:38regardless of their peculiarities and strangenesses and sins and crimes and all of that, has something divine in them that needs to be regarded with respect,0:11:47and that plays an integral role, at least an analogous role, in the creation of habitable order out of chaos, that's a magnificent, remarkable, crazy idea,0:12:00and yet we developed it, and I do firmly believe that it sits at the base of our legal system, I think it is the cornerstone of our legal system.0:12:10That's the notion that everyone is equal before God, which is, of course, a completely strange idea, it's very difficult to understand how anybody could have ever come up with that idea, because the manifold differences between people are so obvious and so evident0:12:24that you could say the natural way of viewing human beings is in this extremely hierarchical manner, where some people are contemptible and easily brushed off0:12:34as pointless and pathological and without value whatsoever. And all the power accrues to a certain tiny aristocratic minority at the top.0:12:45But if you look at the way that the idea of the individual sovereignty developed, it's clear that it unfolded over thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands of years0:12:55before it became something firmly fixed in the imagination that each individual had something of transcendent value about them,0:13:04and I tell you, we dispense with that idea at our serious peril. And so, if you're going to take that idea seriously, which you do, because you act it out, otherwise you wouldn't be law abiding citizens,0:13:15you act that idea out, it's firmly shared by everyone who acts in a civilized manner. The question is: Why in the world do you believe it?0:13:26Assuming you believe what you act out, which I think is a really good way of fundamentally defining belief. So that's the sort of ideas, that there's this God of tradition and structure,0:13:40that's God the Father, who uses the Son, which is more of an active force, and primarily something that's verbal, which I also think is extremely interesting,0:13:50because it's associated not with thought precisely, but with speech, and I think the reason for that is that there's something to speech that's more than mere thought,0:14:00and I think part of the reason for that is that speech is a public utterance, and, at least in principle, speech is something that's shaped by the existence of everyone else, at least across time,0:14:11because when you speak, your speech is put forward in the world as a causal element and it's also subject to criticism and cooperation and mutual shaping,0:14:25and so there's an idea here, too, that the cognitive processes that bring habitable reality out of uninhabitable chaos0:14:35have this collective and public element, which is part of the reason, by the way, that I'm an advocate of free speech, let's say, above all, because I don't think, although it is the case,0:14:46for example in the Canadian Bill of Rights, that every single right has equal value. That's the theory. It's an idiotic theory because it's absolutely impossible for a large set of rights to have absolutely equal standards and stats.0:14:58That cannot happen, there's no way that that can ever work, but that is the legal judgement. But I think it's a huge mistake, because free speech has this divine quality, let's say,0:15:08that you can't escape from, because it's the thing that manufactures everything else, you know, and I do think that the dream0:15:18that you can think of as encapsulated in the stories of Genesis is the dream by which human beings dreamed up the idea that we would now consider consciousness,0:15:28because it took us a long time to figure out the word consciousness, it's not like it's bloody obvious, who knows how many thousands of years -0:15:39or who knows what struggles we had to undertake to abstract out something like consciousness, and how we had to represent that dramatically, say, or symbolically,0:15:48or in a dream-like fashion, before we could actually formulate the term and localize that to some degree in people. It's very sophisticated.0:15:57So John makes the case that, well, there's an emanation of God or an element of God, the transcendent consciousness, something like that,0:16:08that acts directly and in a sort of living way with the underlying potential of the world, and I think that that's phenomenologically accurate0:16:18and I do think that that's the way we regard our lives, because, you know, when you think about it, too, we tend to think that what you encounter when you're looking at the world is the material world,0:16:28but that isn't how you act. You do act as if you're in a place of potential and also in a place of potential that you can actually transform,0:16:37which is also something extraordinarily strange, you know, because we do treat each other as if we're capable of bringing new forms into the world in some permanent manner.0:16:47And we treat each other as if we have free choice and free will, and perhaps we don't, but it's certainly the case that societies that are predicated on the idea that we don't0:16:57don't do very well. And societies that are predicated on the idea that we do seem to do a lot better. Plus, people tend to get very annoyed at you if you treat them0:17:06like they're automatons that lack free will, that's something people find very, I would say, constraining, slave-like, about that even. The demand that you don't have actual autonomy-0:17:18And even worse that you're not responsible for your choices It's an insult to someone to suggest to them that they're not responsible for their choices.0:17:29To do that to someone from a legal perspective you have to argue something like diminished capacity Well you're mentally ill or you don't have the intellectual capacity0:17:40Or you were addled by some substance or you had a brain injury or something and that's why you're not responsible for your actions Otherwise, part of the respect that you give to another human being0:17:50is the assumption that they're responsible for their actions And some of that can be if you do something bad then you're responsible for it But part of that too is if you do something good, you're also responsible for that0:18:03And that also seems necessary because- I mean, it's gotta be more annoying than anything else you could imagine to strive virtuously0:18:15let's say to produce something of extreme value and then to be treated as if that was a mere deterministic outcome and that your actual choices had nothing to do with that People find that sort of thing extraordinarily punishing0:18:29I know that there are debates about all these things and debates about free will and debates about the nature of consciousness but I'm trying to take a clear look at how people act and how they want to be treated0:18:40and then trace it back to these old ideas to see if there's some metaphysical connection So here's how the book opens0:18:51In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.0:19:00And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters Now this is a hard - what would you call - narrative section to get a handle on0:19:13Because in order to understand it properly you have to actually look behind it. So there are a lot of pieces of old stories in the Old Testament that flesh out the meaning of these lines0:19:27And I can give you a quick overview of it. One of the ideas that lurks underneath these lines Although you can't tell because it's in English0:19:37You have to look at the original languages And of course I don't speak the original languages so I've had to use secondary sources Too bad for me But the "without form and void and the deep" idea0:19:49You see, that's associated with this notion of endless deep potential So for example, the words that are used to represent "without form and void"0:20:00Are something like - well one is - I'm going to get this partly wrong Tohu wa-bohu and another one is Taom and it's important to know this because those words are associated with an earlier Mesopotamian word which is0:20:13Tiamat. And Tiamat was a dragon-like creature who represented the salt water And Tiamat had a husband named Apsu0:20:22And Tiamat and Apsu were sort of locked together in kind of a sexual embrace and it was that locking together of Tiamat and Apsu and I would say that's potential and order- something like that0:20:33or chaos and order. They were locked together. And it was that union of chaos and order that give rise, in the old Mesopotamian myth which is the Enuma Elish, to Being0:20:44to the old gods first and then eventually as creation progressed to human beings themselves and so there's the idea lurking underneath these initial lines0:20:54that God is akin to that which confronts the unknown and carves it into pieces and makes the world out of its pieces and the thing that it confronts is something like a predatory reptile - something like a dragon or it's something like a serpent0:21:09and I think part of the reason for that, and this is a very deep and ancient idea, is that - [exhale] this is where it gets so complicated to do the translation -0:21:20partly that is how human beings created our world. Like we went out beyond the confines of our safe spaces, let's say, our safe spaces defined by the tree or defined by the fire0:21:33and we actively voyaged outward to the places that we were afraid of and didn't understand and conquered and encountered things out there0:21:46like literally animals, like mammoths and snakes and predators of all sorts and as a consequence of that active brave engagement with the domain of what we did not understand -0:21:55the terrifying domain of what we did not understand - that the world in fact was generated and that idea lurks deeply inside the opening lines of Genesis,0:22:05and it's a profound idea in my estimation. I think also that the way our brains are structured - and this is something that I'm going to try to develop more today - is that0:22:16the ancient circuits that our ancestors used to deal with the space beyond which they had already explored so that would be home territory0:22:26so that's that unknown territory that's characterized by promise because there are new things out there but also by intense danger because we're prey animals0:22:35especially millions of years ago when we were very young we had to go out there and encounter things that were terribly dangerous and there was a kind of paternal courage0:22:45that went along with that and it was the spirit of that paternal courage that enabled the conquering of the unknown and there is no difference between the conquering of the unknown and the0:22:54creation of habitable order. The thing is, that as our cognitive faculties have developed, to the point where we're capable of very high levels of abstraction,0:23:05the underlying biological architecture has remained the same. So I don't think it's too much to say at all that the circuits that engage you - for example0:23:15when you're having an argument about something fundamental with someone that you love. So you're trying to structure the world around you, jointly, to create a habitable space0:23:26that you both can exist within. You're using the same circuits - the abstracted version - that our archaic ancestors would have used when they went out into the unknown itself0:23:37to encounter beasts and predators and geographical unknowns. It's the same circuit, it's just that we do it abstractly now instead of concretely.0:23:47Of course it has to be the same circuit because evolution is a very conservative force. What else would it be? I think this it why it is so easy for us to demonize those people who are our enemies0:24:00because our enemies confront us with what we don't want to see. And because of that our first response is to use snake detection circuitry on them.0:24:15and that accounts for our capacity - almost immediate capacity - to demonize. And there's a reason for that, it's not a trivial thing. First of all it's a very fast response,0:24:24and second of all it's a response that has worked for a very very very long time. You know, one of the variants of the hero - and I would consider a variant of the hero0:24:37like a fragment of the picture of God - is the heroic warrior who slays the enemy. Of course, that's not precisely a politically correct representation of the hero in modern times.0:24:48Well, and no wonder! But it's still something that you go watch in movies all the time and admire, right? It's like, one of the most - How many plots are there? Romance and adventure, that's about it.0:24:59And most of the adventure genre is, well, there's some enemy that's lurking in some form - it could be human, it could be alien - and someone rises up to go and confront it and maintain order, you know, it's like...0:25:11There's no getting away from that story. And if you don't have that in your own life, then you play a video game where that's happening, or you watch a movie where that's happening, or you read a book where that's happening0:25:21and it captures you. Even if you're atheistic and your only religion is Star Wars, you know. [laughter] Well, really! Really! Right? Really, it still captures your imagination.0:25:33You act like someone who's possessed by religious fervor when you line up for three days to be the first one into the theater, you know. And all the while claiming that you're atheistic to the core, it's like...0:25:44[laughter] Okay, so, this "without form and void" is this chaotic - and it's a hard thing to get a grip on, what exactly this means0:25:58But I can give you another kind of example of how you would experience the formless chaos of potential in your own lives, and even how the order that you currently inhabit can dissolve into that.0:26:11You know, in Dante's Inferno, when he outlined the levels of Hell - so Dante was trying to get to the bottom of what constituted evil in this representation,0:26:23so it's a work of psychology, and he's thinking, there are various ways to behave reprehensibly, but there's a hierarchy of reprehensible behavior, and there's something absolutely0:26:34the worst at the bottom. And Dante believed that it was betrayal. And I think that's right because, you know, one of the things that enables0:26:45long-term peaceful cooperation between people is trust. And I would also say that trust is the fundamental natural resource. There's been some very good books written on the economic utility of trust, for example.0:26:57Societies where the default economic presupposition between trading partners is trust tend to be rich, even if they don't have any natural resources.0:27:08You can see that, for example, with what happened with eBay, which I think was a kind of miracle because what should've happened with eBay was that you sent me junk, and I sent you a check that bounced, right?0:27:17And that was the end of eBay. [laughter] Right, right, exactly. But that isn't what happened! The default transaction on eBay was so honest that the brokers -0:27:29you could hire brokers to begin with, I can't remember what they were called exactly, but you could pay someone a fee so that they would guarantee the transaction. So, you know, you wouldn't send me junk and I'd actually send you a payment0:27:40and we'd pay 10% for someone to guarantee that. The default trade was so honest that those things vanished right away. And so that meant all this frozen capital, roughly speaking, which were all the junk that people0:27:52had lying around that someone else might want, instantly became money. And the only reason that worked was because people trusted one another. And so, trust is an unbelievably powerful economic force0:28:03maybe the most powerful economic force. Anyways, if you have a relationship with someone, it's predicated on trust, and part of the reason for that is that0:28:12trust is what enables us to look at each other without running away screaming. And what I mean by that is that if I trust you, then I don't have to take into account how complicated you are, because you're horribly complicated.0:28:24I think chimpanzee full of snakes, that's what a human being is. [laughter] And as long as you'll do what you say you'll do, then I can take you at your word,0:28:33and your word simplifies you, and you can take me at my word, and my word simplifies you, and then we can act like we understand each other even though we don't. But then, if that trust is betrayed,0:28:44then all the snakes come forth very very rapidly. All of you, I suspect, have been betrayed one way or another and so, what happens if you're in a relationship with someone0:28:54and you trust them, then you make certain assumptions about the past, and you make certain assumptions about the present, and you make certain assumptions about the future. And everything's stable, so you're standing on solid ground.0:29:05And the chaos, it's like you're standing on thin ice. The chaos is hidden. The shark beneath the waves isn't there. You're safe, you're in the lifeboat.0:29:14But then if the person betrays you - like if you're in an intimate relationship and the person has an affair and you find out about it, then you think, one moment you're one place, right? You're where everything is secure0:29:25because you've predicated your perception of the world on the axiom of trust, and the next second - really, the next second - you're in a completely different place.0:29:34And not only is that place different right now, the place you were years ago is different, and the place you're going to be in the future years hence is different.0:29:43And so, all of that certainty that strange certainty that you inhabit can collapse into incredible complexity. And you say, well if someone betrays you, you think,0:29:53"Okay, who were you? "Because you weren't who I thought you were. "And I thought I knew you. But I didn't know you at all. "And I never knew you, and so all the things we did together,0:30:03"those weren't the things that I thought were happening. Something else was happening! "And you're someone else. "That means I'm someone else because I thought I knew what was going on, and clearly I don't.0:30:12"I'm some sort of blind sucker, or "the victim of a psychopath or someone who's so naive that they can barely live. "And I don't understand anything about human beings,0:30:21"and I don't understand anything about myself, "and I have no idea where I am now. "I thought I was at home, but I'm not. I'm in a house "and it's full of strangers.0:30:30I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow, or next week, or next year." All of that certainty, that habitable certainty, collapses right back into the potential from which it emerged.0:30:41And that's a terrifying thing. That's a journey to the underworld from a mythological perspective. And that is really something worth knowing. Because journeys to the underworld are extraordinarily common in mythological stories.0:30:54Like the hobbit going out to find Smaug, the dragon and get the gold is the journey into the underworld. Journeys to the underworld happen all the time, and0:31:03modern people don't understand what the underworld is except that we've all been there. And we go there all the time. And we go there every time the solidity and the stability0:31:13of the world that we've erected, at least partly through our speech, is shattered because some sort of snake appears - that's another way of thinking about it.0:31:22It's a really good way of thinking about it because no matter how carefully you construct the little habitable area that's around you, there's always something0:31:31you didn't take into account, and there's always something that can pop up its head and do you in and make you aware of your mortality and age you, for that matter, or even kill you.0:31:43That's the permanent situation of life, which is part of the reason why I think the story of Adam and Eve, for example, is archetypal. It's because we do inhabit walled gardens, right?0:31:53Because a walled garden is half structure, society, and half nature, that's what a walled garden is. A walled garden is a place of0:32:02of paradise and warmth and love and sustenance, but it's also the place where0:32:12something can pop up at any moment and knock you out of it, and I think part of the reason that that story exists at the beginning of this collection of books is because it explains the eternal situation of human beings. We're always in that situation.0:32:26We're in a walled garden. Or we bloody well hope we are. But there's always a snake. And it's even worse because if there is a snake, we're exactly the sort of creatures who are going to do nothing but go interact0:32:37with that snake the second that we can manage it. It's definitely the case that if you want a human being to muck around with something, the best thing to do is to tell them not ever to do it, have anything to do with it.0:32:47Which is, of course, something you know if you have teenagers. [laughter] Or even children. Or if you know anything about yourself, or your partner.0:32:58So, these stories are trying to express what you might describe as an unchanging, transcendent reality. It's something like what's common across0:33:08across all human experience across all time. And that's what Jung essentially meant by an archetype. And you could say, well, We tend to think that what we see0:33:17with our senses is real. Of course that's true, but what we see with our senses is what's real that works at the time frame that we exist in, right?0:33:27We see things that we can touch and pick up, we see tools, essentially, that are useful for our moment-to-moment activities. We don't see the structures of eternity,0:33:36especially not the abstract structures of eternity. We have to imagine those with our imagination. That's partly what these stories are doing— they're saying, well,0:33:45There's forms of stability that transcend our capacity to observe. Which is hardly surprising— we know that if we're scientists, right?0:33:55'Cause we're always abstracting out things that we can't immediately observe. But there are metaphysical or moral realities or phenomenological realities that have the same nature:0:34:04you can't see them in your life by observing them with your senses. But you can imagine them with your imagination. Sometimes the things you imagine with your imagination0:34:15are more real than the things that you see! Numbers are like that, for example. There's endless examples of that. I would say, well... This is also a good way of thinking about fiction0:34:26because a good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was derived. Otherwise it has no staying power, right? It's distilled reality. Even though, in some sense, "it never happened."0:34:37It's like, it depends on what you mean by "happened." Y'know? It's—It's— It's a pattern that repeats in many, many places, with variation.0:34:46You extract out the central pattern. The pattern, purely, never existed in any specific form, But the fact that you've pulled a pattern out from all those exemplars means that0:34:56you've extracted something real. And I think the reason that the story of Adam and Eve—which we'll talk about in quite a bit of detail today—0:35:05has been immune to being forgotten is because it says things about the nature of the human condition that are always true. I can give you another brief example.0:35:15Like, people have a lot of guilt. Y'know, there's a line of social psychology that claims that most people feel that they're better than other people. I just don't buy that—that isn't what I've seen in my life.0:35:26Maybe I'm a bit biased 'cause I'm a clinical psychologist, and I see more people who are overtly suffering, maybe, than people do in general. Although, I'm not so sure about that, y'know, because0:35:36you don't have to scratch very far beneath the surface of most people's lives before you find something truly tragic. And I don't mean the sort of tragedy that0:35:45you whine about, I mean y'know, your mother has Alzheimer's, or your best friend committed suicide, or you have a close relative with cancer, you have a sick child, or0:35:54there's something wrong with you because almost everyone has at least one really terrible thing wrong with them. And if you don't, hey, you will, so, y'know. [laughter]0:36:04So, y'know, that tragic sense of Being is there with people all the time. And it's also the case that, in my experience—0:36:13I rarely meet someone who says, "Hey, y'know, "I'm doing everything I possibly can, I'm a hell of a guy, and I can't see how I could possibly improve."0:36:23[laughter] You meet someone like that, you think they're narcissistic, right? And you're right. [laughter] But most people don't feel that way! They feel like0:36:32they could do a hell of a lot better than they are, and they're quite acutely aware of their faults, and they don't feel that they're what they should be. And you see, what happens in the story of Adam and Eve as well0:36:42is that when people become self-conscious— at least, that's how it looks to me— they get thrown out of Paradise, and then they're in history, and history is a place where0:36:51there's pain in childbirth, and where you're dominated by your mate, and where you have to toil like mad—like no other animal because you're aware of the future.0:37:00You have to work and sacrifice the joys of the present for the future—constantly! And you know you're going to die. You have all that weight on you. To me, again, that's just—0:37:09how can anything be more true than that? As far as I can tell, that's just how it is for— unless you're naive beyond comprehension!0:37:19There's something about your life that is echoed in that representation. And why it is that p— I mean, we're such strange creatures because0:37:28we don't seem to really fit into Being, in some sense. That's also what's expressed in the notion of the Fall. The existentialists said people feel like they have0:37:38a debt that they have to pay off to existence for the crime of their Being. Something like that. Maybe it's because we're acutely aware that we have to0:37:48offer something of value to the people around us so that they can tolerate us. Y'know, while we're going about our business, but it seems deeper than that. It's that0:37:57human beings seem to exist in a post-cataclysmic world, and that's exactly also what's represented in Genesis. It's very interesting because0:38:06in the Adam and Eve story, there's two— there's two catastrophes, essentially. There's the catastrophe that occurs when Adam and Eve wake up—which we'll talk about in detail—0:38:15and become self-conscious and know they're naked. And their eyes are opened, right? That's the terminology that's used, and to have your eyes opened means to have a...0:38:25an increment in consciousness, essentially. 'Cause eyes are associated with consciousness for human beings 'cause we're intensely visual animals. And so the metaphor for having your eyes opened0:38:35means—is the same as the metaphor of coming to consciousness, and as soon as Adam and Eve come to consciousness, they realize they're naked. The classic interpretation of that is it has something0:38:45to do with sexual sin, and I don't believe that. I don't believe that's what it means. Although there are elements about that that're relevant.0:38:54It's more that to realize that you're naked... It's like—y'know, if you dream that you're naked and on a stage in front of people, that's not a sexual dream, man!0:39:03Unless you're some kind of strange exhibitionist, right? [laughter] You wanna cover yourself up and get the hell off that stage as fast as possible! And so, to be naked in front of a crowd0:39:13is to have everyone— it's to have the judgement of the social world focused on your self-evident inadequacies.0:39:23And that makes people self-conscious. That's a real human state—it's associated with neuroticism in the Big Five trait model, but people don't like that at all. They don't like having their0:39:33fragility and vulnerability exposed to the group. It's one of the two major fears of people. 'Cause one is social humiliation. And the other is something like mortality and death.0:39:43[chuckle] Your typical agoraphobic, for example, gets to have both those fears at the same time because she— it's usually a she— tends to believe she's going to have a very0:39:53spectacular and exhibitionistic heart attack in a public place, and make a terrible fool of herself while she's dying. [laughter]2:06:05Requested P offer his look at human's appointment to further create. Here's something interesting too; we will develop this a lot. You see, when Adam and Eve eat the fruit,2:06:16when the snake gives them the fruit, the thing that happens is their eyes are opened. Okay, to me that means that they've woken up. there's been an increment in their consciousness.2:06:26The next thing that happens is they recognize that they're naked. To recognize that you're naked is to recognize that you're vulnerable. Human beings are strange creatures [JBP bends over]2:06:35most animals are like this, and they're protected. But not us. [stands tall] Our most vulnerable parts are displayed for harm and for everyone to observe.2:06:44Right, so we have that sort of bipedal self-consciousness built into us. But what is really interesting, is that when Adam and Eve realize that they're naked2:06:53it's the same moment that they know the difference between good and evil. and that -- God -- that, I just ground away on that for years [just-out-of-vision stammers]2:07:03what's the relationship between consciousness, knowledge of nakedness and the knowledge of good and evil? I think I figured it out. I think it was that --2:07:12you see -- when you know that you're vulnerable.... And they also developed knowledge of death, right? So So it's deep knowledge of vulnerability. They get embarrassed about that. They cover themselves up, right?2:07:22So that's culture. So it's a very profound shock for them to recognize that they're naked. It even makes Adam hide from God. Then they develop the knowledge of good and evil.2:07:31Well, I think because, you see, human beings have this peculiar capacity that no other creature has, which is I know how I can be hurt, because I am aware of my own limitations. Painfully aware.2:07:43And now because I know how I can be hurt, I know how you can be hurt. And I can take advantage of that. And that's how evil enters the world. That's how it looks like to me.2:07:53I've got this expansion of knowledge. It says in Genesis that that gives people another attribute of divinity: knowing the difference between good and evil. It has nothing to do with animals2:08:03and it has nothing to do with Adam and Eve prior to having their eyes open. But the cosmos switches when that self-consciousness manifests itself. That's when the possibility of evil enters the world. It's something like that.2:08:15That's also echoed by the intimate relationship between the snake in the Garden of Eden and Satan. [Stammers]2:08:24That's a very strange association. It's like this snake also becomes the adversary of being. and I think I'll jump very quickly into that, but2:08:33But I think that's because [first] there's the snake that bites you in the jungle; and then there's the snake that lives in your enemy; And then there's the snake that lives in your family if you banish the enemy to the netherlands.2:08:45Then there's the snake that lives in you if you remove yourself from your family. And that snake that's in you -- right --2:08:54that's a psychological phenomena, that's equivalent to transcendent evil itself -- the thing that inhabits every single person. And that's why there's that association between the snake and Satan.2:09:04and that's where I think people have this... it's associated with our knowledge of vulnerability that gives us this constant capacity for evil.2:09:14Can you Imagine if you're a medieval torturer? -- you know people don't generally imagine that sort of thing -- but people were medieval torturers and they were very good at what they did.2:09:24The only way you can be a torturer is to know what would hurt you. Right, and so you exploit the knowledge of your own vulnerability to bring pain into the world.2:09:34I don't think you can lay that precisely at God's feet. Now people have been arguing about that for a very long time.2:09:43The question for me that arose from that. Fine, like tragedy, you can lay that at God's feet. Well if we didn't bring additional evil into the world, could we tolerate the tragedy of being without becoming corrupt?2:09:58Well I think generally the answer to that is:Yes, as I've seen people react quite heroically to the arbitrary burdens of their life. but malevolence: man, that lays them low.2:10:08It seems to be nothing but a destructive force. I do believe this as well -- you see it in the Cain and Abel story -- that the root for malevolence is the desire for revenge against God for creation itself.2:10:21I've read terrible things written by terrible people, trying to get to the bottom of things. I've mentioned the Columbine killers for example. It's clear. All you have to do is read what they wrote.2:10:32What they were doing was taking revenge against God. They knew that. It wasn't unconscious. They'd been dwelling on this for months, plotting their revenge.2:10:41And it was against for being itself, for the crime of being.0:00:00Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority
0:00:000:00:09I'm really looking forward to this lecture, not like I wasn't looking forward to the other ones, but the stories that I want to cover tonight, one of the things that just absolutely staggers me about them,0:00:19especially the story of Cain and Abel (which I hope to get to) is, like, it's so short. It's unbelievable. It's like ten, eleven lines. There's nothing to it at all. And I've found that it's essentially inexhaustible in its capacity to reveal meaning, and I don't exactly know what to make of that.0:00:34I mean I... I think, you know, because I said I was going to take as rational an approach to this issue as I possibly could, I think it has something to do with this intense process of condensation across very long periods of time. That's the simplest explanation.0:00:47But I'll tell you, the information in there is so densely packed that it really is-- it's really-- it's not that easy to come up with an explanation for that. Not one that I find fully compelling.0:00:58I mean, I do think that the really old stories (and we've been covering the really archaic stories in the Bible so far) I think that one of the things that you can be virtually certain about is that everything about them0:01:09that was memorable was remembered, right, and so in some sense And this is kind of like the idea of Richard Dawkins idea of memes, which is often why I thought that Richard Dawkins if he was a little bit more0:01:20mystically inclined he would have become Karl Jung, because their theories are unbelievably similar. The similar of meme and the similar of arch... the idea of archetypes of the collective unconscious are very, very similar ideas except Jungian ideas-- far more profound in my0:01:33estimation well it just is he thought it [through] so much better. You know Because Dawkins tended to think of memes sort of like a mind worm you know something that would infest a mind and maybe multiple minds0:01:45But he never really took I don't think he really ever took the idea with the seriousness it deserved And I did hear him actually make a joke with Sam Harris the last time they talked about the fact that that0:01:56there was some possibility that the Production of memes say religious memes could alter evolutionary history, [and] they both avoided that topic instantly0:02:05They had a big laugh about it men decided they weren't going to go down that road and so that wasn't fair that was quite [interesting] to me, but these0:02:14Is the the the density of these stories I do really [think] still is a is a mystery it Certainly has something to do with their absolute0:02:23[their] in their impossibility to be forgotten [you] know and that's actually something that we could be tested empirically I don't know if anybody has ever done that because you could tell naive people two stories even equal length right one that had an archetypal theme and the other that didn't and then wait three months and0:02:38See which one's people remembered better and be relatively straightforward thing to test I haven't tested it, but maybe I will at [some] point, but anyways, that's all to say that. I'm very0:02:48Excited about this lecture because I get an opportunity to go over the story of Adam and eve and the story of cain and Abel And I [hopefully] [manage] both of those today, and maybe we'll get to the story of Noah and the tower of babel as well0:02:59But I wouldn't count on it not arthur eight we've been not at the rate we've been progressing if that's okay That's that's no problem. It's there's no sense rushing this [alright]. So we're going to go before we go that before we do that0:03:11I want to Finish my discussion of the idea of the psychological significance of the idea of God, and I've been thinking [about] this a lot more0:03:20You know because of course this lecture series gives me the opportunity and the necessity to continue to think and you know it Certainly is the [case] so the hypothesis that I've been developing with the trinitarian idea is something like0:03:33That the trinitarian idea is the earliest Emergence in image of the idea that there has to be an underlying cognitive Structure that gives rise to consciousness as well as consciousness itself and so what I would suggest0:03:46Was that the idea of God the father is something akin to the idea of the a priori? structure that that gives rise to consciousness You know that's an inbuilt part of us, so that's our structure. You could think about that as something0:03:59That's been produced over a vast evolutionary time span and I don't think that's completely out of keeping with the with the With the ideas [that] are laid forth in Genesis one at least if you think about them from a metaphorical perspective0:04:11And it's hard to read them literally because I don't know what you know. There's an emphasis on day and night, but The idea of Day and night as as 24-hour diurnal. You know0:04:22daytime and nighttime Interchanges [that] are based on the claw on the earthly clock seems to be a bit Absurd when you first start to think about the construction of the cosmos so just doesn't seem to me that a literal interpretation0:04:35is Appropriate and I mean it's another thing that you might not know but you know many of the early church [fathers] one of them origen in particular stated very clearly this was in 300 ad that these ancient stories were to be taken as as0:04:48Wise metaphors and not to be taken literally like the idea that the people who established Christianity for example were all the sorts of people who were biblical [literalist]. It's just absolutely historically wrong0:04:59[I] mean some of them were and some of them still are that's not the point Many of them weren't and it's not like people who live 2,000 years ago were stupid by any stretch of the imagination And so they were perfectly capable of understanding what constant you know what constituted something approximating a metaphor and also knew that0:05:15fiction in some sense Considered as an abstraction could tell you truth that nonfiction wasn't able Wasn't able to get at lets you think that fiction is only for entertainment0:05:24And I think that's a very that's a that's a big mistake to think that so Alright, so here we go so yes so with regards to the idea of God the father, so the idea is that0:05:36In order to make sense out of the world you have [to] have an a priori cognitive Structure that was something that immanuel kant as I said last time put forward as an argument against the idea that all of the information that we0:05:49Acquire during our lifetime [is] a consequence of incoming sense data and the reason that kant objected to that and he was Absolutely right about this is that you can't make sense of sense Data without an a priori structure0:06:00You can't extract from sense data the structure that enables you to make sense of sense data It's not possible, and that's really being demonstrated I would say Beyond the shadow of a doubt since the 1960s and the best0:06:14demonstration of that was actually the initial failure of artificial intelligence because when the AI people started promising that we would have fully functional and autonomous robots and artificial intelligence back in the0:06:241960s What they didn't understand and what stole them terribly until about the early 1990s was that it was almost That the problem of perception with a much deeper problem than anybody ever0:06:35Recognized because like when you look at the world you just see well look there's objects out there and by the way you don't Objects you see tools just so you know in the neurobiology. That's quite clear0:06:45You don't see objects and infer utility You see useful things and infer object so it's actually the reverse of what people generally think but the point is is that0:06:54Regardless of whether you see objects or useful things when you look [at] the world you just see it And you think well seeing is easy because they're the things are and all you have to do is like you know turn your head0:07:03And they appear And that's just so wrong that it's it's almost impossible to overstate Like the problem of perception is staggeringly difficult and one of the primary reasons that we still don't really have autonomous robots0:07:16so there were a lot closer to it than we were in the 1960s because it turned out that you actually have to [have] an embodied you have to have a body before you can say it and Even more importantly you [have] to have a body before you can see0:07:28Because the act of seeing is actually the act of mapping the patterns of the world [onto] the patterns of the body. It's not Things are out there you see them then you think about them, then you evaluate them0:07:39Then you decide to act on them and then you act. [I] mean that you could call that a folk idea of Psychological processing or a perception it's not that is not how it works like your eyes for [example] map0:07:51One of the things they do is map right onto your spinal cord for example They might right onto your emotional system So it's actually possible for example For people to be blind and still be able to detect facial expressions0:08:03Which is to say you can with someone who's cortically blind so they've had their visual Cortex Destroyed often by a stroke they'll tell you that they can't see anything0:08:12But they can guess which hand you put up if you ask them to and if you flash them pictures of Angry or Fearful Faces they show skin conductance responses to the more emotion laden faces0:08:21And it's because imagine that the world is made out of patterns which it is then imagine that those patterns are transmitted to you Electromagnetically you have to light and then imagine that the pattern is duplicated on the retina0:08:33And then that pattern is propagated along the optic nerve and then the pattern is distributed throughout your brain and some of that pattern Makes up what you call conscious vision, but other parts of it0:08:43Just activate your body so for example when I look at this when I look at this this whatever it whatever it is a Bottle that's words, huh?0:08:54You know when I look at it Especially with intent in mind as soon as I look at it the pattern of the bod of the bottle activates the gripping mechanism of my hand and0:09:05Part of the action of per Sortie the active perception is to adjust My bodily posture including my hand grip to be of the optimal size to pick that up0:09:14And it's not that I see the bottle and then think about how to move my hand That's too slow It's that I use my motor motor Cortex to perceive the bottle and that's actually somewhat0:09:24Independent of actually seeing the bottle as a conscious experience so Anyways, huh the reason the reason that I'm telling you that [all] of that0:09:33And there's much more about that that can be told Rodney Brooks ['is] someone to know about he's a robotics engineer who worked in the 1990s and he invented the Roomba0:09:43among many other things so he's a real genius stuffed guy and He works was one of the first people to really Point out that to have to be [able] to have a0:09:54machine that Perceived well enough to work in the world That you had to give it a body and that the perception would actually be built from the body up rather than from the abstract0:10:04cognitive perceptions down and so well and that that turned out to be the case and bird rooks boiled all sorts of weird little machines in the 1990s that didn't even really have any central brain but they could do things like run away from [light] and0:10:17so they could perceive light that their perception was that act of running away from right and So perception perception is very very very tightly tied to action in ways that people don't normally perceive0:10:30Anyways, that's all to say that you cannot perceive the [world] without being embody and you know your embodied in a manner that's taken you roughly three and a half billion years to pull off right there's being a lot of death as a0:10:44Prerequisite to the embodied form that you take and so it's taken all that trial and error to produce something like you that can interact with the complexity of the world well enough to last the relatively paltry 80 or so years that you can last and0:10:57So I think about that as this may be wrong, but I think it's a useful at least it's a useful Hypothesis, I think the idea0:11:06God the father is something like the birth of the idea that there has to be an internal Structure that out of which consciousness itself arises that gives form to things and well0:11:17And if that's the case and perhaps it's not but if it's the case it's certainly reflection. It's a reflection of the kind of Factual truth that I've been describing now0:11:27and then like I also mentioned that I kind of see the idea of Both the holy Spirit and those also of christ and most specifically of christ in in the form of the word0:11:36as the active consciousness that that structure produces and uses not only to to Formulate the world because we formulate the world at least the world that we experience0:11:48We formulate but also to change and modify that world because there's absolutely no doubt that we do that Partly with our bodies which are optimally?0:11:57Developed to do that. Which is why we have hands unlike dolphins would have you know very large brains like us But can't really change the world. We're really adapted and evolved to change the world and to world and our speech [is] really a an0:12:09Extension of our ability to use our hands, so the speech systems that we use are you know very [well-developed] motor?0:12:19very well-developed motor skill and generally speaking your your dominant linguistic hemisphere is the same as your dominant hand and People talk with their hands like [me] as you may have noticed [and] we use sign language0:12:31and there's a tight relationship [between] the use of the hand and the use of language, and that's partly because language is a productive Force and the hand is part of it part of what changes the world and so all those things are tied together in a0:12:44Very very complex way with this a priori structure and also with the embodied structure And I also think that's part of the reason why classical christianity puts such an emphasis not only on the divinity of the spirit0:12:56But also on the divinity of the body, this is a harder thing to grapple with you know it's easier [for] people to think if you think in religious terms at all that you have some sort of0:13:05Transcended spirit that somehow detached from the body that might have some life after death [something] like that but the Christian Christianity in particular really insists on the divinity of the body, so the idea is that0:13:17There's an underlying structure. It's this quasi patriarchal nature partly because it's for complex reasons But partly because it's a reflection of the social structure as well as other things and then that0:13:29uses consciousness in the form particularly of language But most particularly in the form of truthful language in order to produce the world in a manner0:13:38That's good, and I think that's a walloping Powerful Powerful idea especially the relationship between the idea that it's truthful speech that gives rise to the good because that's a really fundamental0:13:48Moral Claim and I think that's a tough one to beat man because one of the things I've really noticed is and then this and It isn't just me that's for sure is that you know there's a lot of tragedy in [life]0:14:01There's no doubt about that and lots of people that I see for example in my clinical practice are Laid Low by the Tragedy of life But I also see very very frequently that people get tangled up in deceit in webs of deceit that are often multiple0:14:15Generations long and that just takes them out you know and so that so deceit can produce Extraordinary levels of suffering that lasts for very very long periods of time and that's really a clinical truism. You know because0:14:29freud of course identified one of the Problems that contributed [to] the suffering we might associate with mental illness with repression Which is it's kind of like a lie of omission0:14:40That's a perfectly reasonable way to think about it and Jung stated straight out that there was no difference between the psychotherapeutic the curative psychotherapeutic effort and0:14:50Supreme moral effort including truth that those were the same thing as far as he was [concerned] and carl Rogers another great Clinician who was at one point a Christian missionary before he became0:15:00More [moore's] more strictly scientific. He believed that it was in truthful, dialogue that that that clinical transformation took place and you know it and of course one of the0:15:13prerequisites for genuine transformation in the clinical setting is that the Therapist tells the truth and the client tells the truth because otherwise how in the world. Do [you] know what's going on?0:15:22how can you solve the problem when you don't even know what the problem is and [you] don't know what the problem is unless the Person tells you the truth that's something really to think about in light [of] your own Relationships because you know if you don't tell the people around you the truth?0:15:34And they don't know who you are and maybe that's a good thing You know because well seriously people have reasons to Lie, right? I mean that aren't trivial But it's really worth knowing that0:15:43you can't even get your hands on the problem unless you formulate it truthfully and if you can't get your hands on the problem the Probability that you're going to solve it is it's just so low and so then I've been thinking [about] as well0:15:56The this and this idea has become more Credible to [me] the longer. I've developed it the longer. I thought about it. You know the idea that there's oh0:16:09Go Bob It's partly the idea that Well, let me let [me] figure out how to start this property friend of mine business partner and a guy that [I've] written scientific papers0:16:21with very smart guy Took me to task and I think I told you this a little bit about Using the term dominance Hierarchy which might be fine for like0:16:30Chimpanzees and for lobsters and for creatures like that But not not first not not for chimpanzees even so much and and he said something [very] interesting0:16:39he thought that the [idea] of dominance Hierarchy was actually a projection of a early 20th century quasi Marxist Hypothesis [onto] the animal Kingdom that was being observed and the notion that the hierarchical structure that you see that0:16:53characterizes say mating hierarchies in Chimps for Example the idea that that was predicated on power was actually a projection of a kind of political ideology and I thought that really bugged me for a long time when he said that because0:17:05Like because I'd really been used to using the term dominant iurc and I thought he told me all that I thought that's so annoying It's so annoying because it might be right and then it took me months to think about it0:17:16And then I and then I was also reading Frans de Waal at the same time [and] he's a primatologist and also Jaak panksepp Because he was a Brilliant Brilliant0:17:25effective neuroscientist who unfortunately just died he wrote a great book called Affect of Neuroscience and For rats to play they have to play fair or they won't play with each other And that's that's a staggering discovery right because anything that helps0:17:38Instantiate the Emergence of ethical behavior in animals and that associates it with an evolutionary Process which is essentially what what pays up was doing gives credence to the [notion] that the ethics that guide us are not near0:17:54social logical epiphenomena Constructs [their] deep Deeply rooted if flat and that they're rats for god's sake he can't trust them and they still play fair you [know] and De Waal0:18:05Notice that the chimp troops that he studied, but it wasn't wasn't the barber barbaric chimp that ruled with an iron fist that was the successful ruler because he kept getting torn to shreds by his by the0:18:17Compatriots that he ignored and stomped on Susie showed some weakness. They just tear him into pieces the chimp leaders that were Stable you know that had a stable [kingdom]. Let's say0:18:27We're very Reciprocal in terms of their interactions with their friends and chimps have friends and they out they actually last for very long time chimp friendships and they were also very0:18:37reciprocal in their interactions with the females and with the infants And I thought that's [what] Frans De Waal is a very smart guy And I thought that was also foundational science because it's really something to note that0:18:49The attributes that give rise [to] dominance in a male [dominance] Hierarchy sort of use [that] word let's call it Authority that might be better or even shudder competence which [I] think is a better way of thinking about it0:19:01Is that that's not predicated purely on anything? That's that's that's as simple as brute power, and I think [too] You know I think as well that the idea and this is [a] deeply devious and dangerous0:19:12political idea in my estimation the idea that male dominance hierarchies sorry Male hierarchies are Fundamentally predicated on power in a little in a [law-abiding] in a law-abiding society0:19:23I think is I think all you [fu] think about that for like a month say She's not long to understand How absurd [that] is because most people who are in positions of authority let's say are just as hemmed in by ethical0:19:37responsibilities or even more so than people at the other levels of the of the hierarchy And we know this even in the managerial literature because we know generally speaking that0:19:46Managers are more stressed by their subordinates than the subordinates are stressed by their managers And that's not surprising you want to be responsible for like [200] people you really want that. That's hard work, man0:19:57and I mean [I] know it's a pain to have a boss because the To care about what the boss thinks and maybe the person is arbitrary which case they're not going to be particularly successful0:20:06But it's no joke to be responsible for 200 people and you have to behave very carefully when you're in a position of Responsibility and authority like that because you will get called out if you make mistakes0:20:16[constantly] so it's not like you're it's not like because you have a position That's higher up in the hierarchy that you're less constrained by ethical necessity now if you're a psychopath0:20:26Well, that's a whole different story but psychopaths have to move pretty rapidly from Hierarchy to hierarchy right because they get found out quite quickly and As soon as their reputation is shattered then they can't get away with their Shenanigans anymore, so [okay]0:20:39[so] all of this is to say that there is something very interesting about the Pattern of Behavior [so] imagine that0:20:48Imagine that sexual selection is working something like this And we know that sexual selection is a very very very very powerful biological Force even though biologists ignored it for almost a hundred years after charles Darwin originally wrote about it thinking mostly about natural selection0:21:03They didn't like the idea of sexual selection because it tended to introduce the notion of mind Into the process of [evolution] because it deals with choice you know0:21:12But so imagine on the one hand that you have a male hierarchy We know that the men at the top of the Hierarchy are much more likely to be? Reprimanded the boil. It's particularly true of men0:21:22So you have twice as many female ancestors as you have male ancestors not going to do the math? But and I know it doesn't sound plausible, but you could look it up and figure it out0:21:31It's it's perfectly reasonable fact that actually happens to be true So there's twice as if twice as many female ancestors because females are twice as likely on average to leave0:21:41offspring as men now, what happens is Any man man who does reproduce tends to reproduce more than once but a bunch of the reproduce zero? Whereas so it would be the average man who reproduces has two children [and]0:21:53the average man who doesn't reproduce have zero obviously and the average woman who reproduces has one child so That means that there's twice as many0:22:04Females in your line as there is males so that that's a big deal and and so imagine that it works something like this so the men elect0:22:13the Competent men who are admired and who are and who are I? Can't say dominant who are who are given positions of authority and respect let's put it that way and it's like an election0:22:27Now it could be an actual democratic election, but it's at least an election of consensus or it's at least an election of well We're not going to kill him for now. Which is also a form of election, right?0:22:38it's a form of tolerance [you] know so So and then what happens is the women for their part peel from the top of the mental Hierarchy and so you've got two0:22:47Factors that are driving human sexual selection across vast stretches of evolutionary time One is the election of men by men to positions where they're much more [likely] to reproduce0:22:56And the second is the tendency of women to peel off the top of [dáil] dominant turkeys which is extraordinarily well established [cross] culturally?0:23:05even if you flatten out, the socio-economic Disparity say between men [and] women like they've [done] in scAndinavia. You don't you don't?0:23:14Reduce the tendency of women to peel off the top [of] the male hierarchy by much And why would you [I] mean women are smart why in the world wouldn't they go for four?0:23:23Why wouldn't they strive to make relationships with men who [are] relatively successful? And why wouldn't they let the men themselves define why that how that constitutes success?0:23:33it makes sense like if you want to figure out who the best man is why not let the men compete and the Man who wins whatever the competition is is the best man by definition? [how] else would you define it, so0:23:46okay, so why am I telling you [all] that well the reason is is because it seems to me that there's this comp this being this complex interplay across human evolution between0:23:57the election of the male dominance Hierarchy and sexual success And that's a big deal if it's true. It could be because what would happen [you] see is that as men evolved0:24:08they would evolve to be better and better at climbing up the male hierarchy because the ones who weren't good at that wouldn't reproduce so Obviously that's going to happen0:24:17But then it wouldn't [just] be a hierarchy because there's a whole bunch of different hierarchies and so then you might say well are there commonalities across hierarchies0:24:26reasonable thing to propose it mean They're not completely opposed to one another at least if you're more success relatively more successful in [Run]0:24:35Hierarchy then you're more probable It's more probable that you'll be successful in another And that's actually a really good definition of general Intelligence or IQ and that's actually one of the things that women select men for now men also select women for that0:24:49But the selection pressure is even higher from women to men and general Iq is one of the things that propels you up across? Dominant turkeys because it's a general problem-solving mechanism, and the other thing [that] seems to do that to some degree is conscientiousness0:25:01And there's also some evidence that women prefer conscientious men so and of course why wouldn't they because you can trust them and and And and and they work, and so those are both good things0:25:11So then you think okay, so men have adapted to start to climb the male dominance Hierarchy but it's the set of all possible hierarchies that they're adapted to climb and0:25:21So then you think there's there's a set of attributes that can be acted out That and that can be embodied that will increase the probability that you're going to rise to the top of any given0:25:31Hierarchy and then you could say well that as you adapt to that fact then you start to develop an understanding of what that pattern Constitutes and so that starts to become the abstract0:25:42representation of something like multi-dimensional competence And that's like the abstraction of virtue itself well and none of that has them none of that's arbitrary now0:25:52and that's as bloody well grounded in biology if anything could [be] and I think [that's] a really hard argument to refute and Like one of the things I should tell you [about] how I think is [that] when I think something0:26:02I spend a long time trying to figure [out] if it's wrong You know because [I] like to hack at it from every possible Direction To see if it's a weak idea because if it's a weak idea0:26:11Then I'd rather just dispense with it and find something better And I've had a real hard time trying to figure out what's wrong with that idea I it seems to me that it's pretty damn solid and then the idea that0:26:24You know if you watch what people do in movies, and so on and when they're reading fiction It's obvious that they're very good at identifying both the hero and the antihero we could say the antihero0:26:33generally speaking the bad guy is someone who strives for Authority and position, but fails generally speaking not always, but fail0:26:42so he's a good bad example a kid you take a kid to a good guy bad guy movie the kid takes out pretty fast that he's not supposed to be the bad guy and and0:26:51Figures out very quickly to zero in on the good guy And that means that there's there's an affinity between the pattern of good guy that's being played out in the fiction and the perceptual0:27:02Capacity of the child you [know] and one of the things I told my son when he was a kid I used to take him to movies that were sometimes more frightening than they should have been but0:27:11One of the things I always told him was I never said don't be [afraid] because I think that's bad advice for kids What I said was keep your eye on the hero Right keep your [eye] on the hero and again0:27:22He was gripped by the movie and often quite afraid of them you know because movies can be very frightening so he just like zero in on that guy and Hoping and you know what it's like in [a] movie you hope that the good guy wins0:27:32Generally speaking, and I mean why do you do that? Where does that where does that come from you see how deeply rooted that is inside you you'll bloody well go Line up and pay to watch that happen0:27:43it's not an easy thing to understand and it's it's so self-evident to people that we don't even notice that it's a tremendous mystery and So is it so unreasonable to [think] that we would have actually over the Millennia come to some sort of collective0:27:58Conclusion about what the best of the best guys are best of the good guys are and what the worst of the bad guys are And to me archetypically speaking thinking of that as the Hostile brothers0:28:10So that's christ and Satan or cain and Abel for example very common mythological motif the hostile brothers It's like those are those those are archetypes it's like the satan for example is by definition the worst that a person can be and0:28:25Christ by definition, this is Independent of anything but Conceptualization is by definition the best today that a man can be0:28:34now as I said speaking psychologically and conceptually but I given our capacity for imagination and our ability to engage in fiction and our love for fiction and our0:28:46capacity to dramatize and our love for the story stories of heroism and Catastrophe and and good and evil. [I] can't see how it [could] any other way like so [well]0:28:56so so that's part of the Idea that's driving the notion of the evolution of the idea of God and even more specifically Driving the evolution of the idea at least in part of the trinity so God is an abstracted ideal0:29:10formulated in large part to Dissociate the ideal from any particular incarnation or man [or] any ruler and there's another rule in the biblical stories0:29:19which is that when the actual ruler [I've] mentioned this before when the actual Ruler becomes confused with the Abstracted ideals then the state immediately turns into a tyranny and the whole bloody thing collapses, [so] [the] idea, it's so sophisticated0:29:34You know one of the things that we figured out and this was a hard thing to figure out was that you had to take the Abstraction and divorce it from any particular power structure and then think about it as something [that] existed as an abstraction0:29:48But a real thing right real and that [it] governed your behavior in [everyone's] behavior including the damned King The King was responsible to the abstracted ideal man that's an impossible. That is such an impossible ideal0:30:02You know why would if they agreed [that] [5000] years ago? But one of the things you see continually happening in the old testament [is] that as soon as the israelite for example the ISraelite Kings?0:30:12become almighty the real God comes along [and] just Cuts them into pieces and then the whole bloody state falls apart for like hundreds of years. It's like0:30:22I think that's a lesson that that we have not thoroughly Consciously yet learned. It's still implicit in the narratives. We still haven't figured out. Why that's the case0:30:32Again, I think that's a real hard argument to to to dispense with so All right, so we looked at this a little bit0:30:43The trinitarian idea is that there's a there's a father that's maybe the Dramatic representation of the structures that underlie consciousness the embody structures that underlie consciousness, and then there's the son0:30:57And that's that that's consciousness But in its particular historical form that's the thing that's so interesting about the figure of the son And then there's consciousness as such and that seems to [be] something like the the indwelling spirit and so0:31:09I mean these psychological ideas came from somewhere right that they have a history they didn't just spring out of nowhere and they emerge from from dreams and0:31:18Hypothesis and artistic visions and all of that over a long time and maybe they get clarified into something like consciousness but it takes a long time to get from0:31:29To get from watching you know from to chimpanzees watching each other to a human being saying well We're we all we all exhibit this faculty called consciousness. I mean, that's a long journey0:31:41You know that's a really long [journey], and there's going to be plenty of stages in between One of the things I really like about Jean piaget the developmental psychologist was that he was so insistent that0:31:52children Act out and dramatized ideas before they understand them and And Merlin Donald who's a psychologist at Queen's university? wrote a couple of interesting books along those lines at all as well looking at the importance of0:32:04imitation for the development of Higher cognition in human beings and so the notion that We embody ideas before we abstract them out and then represent them in an articulated way0:32:14I think is an extraordinarily solid idea And I really can't see how it could [be] any other way And if you watch children you see that like think about what a child is doing0:32:23When he plays house or she plays house you know the child acts out the father or the mother But what's so interesting about me to think well? Look isn't that cute she's imitating her mother0:32:34It's like no She's not that's not what happens because when your child imitates you it's very annoying because you move your arm And then they move their arm, and you know that you move your head to copy you no one likes that0:32:47It's direct direct imitation. That's not what a child is doing with the child is playing what the child is doing is watching the mother over multiple0:32:58instantiations and then extracting out the spirit called mother and that's whatever if mother like across all those multiple manifestations and then laying out that pattern internally and0:33:11Manifesting itself in an abstract world, it's so sophisticated It's just I'm that's what you're doing when you're playing house or having a tea partier or taking care of a doll0:33:20It's not you've seen your mother take care of a doll. You haven't seen that It's that you're smart enough to pull out the abstraction And then embody it and certainly the child is attempting to strive towards an ideal at that point0:33:34You know she's not lighting her doll on fire. You know well with you know certain exceptions, but generally ones that we try to not encourage right, so0:33:45So you see that capacity in the children, and it's something we also know that if children Don't don't engage in that sort of dramatic and pretend play to a tremendous degree0:33:55That they don't they [don't] get properly socialized. It's really a critical element of Developing self understanding and then also [developing] the capability [of] being with others because what you do when you're a child0:34:08Especially around the age of four is you jointly construct a shared fictional world? Will play house together let's say and then you act out0:34:18your joint [roles] within that shared fictional world you know and and that's a form of Very advanced cognitions very sophisticated [I] see that and piaget did as well and so did you and so did freud these brilliant?0:34:30Observers and also Merlin Donald these brilliant observers of the manner in which cognition came to be they noted very clearly that0:34:39embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged enough, how could it not [be] because0:34:49Obviously, we were mostly bodies before we were minds Clearly and so we were acting out things way before we understood them just like the chimpanzees act out the idea that0:35:01You know you have to act reasonably sensibly if your head chimpanzee or you're going to get yourself ripped apart And you see that rules because when wolves have a dominance dispute, you know0:35:11They pump up their hair at each other to look big and they they growl and bark and you know they're very menacing and one Wolf chickens out rolls over puts up his neck and basically what he's saying is yeah, I'm pretty useless0:35:23So you could kill me [if] I want to if you want to and the other wolf says yeah You know you're pretty useless and I could tear out your throat but tomorrow we might need to bring down a wolf or moves0:35:34so I'll kick you out and And it's not like they think that because they don't know they don't think [that] they acted out as a behavioral pattern then if you're an [anthropologist] or [a]0:35:47An ethologist and you went and watched the wolves you'd say it's as if they were acting according to the following rule and that Often confused me because I thought well the wolves act black wolves act out rules, and I thought no. No a rule is what we0:36:03Construct, when we articulate a behavioral pattern right we observe a stable behavioral Pattern and when we articulate it We can call it a rule but for the wolves. It's not a rule0:36:13It's just a stable behavioral Pattern and so we acted like wolf troops or chimpanzee troops all of that When well I'm firfer untold really [untold] tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of years before we were able to formulate0:36:28That pattern of behavior at anything approximating a story or the image and [and] even longer before we could articulate it as a set of0:36:37Ethical Rules, and I'm dwelling this I know I've repeated some of this before But it's so important because you know there's this tremendous push, especially from the social the social0:36:51Constructionist to make the case that ethics is arbitrary ethics is morality is relative There's no fundamental biological grounding in relationship to human behavior0:37:00Especially [in] the in the category of ethics, and I think that that's well first of all It's dangerous because that means that people are Anything you want to turn them into [and] you bloody well better be careful of [people] who think [that] and second?0:37:12I just think that the evidence that that's wrong is so overwhelming that we should just stop thinking that way I mean the and that's probably why I'm also attacking this from an evolutionary perspective0:37:23there's lots of converging lines of evidence that ethic ethical standards of at least of the most of the most crucial store Sort not only evolve but also0:37:35Spontaneously re-emerge for example in the dramatic play of children, so we need to take that seriously and so well That's partly what we're doing here trying to take that seriously, so0:37:53Okay, so the idea there at least in part was [that] the father employed the sun to generate habitable order out of Chaos [I]?0:38:02Also think there might be something more approximately true about that as well too because one of the things we do know There's something that's cool about men0:38:11men are much more criminal than women and that by the way that does not look like it's Socio-cultural partly because it peaks when testosterone kicks in around 14 like it just spikes the hell up0:38:22And then it really it stays pretty high until about 27 and so standard Penological theory for those of you who don't know this is that if you have a repeat offender?0:38:32You know a guy who just won't stop getting in trouble [yes] home in prison till he's 28, and it isn't like you're rehabilitating him or anything. It's like by 28 He's done with his criminal career because the crime curve is peaks at 15 and then falls down around0:38:4727 or so it burns out and that's often by the way that's often that's that's often when men get married and settle down and [stabilized] one of the things that's One of the things that's cool about that is the creativity curve for men is almost exactly the same thing [it]0:39:02Ramps up when testosterone kicks in and then it starts to flatten out around 27 that Curves Match very very closely so that's so that's that's quite cool0:39:11It's the creativity Element of it that I'm particularly interested in because the creativity is in many ways it [attributed] youth and that's look. I mean0:39:21if you look at that sentence And you've stripped it of its religious context what you would say is that well the older people use the younger people to0:39:32Generate creative ideas and renew [the] world it's like yeah, that's that's what happens, and you you know you also have no idea How many of the things that we?0:39:41Discovered or invented as human beings were stumbled across by children and adolescence You know because they're well, they're much more exploratory They're less constrained by their by their already extent knowledge structures0:39:53and they're less conservative so yeah that seems just right to me, so And right in an extraordinarily important way0:40:05Because it also means that it's like if you're an actual father One of the things that it means is [that] that's part of what you should be encouraging your son to do right Which is which [is] does the rail of a father is to encourage0:40:17That is clearly the role and to encourage is to say well. Go out there confront the Chaos of The unknown and the Chaos that underlies everything and drop it with it. You know how because you can do0:40:29It here as big as the Chaos itself And you know do something useful as a consequence and makes your life [better] and make everyone else's life better And you know you can do it and man. That's the right thing to tell that's the right thing to tell young men0:40:41You know talking to young women is more complicated because they have more more Let's say issues to deal with because their lives are more complicated in some ways0:40:50but that's definitely the right thing to be to be telling your your son and one of the things that I've really noticed recently since I've been lecturing especially in the last seven or eight months most of my audiences being young men and and0:41:02I've talked a lot of them [too] a lot I've talked a lot to them about both truth and responsibility and I think that those those are the two things that underlie this capacity and0:41:13It there seems to me to be a tremendous [hunger] for that idea. It's not the same idea as right You know it's very different ideas. It's a counterpart to right and so it's you know0:41:25Life is [hard]. [it's] chaotic. It's difficult. It's really Definitely a challenge And so you can either shrink from that and no bloody wonder because you know it's going to kill you0:41:34It's not it's no joke man where you can? Fuckin front it and try to do something about it Well, what's better and and then you say [to] the person look man?0:41:44you could do it like that's what a human being is like and if you just stood up and got yourself together and You find out by trying that you can in fact do that0:41:53And I do think that that's that's a great core religious message as far as I [can] tell and I think that's deeply embedded in this sort of in this sort of idea, so0:42:04All right, so this is what I've [been] telling you. This is something like how knowledge itself is generated first of all there's the unknown as0:42:14And that's really what you don't know anything about and generally when you encounter that you don't encounter it with thought You encounter it like this Right and that that's the first0:42:25Representation of the absolutely unknown, it's something that is beyond your comprehension, and it's terrifying and because it's Beyond your comprehension You cannot perceive it you cannot understand it0:42:34But you still have to deal with it and the way you deal with it Is [that] you freeze that's what the that's what a basilisk does say to the to the kids in Harry Potter, right?0:42:43They take a look at it And they freeze that's the snake the Terrible snake of Chaos that lives underneath everything you see that that thing freezes you and that's because [you're] a prey animal0:42:52but at the same time it makes you curious, and so that's the first level of contact with the absolute unknown is the0:43:01Emotional combination of freezing and curiosity and that's reflected I think in the dragon stories the dragon is the terrible thing that lives underground Accords gold or hoards Virgins very very strange behavior for reptile as we pointed out before0:43:14but the idea [is] that it's a symbolic representation of the Predatory quality of the Unknown combined with the0:43:23capacity of the Unknown to generate nothing but novel information And it's very you can see that is very [characteristic] of human beings because we are prey animals, but we're also unbelievably0:43:35Exploratory and we're pretty damn good predators And we occupy this weird cognitive niche and so one of the things we've learned is that if we? Forth Lightly confront the unknown terrifying as it is there's a massive prize to be gained0:43:48continually and so that seems to be true, right [it's] true as anything is and then I would also say that that idea and we know that one of the metaphors that underlies [gods]0:44:00extraction of Habitable order out of Chaos at the beginning of time is an older idea and a more archaic idea that God0:44:09confronted something like the leviathan and that's one of the words for this serpent like Chaos creature that's often used in the old testament or the0:44:18Leviathan and they Beat them on. Yeah. That's the other thing and so there's this [idea] that I think came probably came from the mesopotamia that the God either in the [sun-like]0:44:29Aspect or in the father like aspect is the thing that confronts this terrible beast that? represents the Chaotic unknown and Cuts it into pieces and then sometimes gives the body parts to the populace in order to feed them so you can see a hunting0:44:43Metaphor there as well, but it's deeper than that and so all right, so The first thing is there's the absolute unknown and the unknown is what you do not understand. It's what's beyond the campfire0:44:54Maybe it's what's beyond the tree even more anciently [an] old [word] when we when we lived in trees It's out there that where you don't know and what's out there0:45:03Crocodiles and snakes and birds of prey and cats and all sorts of things like predatory cats And they will eat you but there's utility and going out there to find out What's there like maybe you go?0:45:13And you don't kill the snake you kill the damn nest of snakes and that makes you pretty popular just as you should be that accelerates your your rep reductive0:45:23Potential let's say and we're descended from people who did that and so we have this? Notion about how the world is structured that's deeply embedded in our pSyChe [like] really really deeply way way down way below0:45:35the surface Cognition way down in the limbic system in these ancient parts of the brain that are like 60 million years old or a hundred million years old or older than that?0:45:44ancient ancient brain structures And so the first thing we do is we act out our Encounter with the unknown world and we act that out in the same way in a manner. That's analogous to the Manner0:45:55That's presented as a description of what it is that God does at the beginning of time to extract habitable order out of Chaos? And [I] I will tell you about the other part of that for now, so you act it out first and then0:46:09The second thing is you watch people who act it out? And you start to make representations of that that's stories, right? And maybe you admire them and then after a long time you collect a bunch of those stories0:46:19and then you can say what that is you can articulate it as a pattern and So and this is something Nietzsche also figured out to begin with you know because prior [to] Nietzsche0:46:28[I] would say he did so many things first it was quite remarkable. You know there was an idea that You first think and then you act, and then people like to think that of course you do it0:46:40Bloody Rubbish because you're impulsive as you can possibly imagine you're always doing things before you think and sometimes That's a really good idea so the idea that you see things and then think and then act0:46:51It's like you really know I'm sorry did I don't do that. I know one I know I know does that and they certainly do that Don't do that when they're emotional you know you act first and one of the things that Nietzsche said very clearly was that our0:47:05Ideas emerged out of the ground of our action over over thousands and thousands of years and then when philosophers were Putting forward those ideas what they were doing wasn't generating creative ideas0:47:17They were just telling the story of humanity It's already there. It's already in us it's already in our patterns of behavior and and it strikes me that that's0:47:29Well he was a genius and that was one of the genius one of his Many many observations of pure genius and so you can think about it. You know you can think about it like this, [too] is that?0:47:40There's unknown and then you act in the face [of] the unknown and then you you dream about the action and that's what you're doing in a movie theater, and then you speak about it and0:47:50So you know and of course once you speak about it that affects how you dream and how you dream affects How you act it's not like the all of the causal direction is it was one way because it's not deep these things loop0:48:02But it's still from the unknown through the body through the imagination into articulation That's the primary mode of the generation of of wisdom let's say and you can easily map that onto an evolutionary explanation0:48:15Because the body comes first right and then is the imagination, which is the body in Abstraction and only then the word and of course that's [exactly] how things did evolve because we could imagine things0:48:27Long before we could speak at least that's the theory, so and I represented that this is a0:48:36image from my book maps of meaning and so So the idea is that this is the fundamental representation of the unknown as such it's half0:48:45spirit because it partakes of the air like a bird and it's half matter because it's on the ground like a like a like a Make and and that's what you think is there when you don't know what is there?0:48:57That's how your body reacts to what's there when you don't know what is there? You know that [too] because if you're alone at night You know it maybe you're a little rattled up for one reason other maybe you watched a horror movie and you know there's some weird0:49:09Noise in the other room. It's dark, and you could just try this once It's like so you're on edge you think You want to turn the light on and go in the room and see don't do that0:49:19just open the door a little bit and sneak your hand in and just watch what your imagination Fills that room with right and then then you remember what it's like to be three years old in bed in afraid of the dark0:49:30Right and I read a good book on dragons lately Recently that that that had a very interesting hypothesis about them. I thought one of the things the guy did was track0:49:40I can't remember his name unfortunately Track how common the image of the dragon was worldwide. It's unbelievably widespread it's crazily widespread and he thought that this was actually the category of0:49:53Primate Predator and The Predator was so predator is a weird category right because like there's there's crocodiles in it, and there's lions And they don't have much in [common] except they eat you so it's a functional category0:50:05And so this is the this is the imagistic representation of the functional category of Predator and his predator Theory was well if you're a monkey, then a bird would pick you off like an eagle, and so that's this0:50:18right and Then if it wasn't eagle it was a cat as they climb teary trees and give you a good chomping and then if it wasn't a cat And you go down to the ground and a snake would get you or maybe a snake would climb up the tree because snakes like?0:50:31to do that and get you and so that's a pre cat snake basically Free cat snake bird, and that's the thing you really0:50:41That's the thing [you're] really want to avoid you don't want to come across one of those and so [and] then you know the other thing it does is breathe fire Which is quite [interested] [because] obviously fire was both greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity0:50:53And we've mastered fire for a long time it might be as long as [two] or [three] million years That's what Richard rang him. [I] think it's [rang] [ham]. He wrote a book recently on. I think it was ragan0:51:05who wrote a book on when human beings [learned] to cook that was about two million years ago and cooking increased the Increase the availability of calories you know how chimpanzees are sort of shaped like a big0:51:17Like they're ugly. They're shaped like a big bowling ball You know they're really they look really fat, [and] it's and they're short and they're wide and that's because they have intestinal tracts that are like you know 300 miles long and the reason for that is because0:51:29they have to digest leaves and so you go out in the forest and like sit there and eat leaves for a whole day and See how that works out for you. You know yeah, they have no calories in them. So chimps spend about [inkless] I0:51:41think it's eight hours a day chewing and It's because what they eat has no nutritional value And then they have to have this tremendous Guts in order to extract anything at all out of it human beings at some point0:51:52Just thought oh to hell [with] that we'll cook something and then we traded our guts for brain Which you know more or less has worked, and I think it's made us a lot more attractive as well0:52:02So okay well, so the idea here was that Well, that's the basic archetype [of] the unknown as such and then I like the st.. George version of this it's so cool because0:52:13St.. George lives in a like a castle and the castle is partly falling down and it's partly because there's a dragon That's come up [to] like it's an eternal dragon It's come back to giver who in a rough time which always happens0:52:23Because there isn't the eternal dragon is always given are giving our fallen down castles a rough time always And so then St.0:52:32[George's] the Hero who goes out to confront the dragon and he Frees the virgin from its grasp and I would say that's a pretty straightforward Story about the sexual attractiveness of the masculine spirit that's willing to forthrightly encounter the unknown0:52:45That's it looks just straight looks like a straight biological representation to [me], and it's a really really old story Right it's the oldest written story. We have and that's basically the mesopotamian creation myth0:52:57The anu male ish, which which basically lays out precisely that story and so and it's replayed. I mean I bet you The movie Goers Among you especially the ones that [are] more attracted [to] the superhero. You know they're really flashy sort of0:53:11Superhero type movies, you've probably seen the St. George story like 150 times in the last 10 [years] you never get tired of it because it's the central story of mankind so0:53:20you've got the unknown as such and That is what you react to with your body in the existential terror and extraordinary0:53:29Curiosity are gripping you and then it's like the unknown unknowns that Who's the politician under bush?0:53:39Rumsfeld yeah, I think the reason that that phrase caught on so well is because he nailed an archetype There's unknown unknowns, and there's known unknowns and that's the unknown unknown and you have to be able to react [to] an unknown unknown because they can get you and0:53:52You can't just plead ignorance because then you're dead that doesn't work like human beings are the sort of creature who has to know what? To do when they don't know what to do, and that's very paradoxical and what we do is we prepare to do everything0:54:04That's right We're on guard we prepare to do everything very very stressful and but also very engaging and very Very much something that heightens consciousness and maybe those circuits are0:54:14Permanently turned on in human beings because we also know that we're going to die and no other animal knows that and so sometimes I [think] that our that our stress circuits are just on all the time, and that's part of what accounts for our heightened consciousness0:54:26so you have your unknown unknowns and then you have your relatively you have the unknowns that you actually encounter in the world like the mystery of your of your0:54:37Romantic partner when you have a fight [with] them It's like [well] We're having a fight who the hell are you [I] mean you're not the absolute unknown because I know something about you but you're the unknown as its manifesting itself to me right now, right and and and then there's a0:54:52known that we inhabit And then there's the knower and the known is given symbolic representation as far as I've been able to tell in Patriarchal form in the form of male deities and the unknown as you encountered0:55:05it's given Feminine form so We won't get into that too much but but if you're interested in that you could look at my maps of meetings lectures Or maybe take a look at the book but I think it's a good. I think it's a good schema for religious archetypes0:55:19I've worked on a long time it seems to fit the union Criteria quite nicely. It maps nicely [onto] Joseph Campbell's ideas He got almost all has ideas from you however0:55:28and It also makes sense from a biological and an evolution a perspective as far as I [can] tell that's a lot of cross validation at least in my estimation0:55:38So okay so back to the hierarchy of dominance. Well, let's take a look at it a little bit, so I'm quite enamored of lobsters as some of you might know0:55:48Because I found out this just blew me away when I found it out. I mean I I've done a lot of work in Neuro Chemistry Some similar chemistry because I used to study alcoholism and drug abuse and alcoholism0:56:00to study alcohol You have to know a lot about the brain because alcohol goes Everywhere in the brain it affects every neural chemical system And so if you're going to study alcohol it kind of has to study, Neuro chemistry in General0:56:11And so I did that [for] [quite] a long time. I really got in a [murud] of a book Called the Neuro psychology of anxiety by [Jeffery] Gray which is an absolute work of genius although extraordinarily?0:56:20Did I don't know how many references that book has it's like? Must be a thousand and gray actually read them and worse he understood them and then and then he and then he0:56:31integrated them [into] this book and so to read it you have to really master functional neural chemistry and animal Behaviorism and and Motivation and emotion and neural anatomy like it's a killer book0:56:42but man It's really rich and it's taken psychologists about 40 years to really unpack that book But one of the things I learned about that was just exactly how much0:56:51Continuity there was in the neural chemistry of human beings in the neural chemistry of animals. It's absolutely staggering It's the sort of thing that makes the fact of evolution something like [self] [evident]0:57:02I do think it's self-evident for other reasons that I'll tell you about later. I think evolution or I think natural selection Random mutation and natural selection is the only way you can solve the problem of how to deal with an environment0:57:16That's complex Beyond your ability to comprehend [I] think what you do is you generate endless variants because [God] only knows what the [hell's] going to happen next They all almost all [of] them die because they're failures and a couple0:57:27propagate and you know the environment keeps moving around like a giant snake you never know what it's going to do next and so the Best you can do is say well Here's thirty things that might work, and you know twenty-eight of them are going to perish if you're if you're an insect0:57:41It's like the ratio is way way higher than that, so Anyways back to the lobsters In all of these so these creatures engage in in0:57:50Dominance disputes and and I think dominance is the right way to think about it because lobsters aren't very empathic And they're not very social and so it really is the toughest lobster that wins0:57:59You know and what's so cool [about] the lobster is that? When a lobster wins he flexes and gets bigger, so he looks bigger because [he's] a winner0:58:08It's like he's advertising that and the biological the [neurochemical] system that makes him flex is serotonergic And you think well who cares what the hell does [that] mean?0:58:17Well tell you what it [means] It's the same chemical that's affected by Antidepressants in human beings and so like if you're depressed you're a defeated lobster like you're like this. I'm small0:58:27I'm not you know things are dangerous. I don't want to fight you give someone an antidepressant It's like up they stretch, and then they're ready to like take on the world again Well if you give lobsters who just got defeated in the fight serotonin, then they stretch out and they'll fight again0:58:41and that's like we separated from those creatures on the evolutionary timescale somewhere between 350 and 600 million years ago, and the damn Neuro chemistry is the same and so that's another indication of just how0:58:54important Hierarchies of Authority are I mean they've been conserved since the time of Lobsters right there weren't trees around when lobsters first first manifested themselves on the planet0:59:06and so what that means is these hierarchies that I've been talking about those things are older than trees and So one of the truisms for what constitutes real from a Darwinian perspective?0:59:18Is that which has been around the longest period of time right because it's had the longest period of time to exert selection pressure Well, we know we evolved and lived in trees something on the order of 60 million years ago0:59:31we're talking [ten] times as far back as that for the Hierarchy and so the idea that human beings that the hierarchy [is] something that has exerted0:59:41Selection pressure on human beings is I don't think that's a disputable. That's not a disputable issue How it's done it and exactly what that means we can argue about but like that sort of biological0:59:52Continuity is just absolutely unbelievable [I] It was funny because I revealed this finding I didn't discover this I read about it1:00:01But [I] talked to my graduate students about I used to take them out for breakfast you know and they were very contentious Snappy Bunch and And they're always trying to one-up each other1:00:10And they're quite witty and for like six months until it got very annoying Every time one of them went up the other they'd stretch themselves out like snap their hands like1:00:19So [that] was that was very funny. It was really very funny. So you see this in Lobsters, and so that's pretty amazing so You know and one of the other thing that's really cool about lobsters1:00:30Is that let's say you've been like talk lobster for a long time, but you're getting kind of old and some young Lobster just you know whales the hell out of you and and so you're all depressed, but thing is your brain is dominant1:00:43But you don't have much of a brain because you're a lobster and so now what are you going to do because you just lost and the answer is while your brain will dissolve and Then you'll grow a subordinate brain1:00:53Yeah, so that's we're thinking about [two] right here for a couple of reasons first of all if any of you have ever been seriously Defeated in life. You know what that's like. It's like1:01:04It's a death a descent a dissolution and if you're lucky a regrowth And and maybe not as the same person that's what happens to people with post-traumatic [stress] disorder right their brains undergo permanent neurological1:01:16Transformation and they then Inhabit a world it's much more dangerous than the world that they inhabited to begin with but we also know - if you have post-traumatic Stress disorder or depression that your hippocampus shrinks1:01:27Right it dies and shrinks and you can sometimes get it to grow back your hippocampus shrinks and your amygdala grows and the amygdala increases emotional sensitivity and the hippocampus inhibits emotional sensitivity and so if you've been badly defeated the hippocampus shrinks and the amygdala Grows1:01:42now if you recover the hippocampus will regrow and the antidepressants actually seem to help that but the damn amygdala never shrinks again and1:01:51So well so that's another lesson from the lobster It's quite a terrifying one but but it's one like it's so interesting that [you] can relate to that, [right]?1:02:00It's like I get what that poor crustacean is going through you know so Okay, here's the rats and this is from yak [bank] [steps] work rat. He was the first guy who figured out the rats giggle1:02:14And you might think well, what kind of stupid thing is that to study is like [$50,000] research grant for giggling rats. You know [aside]? but He discovered the play circuitry in mammals. That's a big deal right? It's like discovering a whole new continent1:02:28There's a play circuit in mammals . It's built right in so it's not socially constructed. There's a there's a biological Platform for that and so what?1:02:37[panksepp] would do with rats he found out if rats if you take a rat puff away from its mother it dies Even if you feed it even if you keep it warm it dies now1:02:46you can stop it from dying by taking a pencil with an eraser on the end and Massaging it right because rats won't live without love and the same thing happens to human babies1:02:56And we saw that Romania when there was that Catastrophe have to tell Chesco in the orphanages where the orphanages were full of unwanted babies because Ceausescu insisted that every Romanian woman was constantly pregnant1:03:07So the orphan is just stacked up with unwanted babies lots of them didn't even have names and they were warehoused warm shelter food1:03:16Devastating lots of them died most of them died before the first year and the ones that didn't die were permanently dysfunctional because You have to be touched if you're a human being it's not an option you have to be played with it's not an option1:03:31It's it's part of Neural Developmental Necessity And you have to also play fair, so because otherwise you produce a very disjointed Child who isn't able to engage in the niceties of social interaction?1:03:42Which is continual play in some sense and reciprocity so what panksepp did with his [rat] he noticed that male rats? juveniles really liked to wrestle and they wrestle just like1:03:53humans Beings wrestle they pinned each other for crying out loud with like that that rat has just lost He's down for a ten count right and so so what you do is you take Juvenile rats?1:04:03And you can find out that they want to play because you can attach a spring to them and Then they'll try to run and you can measure how hard they're running by how hard they're pulling on the spring and then you can1:04:14Estimate how motivated they [are] and so you can find out that? well Fed rat who doesn't have anything on his mind will still work hard to play if1:04:24To enter an arena where he's been allowed to play before he'll work [for] that So that you think while the rats motivated, so the two rats Go out there and they play and And so they're playing like dogs play and everyone knows what that looks like if you're you know what you have any sense about dogs1:04:39[they] kind of go like this and kids do that and maybe you do that with your [wife] if you're gonna play with her a little bit okay my poor my poor wife man when she1:04:49Huh? she was a she was a Young she had older siblings and so she wasn't played with as much when she was little as she might have been and I1:04:59Used to like you know what you take a pill away And you go like this three times right that means look out a pillow is coming your way So I go one two [three] wow1:05:09But she looked she was completely dismayed at me like what do you do that for and I thought well I? Eventually taught her that rule the other thing I used to do1:05:23The only thing I used to do you know it said sometimes She'd come at me like this when we were playing round, and I grabbed her wrist And I'd knock her for her for her hamsters heard not close together. She used to just get completely annoyed about [that] and I thought1:05:39Right that's what you do you just opened your hands well. She didn't know that either So she hadn't been played [with] enough when she was a little [rat] and so1:05:49anyways Anyway, so you let the route the little rats. Go out there, right? And so let's imagine one [of] them is 10% bigger than other and so that the 10% bigger rat wins1:06:01Because 10% is enough in rat way to ensure that you're going to be the pinner rather than the penny, okay? So so that's fine so a knit net the rat the rat pins the big rat pins a little rat and now the big rat is the is the1:06:14Authority Rat and so then the next time that the rats play The little Rod has to invite the big rat to play so the big rats out there being cool and a little that pops up1:06:24And you know does the whole will you play with me thing and the big rat will deign to play with it but if you pair them repeatedly unless the big rat lets the little rat win 30 percent of the time so little rat will not invite him to play and1:06:36Panksepp discovered that it's like I read that that just blew me away it's like that is so amazing because you see well first of their there's an analogy to psays ideas about the emergence of1:06:47Morality out of play and human being so that was very cool But the notion that that was built in to rats at the level of wrestling was and their social They're deeply social animals right they have to know how [to] get along with [one] another and most of their authority1:07:01Disputes dominance disputes, you don't want them to end in bloodshed and combat because you know if your rat won And I'm rat [2] and we tear each other to shreds In a dominance dispute rat 3 is just going to move in it's really not a great1:07:14Strategy and so be better if we could settle our differences You know somewhat peacefully and so while so rat anyway peg's had figured out that rats1:07:24Play and not only [did] they play they play fair and they [seemed] to enjoy it he also figured out This was really cool [to] that if you give juvenile rats attention deficit disorder drugs1:07:35Ritalin suppresses prey play So that's worth thinking about. It's like well. Why do you have to give?1:07:44Juvenile Human beings Amphetamines in school well because they need to play well, you know they don't get to play you know get to wrestle around1:07:53I mean that's oppression as far as I can tell they don't get to wrestle around that's fine feed them some amphetamines man [that'll] shut down the old play circuits. Well is the other problem is panksepp found out that if you don't let Juvenile male rats play?1:08:07Their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly Surprise surprise, you're not letting them [ensure] It's like what else would you expect so you know that's something to think about really hard, I would say so1:08:19Well, so there's some wolves going at it, [and] [we're] all [hunting] not exactly there's some moves having an Authority dispute, but1:08:31More technically speaking And a lot of [its] posturing you know they tend they tend [not] well Socialized wolves tend not to hurt each other during authority disputes because well for over obvious reasons1:08:44It's too dangerous and so they have other ways of demonstrating who should be listen to authorities And there's chimps doing you have this particular house. I think if I remember correctly I think it's right1:08:56This is a really cool picture because I think this chimp chimps don't like snakes by the way So for example if you take a chimp that's never seen a snake And you show it a snake it is not. Happy it will get the hell away from that snake if you bring a chimp1:09:10Anesthetized into a roomful of chimps the chips will all get away from that and then look at the body they don't like that either and if you bring a big snake into a chimp cage even if the chimps have never seen it like they'll get away from it and1:09:21Then stare at it and chimps out in the wild if they see a big snake They'll they'll stand there and they have a noise that means it's like holy crap. That's a big snake you know1:09:33It actually means that technically, I'll tell you why in a minute But they get they stand away from it then they make this this Noise which means oh my [God] look at the snake1:09:43and then they'll stand there for like 24 hours looking at the snake and so the snakes are really really they're super stimuli for Chimpanzees So that's pretty interesting in this chimp seem to learn how to take this dead snake and go1:09:55scare other chips with it and that was That was hardly how he established his authority and you know and [while] there? There's a there's a there's a threat, and you like if I was you, [and] I was around that chimp1:10:06I would take that threat seriously because those things are no joke man And you see the same thing here with the I don't remember what kind of monkey that is but they're engaged in agonistic Behavior and so1:10:17From so and there has been by the way there has been Recent research showing that in higher order primates that [there] is snake Detection circuitry that's built into them right so it's not learned1:10:28It's not learned deeper than that now for a long time Psychologist psychologist knew for a long time that I could make you afraid in a conditioning experience1:10:37Experiment much faster using a snake or a picture of the snake than a gun or a picture of a gun So we can learn fear [to] snakes very rapidly spiders as well, and so then people thought well1:10:49maybe we were prepared to develop fear to snakes or spiders that sort of thing But the more recent research has indicated that it's more than just1:10:58prepared is that we have the Detection circuitry built right into us and Well is because well why wouldn't we that's that's really the [issue]. It's like1:11:07It's not really [that] much of a surprise unless you think of human beings as a blank slate And if you think that [been] I don't know you should crawl out of the 16th century1:11:16That's that's all I would look I would look at it because I mean that's that's that's just go on that idea it's it's it's so wrong, so1:11:27So maybe you can think about this as a dominance hierarchy, but wolves look for those wolves look for Credibility and competence as well and and chimpanzees don't like Brutal tyrants1:11:39And so we'll talk about it as the hierarchy of authority and so well. This is kind of how it starts to [develop] You know you see well these girls are negotiating the domestic environment here1:11:49and how to behave properly and how to share and all that and turn and take turns And so they're negotiating the hierarchy of authority and if you're good at reciprocity1:11:58It's sometimes you're the authority and sometimes the other person is the authority that's fair play, right? And so these boys are doing the same thing and you see they're all smiling away And so it looks like aggressive behavior and people who are not?1:12:11Very attentive and who are paranoid and who don't like? Human beings can confuse this with aggression and they forbid it at schools1:12:22Which is you know I know when my kids were going to school for example. This was quite a while ago now They were forbidden to pick up snow on the off chance1:12:31They might throw a snowball and we know how terrible that is So what I told my son was [that] he was perfectly welcome to pelt any teacher he wanted to in the back of the head1:12:40with the snowball as long as he was willing to Suffer the consequences of doing it, and I don't know if he ever did But he was happy with he was certainly happy with the idea which made me very [happy] about him, so1:12:54Yeah, so so you know kids need to do this they really really Seriously need to do this it's what civilize --is them and [they] that needs to happen [between] the ages of [two] and [four] because if they're not1:13:06Civilized by the time they're [4] then you might as well Just forget it, and that's a that's a horrible statistic but it's unbelievably well borne out in the relevant developmental literature like there's lots of aggressive two-Year-olds most of them are male and1:13:18If they stay aggressive past the age of four they tend to be lifetime aggressive. They make no friends. They're outcasts they're much more likely to end up antisocial criminal Delinquent and in jail and so1:13:29Your kids need to be socialized between the ages of two and four And that's particularly true for the more aggressive males and most of the rest of two-year-olds are male and that isn't socialization by the way1:13:40So there's a [more--not] more abstract representation of the same sort of thing And I'm trying to make the case [that] this that the that the hierarchy of authority emerges out of a [game-like]1:13:50Matrix an Underlying Game-like Matrix And that's one of the things that one of the things that's so brilliant about Jean Piaget he figured that out it's so smart and he was interested in the biological origin of morality and he identified it he he he1:14:05Traced the origin to play and the emergence of morality out of play, and that's it's so smart [it's] just I [just] can't believe how smart an idea that was because it's the [bottom-up]1:14:16construction of of Morality now Piaget was [a] constructionist and to some degree social constructionist He underestimated the role of biology, but that doesn't invalidate his theory. It's really easy to put a biological underpinning underneath1:14:30underneath pas theory, we know the biology well enough to do it quite quite nicely now so I mean we well the fact that tanks have for example [could] identify the play circuit is a really good start with that right because1:14:43Play has been around so [long] that. We have a circuit. That's dedicated to it and so that's that's a very very ancient That's a very ancient issue And so you know this is this is very much of an abstraction of a game here, and then of course you get the ultimate1:14:57abstraction in representation, what in a representation like like that Where even though even the landscape of the game is fictional and of course we've migrated to a large degree [into] those sorts of fictional1:15:11landscapes fictional books movies video games so it's the same it's an extension of the same thing so practice for1:15:22practice for real life the Shades in some cases into real life itself, so Alright1:15:31More representations of God the father I like these representations. I like the triangle Idea I mean I [don't] know why God is wearing a triangular hat it's kind of a strange fashion choice1:15:42but I think it's Associated with the idea of the pyramid and I think that's associated with the idea of the hierarchy of Authority and I think that's why the Egyptians put their pharaohs inside pyramids1:15:51I know, there's more to it than [that] But I think some of that has [to] do with the notion of this hierarchical structure you see this on that now that's speculative obviously and I don't want to make too much [of] it, but1:16:02But I can't help but think that there's something to that see that's on the back of [the] American Dollar Bill I like that a lot [that's] like the eye of horus from the egyptians and so the idea here is something like1:16:12At the top of the Hierarchy is something that is no longer part of the hierarchy Right, so if you move up the hierarchy enough what happens is [that] you develop the [ability] as a consequence of moving up that hierarchy1:16:24To be detached enough from the Hierarchy, so you're no longer really part of it And so [that] you can move in all sorts of different hierarchies and the thing the idea here is [that] the thing [that] you're really?1:16:33Developing is the capacity to pay attention, and I would say from a from mythological perspective the the one thing that seems to compete with the idea of the spoken word as1:16:45the as the source of the Extraction of habitable order from Chaos is the [I] is the capacity to pay attention so marduk for example the mesopotamian creator. God who?1:16:56emerged in the hierarchy of Mesopotamian gods and came out at the top right he was the victor of the gods He had eyes all the way around his head and he could speak Magic words, and I really like that1:17:07I really like that idea and the egyptians developed that idea too because their God horus was the eye Everyone knew was the eye of [horus] that that sense that image is so compelling that we still know [about]1:17:17everybody has seen the eye of [horus] with a really open pupil and What the egyptians learned was that the open eye was what revivified the dead society it's so smart1:17:29So what do you do if your life? Isn't in order bloody well pay attention and that isn't the same as thinking It's a different process paying attention thinking is like the imposition of structure in some sense1:17:39I know I'm oversimplifying but paying attention is something like watching for what you don't know and So like one of the things I often recommend to my clinical clients if they're having trouble with a family member is1:17:50Number one, shut up. Don't tell them anything about yourself just and I don't mean in a rude way It's just like no more personal information1:17:59number [two] watch them like a hawk and listen and if you do that long enough They will tell you exactly what they're up to And they will also tell you who they [think] you are and then you'll be shocked because they think you're something generally speaking1:18:13That's not like you what you are at all and when they tell you it's like a revelation to both of you But attention [is] an unbelievably powerful force, and you see this in psychotherapy1:18:22Too because a lot of what you do and in any Reparative relationship is really pay attention to another person pay attention and listen and you would not believe what people will tell [you] or reveal to you if you watch them as if you want to know instead of1:18:37watching them so that you'll have your prejudices Reinforced that's usually how people interact is like. I want to keep thinking about you the way I'm thinking about you, and so I'm going to filter out anything that just proves my theory1:18:50That's not what I'm talking about at all. It's like I'm going to watch you and figure [out] what you're up to. [not] in a rude way none of [that] I just want to see what's there and that'll be good for you1:19:00Probably and also be good for me, and so well, so that's the idea that you know climbing up a hierarchy of authority can give you vision and that vision can1:19:11transcend the actual Hierarchy, and I think that's also the I think that's also the That's the metaphysical space that an artist occupies because artists really aren't in a hierarchy there outside of hierarchies1:19:23You've watched the Lion king most of you yeah That's that Zoo you know the little bird that's the eye of the king that's the same thing there so and that's that's echoed in this idea as well, so1:19:35So well that's some more More ideas of Hierarchies same idea. This is right gold1:19:44Silver Bronze, why gold gold is the sun [gold] is pure right? So the idea is that the thing that's at the top of the hierarchy is incorruptible because gold doesn't mix with anything else, right?1:19:55It's this sort of metal that doesn't ever become corrupted. It's a noble metal It doesn't become corrupted, and so it Shines like the sun And it's associated with what's ever at the top of the [hierarchy] and the gold1:20:06The gold Medal is a disc like the sun, and it's awarded to those people who? Occupied the top position and who are manifestations of the ideal and here's here's I can tell you a quick story1:20:18[so] imagine that you're watching an olympic contest [I] found this happens to me very often with gymnastics because the gymnasts are so absolutely unbelievable you know so you go watch the gymnastic performance and1:20:29the verse is out there bouncing around like You know you can't even imagine doing it. They're so perfect at it. So you see this person they're going through this routine1:20:39They're just absolutely Spectacular and flawless at it. You know at the [end] They stop and everybody claps and and they're all excited to see what a human being can do and that's why we're in the audience1:20:48Watching because we want to see what a human being can do and the judges go like 9.8 9.8 9.8 Everybody's thrilled and then the next contestant comes out, and it's [like] well1:20:57They're just basically screwed right it's like this person came out there and was perfect How are you going to top that that's an interesting question because this1:21:06Is a representation of what you do to top? Perfection itself and you can do it [and] here's how you do it And you know this even though you don't know you know it, so let's say the next contestant comes out1:21:17They're kind of shaky because it's like oh man the bar is being raised high so what they do is they put themselves right on the edge of Chaos and1:21:26You can tell by watching them that they are one bloody fraction of a second from Catastrophe [they're] pushing themselves farther than they've ever gone in the direction of their perfection [and]1:21:37Everyone in the room is so tense they can hardly stand it right you can hear a pin drop and that person is flipping around It they're just it's just right on the edge of catastrophe [and] at the end1:21:47They go like this, you know And there's that gesture of triumph that goes along with that and everybody rises in one instant and just claps like mad It's like well, why what are you doing? What are you doing? When you're doing that right?1:22:00You can't even help it it grabs you right in the core of your being and you stand up And it's it's an act of worship. That's what it is and you saw someone Go Beyond their perfection into the domain of Chaos and establish order right in front of your eyes1:22:14And you're so thrilled about that you know you're happy to be alive And everyone's celebrating it all at the same time, and it's an absolutely amazing thing, and that's what well sometimes1:22:25That's what this represents and sometimes that's what this represents And that's what we're trying to get at because that's at the pinnacle of the hierarchy right not only are you doing? What you should be [doing]?1:22:35but you're doing it in a way that increases the probability that you'll do it better the next time you do it and [then] you could say here's another thing to think about along the same lines1:22:44And I know we haven't got that [out] of an easy yet You tell your kids to play fair right you say [Norman] it's not [whether] [not] you win. It's how you play the game and1:22:57You say that you don't really know what you mean you feel kind of stupid saying it even though You know it's true and your kid looks at you like there's something wrong with you because he doesn't know what you're talking about either but you know it's true [and]1:23:07So here's why it's true Life isn't a game. It's a set of games and The rule is never Sacrifice victory across the set of games for victory and one game1:23:21Right and that's what it means to play Properly you want to play so that people keep inviting you [to] play because that's how you win Right you win by being invited to play the largest possible array of games and the way you do that is by1:23:35Manifesting the fact that you can play in a reciprocal manner every time you play even if there's victory at stake And that's what makes you successful across time And we all know that and we even tell our kids that but we don't know [that] we know it and so we're not1:23:49adapting ourselves to the game and Victory in the game We're adapting ourselves to the [metagame] and victory across the set of all possible games, and that's what that well1:23:58That's exactly what as far as I can tell that's exactly what this is aiming at to that. That's the same idea that There's that there's a transit. There's a mode of being that transcends the particularities of [the] of the localized contests1:24:11That's the other way to think about it and to act morally is not to win today's contest at the expense of the rest of possible contests and1:24:21Again, I don't see that as something that's arbitrary it's not relativistic there's an absolute Moral an absolute Moral stance there and everyone recognizes it and1:24:31And I also think it's the key to success and I would also say it's very much akin in a strange way like the the the person who is the master at1:24:41Being invited to play the largest possible games number of games is also the same person I haven't quite figured out the precise [relationship] between these two is also the same person that goes out1:24:53Forthrightly to conquer the unknown before it presents itself as the enemy at the door. They're the same thing now I don't I can't haven't figured well. Why that is exactly but but1:25:04Well, I'll figure it out eventually and when I do I'll don't tell you well if you're interested, so okay, so here's the mother no ideas of1:25:14God as as Hierarchical authority figures so strip the religious preconceptions off what you observe and just look at what you see well look there's primate1:25:24looking upward Ad Dominance figure, that's that's what you see there now It's very interestingly symbolically Represented because you have gone1:25:33The farther there with the cross and I think what that [means] as far as I can tell is [that] there's a recognition there in the image that the person who's most dominant is the one who's or the most have the most [authority] is the one who's1:25:46Voluntarily accepted the suffering that's part of being and that's what that picture represents It's like the authority holds that says this is what you have to accept and that that that that transfix is the viewer1:25:58Because of because of the fact that it's true, and you think well is that true, okay? Well think about it this way? Do you like brave people or do you like cowards? Well that that's pretty straightforward and what's the ultimate act of Bravery?1:26:10It's to come to terms with the fact that you're mortal and limited and to live forthrightly Regardless well obviously that's at the core of what's of what's admirable and why would we presume that that's not the case1:26:23We act as if that's the case. It's what everyone dreams and wishes that they could they could do I mean assuming that? You know you've dispensed with the idea that you're going to be immortal1:26:33I suppose that might be worth wishing for [too] or or perhaps not immortal is a very long time But you certainly want this and that [image] says well1:26:42This is what you should be and you [know] we've got that same Opening into the sky going on in that image that I showed you before it's like This is a transcendent truth that constantly reman efest itself across time and space and jung would say it's built into your psyche that1:26:57Image now you know there are elements of it [that] are culturally constructed it wouldn't [necessarily] have to be the cross Although the cross is a very old symbol. It's far older than then it's use in Christianity. It has been used in many many1:27:10religious representations, but that echoes the soul echoes with that you know and Well, then there's moses up there on [the] on the mount1:27:22Receiving these the the law and so we'll talk a lot more about that when we get to exodus but if yeah yeah, yeah1:27:35If we get to exodus so well look where does it happen well on the mountain. Well, that's a pyramid That's up right. That's optics up. It's it's up in stratosphere is up in the sky where where you look upward, okay?1:27:49And and then so what's happening to moses well here? Here's a bit of a clue as far as I can tell [I] Figured this out partly again by reading jean Piaget because one of the things that pSA said about kids was that1:28:00They first learned to play a game But they don't know what the rules are meaning that if you have a bunch of kids together they can play a game but if you take one of the kids out of the game when they're young say six, and you say1:28:11What the rule are what are the rules they can only sort of give you a representation? So you take six-year-old one and he'll tell you some of the rules and six-year-old two will tell you different rules and and you know1:28:21Six-year-Old three will tell you different rules, but if you put them all together they can play so they have the knowledge Embodied either individually or [in] the group the knowledge is there1:28:31to be extracted well then they get a little older they can extract the rules and Then they start to play by the rules [and] then the CSA's last step was well1:28:40they didn't just the kids play by the rules that they learned that they can make the rules and He thought about that as moral progression first you can play then you can play by the rules then you learn1:28:49Maybe because he didn't think everyone learned this that you're actually the master of the rules [that] [doesn't] mean the rules are arbitrary But it means that1:28:58You could be the generator of the rule that's assuming that you know how to play the game And he thought about that as a Moral Moral progression And then I thought well that's exactly what happened [to] moses in in the story of exodus because moses is out there leading all those1:29:10Israelites around and like they don't have a law they don't have a lawgiver They have a tradition, and they're all like crabby because both are in a desert. It's like1:29:19They're in a tyranny, but now they're in a desert. It's like. That's no improvement So they're really getting pretty bitchy about it and so they're worshipping False idols and having one catastrophe after another and they get moses to judge their1:29:33Conflicts so he does that for God only knows how long forever crabby israelites come to moses and bitch at him It's like wow he did this and she did that and and so then he has to figure out how1:29:44[to] make peace and He does that so long that one of his I think it's his father-in-law tells him he has to stop doing it because he's going To exhaust himself [well] then you think well, what's happening? Well?1:29:55And I'm not assuming that this is a like a literal historical story. I think again It's a condensation. Well any group has a set of customs1:30:06Just like a wolf pack does and so then the customs are being manifest in someone. Who's a genius is watching and thinking okay? Well, what's the rule in this situation? What's the rule in this situation? What's the rule in this situation and then in his imagination1:30:20[the] rules turn into a hierarchy and then he goes up on the mountain [just] bang and he thinks oh my God Here's the rules that we've been living by all this time, and that's the revelation of the commandments well, and you think well1:30:33How else could it be you think the rules came first and baying them came second? It's like no the rules come first Sorry the actions come first the obeying them comes first1:30:44And then you figure out what everybody's up to you say hey look this is what you've been up to all [along] everybody goes oh Yeah, that seems to make sense peak and if it didn't who would follow them1:30:53no one was going to follow them if they don't match what's already there you just think about that is unjust and so that's that's portrayed here as A1:31:03Cataclysmic human event it's like oh my God we've been chimpanzees. We've been in this hierarchy of authority for so long we have no idea what we're doing and all of a sudden poof it bursts into1:31:14Revelatory consciousness, and we could say here is the law and you say well is it given by God well? Hey it depends on what you [mean] [by] God we could start with [that] presupposition, but it's not like it1:31:26Just came out of nowhere it took it and this is something else Nietzsche observed so interestingly, and he said you know that a moral revelation was the consequence of a1:31:36tremendously long process of initial construction and then formulation thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years of1:31:46custom a building custom before you get the revelation of the Articulated law and that's a description of the pattern [that] works. Let's say well. What's the pattern that works?1:31:57It's the game that you can [play] with everybody else day after day with no degeneration And that's another thing piaget figured out. It's so brilliant, and that's his idea of the equilibrate state1:32:08it's an extension of the [menu'] accounts idea about the universe [Maksim] right act in a way so that each action could become a Universal rule that was Kinda Mental Moral Maxim and PSa put a twist on that. He said no, no, that's not exactly yet. [it's]1:32:24Act in such a way that it works for you now And next week and next month and next year and ten years from now and so that while it's working for you1:32:33it's also working for the people around you and for the broader society and Then and that's the equilibrate estate And you could think about that as an intimation of [the] [kingdom] of the city of God on Earth1:32:44It's something like that And it's based on this idea that a morality has to be iterable And you know there's lots of there's been lots of simulations online already artificial intelligence simulations of trading games1:32:56Right I mean the people who've been studying the emergence of Moral behavior say in artificial intelligence Systems have already caught on to the idea that one of the crucial elements to the analysis of morality is inner ability1:33:08you can't play a degenerating game because Because it degenerates Like obviously you want to play a game that at least [remains] stable across time and God if you could really get your act together1:33:20Maybe it would slowly get better and of course that's what you'd hope for your family, right? That's what you're always trying to do unless you're completely hell-bent on revenge and destruction1:33:30It's like is there a way that we can continue to play together that will make playing together even better the next day that's what you're up to and1:33:40Well, I don't see anything arbitrary about that [and] part of it. This is also why I think that bloody post modernists are so incorrect because you know they say something like there's an infinite number of interpretations of1:33:50The world and that's actually true But then they make a mistake and they say well, no Interpretation is to be privileged over any other interpretation. It's like wrong1:34:01wrong that's that's where things go seriously off the rails because the Interpretation has to be and this is the piagetian Objection is like if you and I are going to play a game rule one is we both have to want to play1:34:13Rule two is other people are going to let us play rule 3 is we should be able to play it across a pretty long Period of time without it degenerating and maybe rule 4 is well. We're playing the world shouldn't kill us1:34:25It's like there are not very many [gay] like you don't send your kids out to play on the superhighway, right? So they're not playing hockey on the superhighway because the world kills them and so1:34:36There's an infinite [number] of interpretations But there is not an infinite number of solutions [and] the solutions are Constrained by the fact of the world and are suffering in the world and then also constrained by the fact that we constrain each other1:34:48And so that's that's where. I think that's gone like dreadfully dreadfully wrong, so All right1:35:05It's really fun to look at these old pictures once you kind of know what they mean, you know the leaf That's what I've discovered. Is that once I kind of understand the underlying1:35:14Rationale for I mean someone worked hard on that that's an engraving right they took a long time making that picture They're serious about it and when you understand what it means1:35:25You know all those people there their prostate prostrate at the at the at the revelation of the law? It's like well, no wonder It's like break the law and see what happens breaks the universal Moral law man and see what happens1:35:38You know I see people in that situation Well as you all do all the time perhaps me more than you because I'm a clinical psychologist you know and if the people I'm seeing haven't broken the1:35:48Universal law then you can bloody well be sure that people around them have it's no joke Like you make a mistake and things will go seriously wrong for you, and so it's no wonder that. You'd be1:36:01Terrified at the revelation of the structure that governs our being one of the things that's so remarkable about the old testament This is another thing Nietzsche commented on: he was a real admirer of the old testament not so much of the new testament1:36:13He thought it was a sin for Europe to have glued the new testament on to the old testament [because] he thought the old testament was a really accurate representation of the phenomenology of Being. It's like1:36:25stay awake speak properly be honest or Watch the hell out Because things will come your [way] that you just do not want to see at all and it might not [just] be you it might1:36:35Be everyone you know and everything about your culture that is demolished for for generation after generation. It's like Stay awake and be careful1:36:44And I like I think that people only don't believe that when they're being hubristic And I think that most people know that deep in their hearts1:36:53You know when you get high on your horse that happens fairly often if you have any sense you think geez I better be careful [top] myself down and fare a bit because if I get too puffed up man1:37:03Something's going to come along and take me out at the knees and everyone knows that pride comes before a fall It's like if you have any that's why it says in the old [testament] that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom1:37:13[it's] like I've never in all my years as a clinical psychologist, and this is something that really does terrify me I have I have never seen anyone ever get away with anything at all even once you [know]1:37:26There's that old idea that. God has a book you know and keeps track of everything in heaven. It's like okay Okay, [you] know maybe it's not a book fine1:37:35But that is a really useful thing to think about because well, maybe you disagree Maybe you think people get away with things all the time I tell you I've never seen it what I see instead1:37:44is [that] thing happens right they someone twists the fabric of reality and They do it successfully because it doesn't snap back at them that moment and then like two years later something1:37:55Unravels, and they get walloped and they think oh my God that's so unfair and then we track it It's like but what happened before that this and then what this and then what this and then what oh?1:38:07Oh this well that's where it went wrong. It's yeah, because you can't twist the fabric of reality without having it snap back1:38:17It doesn't work that way, [and] why would it because what are you going to do twist the fabric of reality? I don't think so I think it's bigger than you. You know And I think that one of the things that really tempts people is the idea that well, I can get away with it1:38:30It's like yeah you try you see. Oh, well that works It's like you get away with nothing and that is the beginning of wisdom and I it's something that deeply terrifies me1:38:39And you know err ever since? last September when I Came to Board like broader public attention one of the thing I'd be terrified [of] making [mistake] because I certainly know I'm more than capable of making a mistake and1:38:51Going so far either. I haven't made [one] or no one found out about it, so But it's like you know we walk on a very thin and narrow Edge1:39:00and we're very lucky when things aren't degenerating into Chaos around us or Rapidly moving too far too much order and it's not an easy thing to stay on that line and1:39:10You can tell when you say you're on that line because the things are deeply meaningful and engaging when you're on that line but if you're not Existentially terrified about the consequences of wavering off that then you are truly, not awake1:39:23So and that's what I see in this picture You know it's like look out man, because there are rules and if you break them1:39:32God help you1:39:43so one of the things that seems to me the case with regard this in the question period A bit last time is that one of the things that seems to be actually one of the Advantages to gluing the new testament on to the old testament is the idea of a transformation and morality that is analogous to the pia1:39:59Jetty an idea that After you learn to play [by] the rules you can learn to make the rules because I think that's actually what happens to some degree in the transition between the [old] testament and the new testament1:40:10Because in the old testament most morality is prohibition Here are things you shouldn't do. It's like no fair enough. That's a lot of what you do with your kids Don't do this don't do this don't1:40:20Especially when they're happy you're always going around telling them to stop being so happy because all they're doing is causing trouble It's quite painful if you're a parent and you notice that but the first morality is prohibition1:40:30right Control yourself so you don't cause too much trouble and then maybe if you get that down And you're good at it, then the next thing is well once you're disciplined1:40:39then you can start working [toward] something that's a positive good, and that's the transformation that seems to me to [be] fundamentally characteristic of the Juxtaposition of the new testament on to the old testament, but in these images is still something like serve tradition serve the father1:40:56psychologically speaking support the tradition because You live on it they're in an old mesopotamian story the enumeration you can which you can read about if you're interested [in] the1:41:08Original gods who are really badly behaved? They're like two year [old] in fact. They're a lot like two year olds They kill the primordial gone absolute1:41:18Pea tree oracle God they kill him and try to live on his corpse Well, that's what we all do right because we live on the corpse of our ancestors You could say we live on the corpse of our culture1:41:27It's dead And that's not a great place [to] live [so] you have to keep revivifying it so the damn thing You know stays Active and awake you you stay [on] the carbs for too long and then the devil or the Demon of Chaos comes back1:41:40And that's what happens in the mesopotamian story It's like don't be thinking that you can stay on the corpse of your ancestors for too long without Contributing to the revivification of the system because the Chaos that all of that holds that that all that1:41:55holds that bay will definitely come and visit you you [see] that in stories like The Hobbit you know hobbits. They're nice they like to eat. [they're] kind of fat. They're shorts are not very bright you know1:42:06They're hubristic. They have no idea. What's out there in the broader world They're protected if you remember by the striders who are the sons of great Kings who look like?1:42:15Tramps they have nothing but contempt for them they patrol the borders and keep the Bloody hobbits safe But out there out there in the periphery all hell is brewing and Chaos is is is1:42:27Generating and forming and that's an archetypal story And that's why people like that story so much Because that's exactly right [like] we're the hobbits and there are we are1:42:36Protected from Chaos by the spirits of our dead Ancestors, and we're too damn stupid to know it, and we think oh well We don't need them anymore and that to me that's post-Modernism1:42:45That's what the bloody universities are doing with the humanities [to] absolutely appalling and we will pay for it so Unless we wake up, and hopefully we'll wake up because that would be better than paying for it even [though] being awake as well1:42:57[they're] painful so so then I had this vision one time and I kind of portrayed it in this in this image of What the world was like and I thought well, it's not a pyramid1:43:08It's not a single Hierarchy of authority that's not what it is It's it's an array of hierarchies of Authority so you imagine this sort of infinite plane and the the infinite plane1:43:19There's nothing but pyramids and inside the pyramids there are strata of people Everywhere far as you can look some of the pyramids are tall some of them are short they overlap1:43:28it's endless the [plain] is endless and those are all the positions to which you could rise and everybody's inside the pyramid sort of crammed up trying to move towards the top and then there's the possibility of sailing across over top of1:43:41all [of] them and seeing how the structure itself works and that's and that's the eye that floats above the pyramid and it sees the structure itself and the highest order of being is [not] to be at the top of the pyramid it's to use the1:43:54discipline that you attain by striving towards the top of the pyramid to release yourself from the pyramid and move one step up and That's I [think] that's one of the things that's instantiated in the idea of the for example of the holy ghost1:44:08so And I think that's akin to that that's sisyphus and needs a set of sisyphus if I remember correctly that one has to1:44:17[Imagine] him happy well If there's a rock at the bottom of the Hill Then you might as well push it up the hill and if it rolls back [down] well then you've got something else to do don't you can push the damn rock back up the hill and there's no shortage of1:44:29Rocks to put up to push up the hill and that's what we're built for anyways And so let's go out and like push some damn boulders up the hill and then maybe we could have enough self-confidence1:44:38And enough enough respect for ourselves that we wouldn't have to turn to Hatred and revenge and try to take everything down because I think that's the alternative1:44:47so He's not weak. That's one thing you can say about him The same idea represented there right that's outlets who voluntarily takes the world on his shoulders1:44:58It's like the idea of christ taking the sins of the world on his shoulders [it's] exactly the same notion which is the notion that you should be able to recognize in yourself all the horror of1:45:08Humanity and take responsibility [for] it because that's what that means and the thing that's so interesting about that is that if you can recognize Yourself in yourself all the horror of humanity [you] [will] instantly have a hell of a lot more1:45:20Respect for yourself than you did before you did that because there's some real utility and knowing that you're a monster Now on just because you're a monster doesn't mean you have to be a monster, [but] it's really useful to [know] that you are one1:45:32so then and one of the things that Jung Knew and this is something that I find so [amazing] about his writing [is] I think something that really distinguishes him for example from Joseph1:45:42Campbell who talked about following your bliss is like Jung said very clearly that the first step to enlightenment is the encounter with the shadow and what he meant by that was1:45:51Everything horrible that human beings have done was [done] by human beings and you're one of them [and] So if you don't understand that and to understand that really means to know1:46:02how it was that you could have done it and that's a shattering thing to try to imagine that to try to imagine yourself as Someone who's engaged in medieval torture to see how you could in fact do that1:46:14You're never the same after you learn that but being never the same after learning that is Unbelievably useful because when you understand that that's what you're like, then you're a whole different creature1:46:25And I don't think and this is something I did learn from jung is that you cannot be a good person until you know How much evil you contain within you it is not possible, and it's partly because you just don't have any potency1:46:38like if you're just naive if you're just nice if you'd never hurt anyone you'd never hurt a fly you don't have the Capability [for] any of that, why would anyone ever take you seriously?1:46:47You're you're just you're a domestic animal at best You know and a rather contemptible one at that? and it's a very strange thing because you wouldn't think that the revelation of the capacity for evil is a1:46:58precondition [for] the realization of good But I believe first of all why [would] you be serious enough to even attempt [to] pursue the good? Unless you had some sense of what the consequence was of not doing it1:47:10You have to be serious about these sorts of things. It's not it's not it's not the game of a child, right It's the game of [a] fully developed adult and you have learned this in part when I had little kids1:47:22I wrote a chapter from my new book called never let your children do anything that makes you dislike them and Why was that and I read I read that wrote that after [I] knew I was a monster1:47:32And I thought I'm going to make sure I [liked] my kids I'm going to make sure they behave around me so that I like them because I'm way bigger than them1:47:41and I'm way more cruel than they are and I've got tricks up my sleeve that they cannot even possibly imagine [and] if if they Irritate me. [I]1:47:51will absolutely Take it out on them, and if you don't think that you're the sort of person that would do that Then you are the sort of person [who] is doing it?1:48:14you know We're not going to get to Adam and Eve ha ha Aria I watched this great documentary once Called Hitman hart and was about Bret hart and who was the most famous Canadian in the world for a while and he?1:48:29was a worldwide wrestling federation wrestler you know and he was a good guy and He came from this famous family of wrestlers who all came from Alberta?1:48:38I think there were seven brothers who were wrestlers and seven sisters and all the sisters married wrestlers, and they were all offspring children of Stu hart who1:48:47Was a wrestling impresario like 40 years ago and it was it was such a cool documentary because I was always wondering why in the world did people watch wrestling and1:48:58And then believe it you know believe it. Do you believe movies when you go watch them? It's like That's a hard question to answer while you're there you do and so if you're watching wrestling, and you're a wrestling fan1:49:10Do you believe it? Well it is a matter of belief? It's a matter of being engaged in a drama and there are different levels of drama right so let's say worldwide wrestling1:49:19Federation drama is not the most sophisticated form of drama, okay? But I'm not being a not being a smart aleck when I'm saying that1:49:28There is drama of different sophistication for different people, and that's also why religious truths exist at multiple levels simultaneously Right it is got to [be] something in it for everyone, and that's a hard belief system1:49:39that's a hard system to put together something for the Unbelievably sophisticated and something for the common person okay? So we have wrestling and bret hart was a good guy, and he fell into the archetype of being a good guy1:49:50And that's partly what [the] what the story's about. It was a bit too much for him, but um One of the things that he he laid out So carefully where because he figured that 120 million people knew him something like that and that everywhere he went1:50:03he was treated like a hero and he found out quite a bit of quite a burden as you could imagine if you think about It but he portrayed. What was happening in the wrestling ring as1:50:12classic good against evil but not Conceptualized and discussed right embodied thought out acted out You know like like the like thor and the hulk except like right in front of you and so1:50:26well That's exactly this sort of thing. I mean we could consider hockey more sophisticated than wrestling perhaps and As I said I'm not being a critic of these, I'm not being1:50:37Critically minded about these things I understand their purpose, and I would highly recommend that documentary it's a brilliant documentary But this is it's the same thing. It's a silver cup right. It's like there's the hero of the team1:50:49That's the hero of the team's you know here's something cool if you're the fan of the Toronto blue Jays are the Toronto maple leafs of course this hardly ever happens to you if you're the fan of the Toronto maple leafs because1:51:02they always lose, but haha but but if You're watching a game and your team wins and we take your testosterone Levels then they went up1:51:12And if you watch the Toronto maple leafs and they lost, and you're a fan then your testosterone levels go down So that's pretty damn funny. You know. I mean really don't you see how deeply instantiated. This is in people1:51:25I mean it bloody well alters your biochemistry like your your your testosterone levels. It's all more my team loss You know it's like ah do. We know there'll be nothing in it for the wife tonight. You know1:51:42Yeah1:51:54Well, this is the cosmos I think from from the phenomenological perspective and one of the things that that that has come To my realization is that this is real?1:52:07This is real. It's not a metaphor [it's] [way] deeper than a metaphor the most real things about life are the place you don't know and the place you know and1:52:17You could say well that's explored territory and unexplored territory that's real and it's been around forever back to the lobsters You know if you put lobsters in their new place the first thing1:52:26They do is go around their territory finding places to hide and also making a burrow so the first thing They do is establish what they know? Against what they don't know and [that's] real it's real from the Darwinian perspective1:52:39And we're going to say that what's real from the Darwinian perspective is plenty real enough because we're alive [and] everything and so that sort Of thing matters like well, that's what this is the taoist symbol. That's what it says. Is that what way it says?1:52:51What is experience made of? Eternally that's easy Chaos and order and In every bit of Chaos. There's the possibility of order and in every bit of order1:53:01There's the possibility of Chaos, and that's the way right. That's the path of life That's life itself and where you're supposed to be is right on the border between the two of those and why is that?1:53:11stable enough Engaged enough, right? So not only are you doing what you should be doing you're doing [in] a way that increases the probability that you'll do it better1:53:20tomorrow and you can tell when you're doing that because You're engaged you're in the right time and place and your your neurology tells you that that's what1:53:32meaning is that's what transcendent meaning is and that's so cool because I also think [that] that is the antidote to Existential suffering the antidote to existential suffering is to be at the right place at the right time and you know?1:53:45You want to get technical about it okay anxiety and pain? That's the cause that's the reality of the existential [so] suffering okay So let's say you're in the right place at the right time what happens to you, biochemically?1:53:58Dopaminergic activation, what does that do? Suppresses anxiety and it's analgesic now it's more than that because also produces positive emotion and the desire [to] move forward and it underlies creativity and1:54:11And so so not only do you get the positive engagement from a neurochemical? Perspective you get the analgesia and you get the anti end and you get the reduction of [anxiety] so it's not hypothetical1:54:22It's and it is the case that the dopaminergic systems those are the exploratory systems unbelievably ancient and archaic are activated when you're optimally positioned to be1:54:32To be what? Incorporating new information, which is what human beings do because we're information foragers, and so we want to be secure1:54:41But building on [our] security at the same time and then we want to do it for ourselves We want to do it for other people we want to do it for our families We want to do it for broader Society we want to bring the whole world1:54:52Together in alignment to do that, and that's meaningful And God only knows what we could do about the suffering of the world if we did that you know we have no idea1:55:01What we could do if [we] started doing things properly and maybe so many of the things that dismay us about life We could we could stop I mean We stopped a lot of them in the last hundred years you [know] things are a lot better than they were a hundred years ago1:55:14Obviously, they're not perfect, but [a] hundred years ago 120 years ago man, you know the average person in the western world lived on less than a dollar a day in today's dollars1:55:23It's like you just try that for a week and see how much fun that is so the daoists Well, what is this well? This is the pre cosmogonic Chaos out of which the [word] of [God] extracted habitable order at the beginning of time1:55:37It's the same thing. It's the [same] thing and [that] Chaos We'll talk a bit more about [that] later I guess because it's a very complicated thing to to describe, but it's certainly the thing that when you encounter1:55:49The Chaos is what you encounter when the twin towers fall? right you remember what that was [like] right, so It was it was september 10th. Well that was the world everyone knew what the world was like and then it was september 11th1:56:03and everyone walked around day for three days because the [Building's] [failed] But so what you can see a building fall, you can understand what it's what happens when a building falls1:56:16So then what's going on with the being dazed well? it's the Chaos that underlies our habitable order manifested itself in those buildings [collapse] was a Brilliant act of Terrorism and1:56:25Everyone was frozen and curious because that's how we react to that sort of thing the it's like It's like the shark. You know remember that famous1:56:35That famous movie poster for jaws with the woman swimming on the top of the water and that terrible Leviathan shark underneath coming up to to take her out. Well that's life man1:56:45That's the world and now and then you see [that] [and] when something falls like the twin towers fall you remember that the Ocean below you the abyss right the primordial abyss that bloody thing is deep and1:56:57Then you're fragile, and that happens when [someone] betrays you and it's happened It happens to you when your dreams fall apart you encounter that Chaos again from which the world is extracted1:57:06And then you're called upon to act out attention and the word in order to bring the world back into order and none of that is none of that is1:57:17Superstitious none of that is superstitious none of that's even metaphorical. It's real Its ribs more real than anything else, and I [think] the reason for that in part is that1:57:27This has been it's been this way forever Right as long as there's been life this has been the rule of life and1:57:36That's the cosmos that's reality. That's what we inhabit And so one of the things you know the the so-called new atheists And I they don't want to go on a tangent about new atheists because I think atheists are often remarkably honest and very1:57:50consistent in their analysis, so But I just don't think they're taking the problem seriously that like I don't think they take their evolutionary1:58:00theorizing nearly With the seriousness that it that it necessitates, and I don't think that I1:58:11Don't think that you can dispute the proposition that the longer something has had a selection effect Life the more real it [is] it's the fundamental1:58:23axiom of Darwinian biology And I think the Darwinian world is more real than the [physical] world that was the argument that I was trying to have with with Sam Harris, and I didn't do the world's best job with that although it went not too bad the second time, but it's1:58:38It's not something to be taken lightly. [it's] a very serious Profound and meaningful proposition and People [act] [it] out and want to act it out whether they know it or not1:58:51That's Marduk So the story of Marduk, I'll just give it to you very briefly Time at an apse who are locked in embrace at the beginning of time goddess of [saltwater]. God of freshwater?1:59:05Together Chaos an order right they give rise Masculine feminine they give rise [to] the world of the elder gods and those are to me their primordial1:59:14motivational forces or something like [that] and Their rage and their lust and their love and all these things that possess us that are there forever and they're out in the world acting and they carelessly slay absolu their father and1:59:28they're making a racket and then they Collapse ooh and then time at gives wind of [that], and that's a [timeout] right there by the way she's kind of a rough looking creature and1:59:39She's a mother of all things and so she's not very happy about this. They said though these her children have destroyed structure itself Plus They're noisy and Careless and so she thinks all right, just like Noah1:59:51Just like the God that brings the flood to know what exactly the same idea time ad comes back It says yeah, okay enough is enough. I'm going to take you out and she makes this2:00:01Battalion of monsters and puts the worst monster there is at the head of the Battalion. His name is King He's like a precursor to the idea of Satan and she lets the gods know hey2:00:13I'm coming for you, and so they're not very happy about this because their gods, but like yeah She's Chaos itself right she gave birth to everything. This is no joke and so they send one2:00:23God out after another to confront her and they all come [back] with the tails between their legs There's no hope and then one day There's a new God that emerges in that marduk and the gods know as soon as he pops up they know he's something new2:00:36Remember and this is happening [while] the mesopotamians are assembling themselves into one of the world's first great Civilizations so all the gods of all those tribes are coming together to [organize] themselves into a hierarchy to figure out2:00:48What proposition rules everything and so marduk is elected by all the gods and he says look I'll go out there And I'll take on time at but here's the rule from here on you follow me. I determine destiny2:01:01I'm the top God I'm the [thing] at the top of the hierarchy and all the other gods say hey look no problem you get rid of Chaos We do exactly what you say now marduk. [he] [has] eyes all the way around his head and he speaks Magic words2:01:15Those are his primary attributes and so he takes a net and he goes out to confront time out and and he he He encloses her in a net which2:01:24I think is so cool because it's an encapsulation right? It's a conceptual encapsulation. He encloses Chaos itself in a conceptual structure he puts it in the net and then he cuts her into pieces and he makes the world and2:01:38then Then he creates human beings to inhabit [that] world and to serve the gods and he creates human beings out of the blood of king of the worst of the demons and2:01:50That took me to call into young as the student might help me figure that out. I thought that's pretty damn pessimistic It's like you know what exactly it sounds like a fall metaphor. It's like the idea of original sin, but but our2:02:04joint Conclusion With regards to that with it human beings are the only creatures in creation that can truly deceive2:02:14Right we have the capacity for evil. Just like it says in the Adam and Eve story We can actually do that and that's why we're made out of the blood of king of the king of the demons the We are the thing that can deceive that can twist the structure of reality?2:02:26well, so marduk now the mesopotamians had an emperor right and the emperor was the2:02:35Avatar of Marduk that's what made him emperor. He was only at emperor if he was going to be marduk he had to be a good marduk which Mantia do confront time at Chaos and2:02:44Cut her off and make or out of her pieces and what the method name is used to do at the New Year's celebration They go outside the walled city, and that's explored territory versus unexplored territory2:02:54They go outside their walled city into [Chaos] and they bring all the statues that represented the gods And they'd act this out because they're trying to figure something out right you're trying to figure [out] what this means2:03:04They're acting it out, and then they take their emperor and the priest would make them kneel, and [they'd] take all his king equally all his king uniform off his emperor uniform off and2:03:14Make him kneel and humiliate him and nail him with a glove and say okay How were you not a good [marduk] this year right? And then he'd recount all the ways that he was inadequate in2:03:25confronting Chaos, and then they do the celebration and marduk would win and and the king would go sleep with a royal prostitute and and The reason for that was it's the same [idea] st.. George pulling the virgin from the dragon2:03:37it's exactly the same idea that if you call if you encounter the Reptilian Chaos you can extract something out of it with which if you unite, you produce creative order2:03:47That's what they were acting out, and that was the basis for the mesopotamian idea of sovereignty. It's so smart it's so unbelievably smart and you know the mesopotamians had a massive influence on the2:03:59civilizations that then had a massive influence on assets one of the stories of how the notion of sovereignty itself came to be it's the Evolution of the idea of God that's one way of thinking about it2:04:09But even more importantly it's the evolution of the idea of the redemptive human being right? And that's taken - it's one of its conclusions following the story of buddha2:04:19But also in the story of christ the idea of the perfect individual and the notion is well That's the word that speaks truth into Chaos at the beginning of time to generate habitable order that is good2:04:30That's the story and so with that Let's See oh2:04:39Sure, I'll just show you these [pictures] because they're so interesting once you know what they mean, they're so cool. That's a symbol of infinity [let's] Hercules and Hydra. What's life like cut off one head what happens?2:04:52Seven more grow right, what do you do run hold well? No, that's not what you do it This is what you do you fight it It's the it's the Chaos that generates2:05:05Partial Chaos, it's the ultimate Chaos that generates partial Chaos But that Chaos also is what Revista finds life because otherwise it would just be static2:05:17Mercury The head of the Hydra right freeze of you, I'd [saint] George. He's doing it peacefully which is so interesting right?2:05:26He's got a beatific look on his face in that particular representation another [Saint] George right the virgin in the background I think that's say dan if I remember correctly2:05:39St.. George is the Patron Saint of England Here's an interesting one this actually sheds light on on the human proclivity for Warfare St.. George2:05:48That's a Muslim soldier It's really easy to transform the enemy into the dragon right because the enemy is often the predator and we do that instantaneously2:05:57Right without a second thought and so then we can go to war morally because why not take out the snakes? well, you know the problem is where are the snakes or maybe they're outside and maybe they're not maybe they're in this room and even2:06:11Worse maybe they're in you and that's wisdom when you know that they're in you. Why wouldn't she be happy about that especially [if] she had a especially if she had a child right seriously?2:06:32and that's [horace] right the god of vision and he was a He was a falken because Falcons have great vision and they fly above everything and they can see everything so that was the egyptian created2:06:45God horus, and I'll tell you the story about horus at some points well Now here are some pictures that demonstrate what I had2:06:55Described as the emergence of let's say the meta hero out of the hero So there's the person you [admire], and then there's the set of people that you admire [and] then there's the meta set of admirable people and the extraction of that ideal as far as I can tell that's just what's portrayed2:07:10in these images2:07:20That's a great one. It's very sophisticated image you see that the two sides of Christ's face are not symmetrical2:07:29One is God in ones man. That's what that icon means and so the fully developed person in this representation. [it's] one of the oldest representations of this sort that we know the idea is that2:07:41There's a there's a human person In his ordinariness let's say, and then there's this this kinship with the divine that's associated with the willing2:07:52adoption of the responsibilities of Moral Mortal being and that produces this union And then it's manifest in a book right because that's speech, and it's associated with the son right it's the proper way of being2:08:09And that's a perfect example. I think of the emergence of the archetype out of the multitude. That's what it looks like to me2:08:26and so I guess now we're done with Genesis one and took three lectures, but [God's] complicated you know, that's the thing2:08:35so2:08:47so thank you and Next week by all appearances. That's where we are so we've got2:08:5620 minutes for questions So in the past I've done some work with blog big brother big sister and whatever [that] being said that the most common story I tend to hear from pacific youth is that they write they're raised in a single family2:09:09Home usually [with] a mom daddy's there on a picture in alcoholic, whatever whatever the writer So we have this child who is trying to?2:09:18Seek ways to make himself healthy and Empower himself in a ways that a healthy father should have done So you know between the formative years [of] like 1 to 4 so I think you know I'm going with this2:09:28How let's say for someone who born without like a good father figure where would they go out in the world or like what? for series of incidents where they try to expose themselves to to like2:09:38gain access to that balancing of health and Knowledge that a father though a good father figure should have provided to in the first place [ok] well partly2:09:47I mean certainly to some degree a good mother can provide that right to some degree although it's hard for one person to be everything right you know and I think one of the conundrums that face women and this is [a]2:09:57Tough one and this is why I think women are higher in trade agreeableness and higher and trade negative emotion Is that you know the primary? Problem that a woman has with an infant is why not throw it out a window because it's very annoying right?2:10:09I mean, it's there all the [time]. It's constant demand It's absolutely constant amount tremendous dependency and so a woman has to be tilted Towards Mercy2:10:19That's how it looks to me Right and especially during it's so important during the especially the first year when children are so unbelievably vulnerable And so I think it's very difficult for women to be merciful like that and to make the shift to encouraging2:10:33Disciplinarian I think that's a very difficult thing for people to do simultaneously although You know people people. I'm not saying that women are always only merciful and men are always only encouraging disciplinarians2:10:45But things do sort themselves out to some degree [like] that, and I think also the biochemical transformations That accompany pregnancy and childbirth and lactation also tilt a mother towards that as well2:10:56We have to really love that little thing right it's it's number one No matter what it demands, and then telling it what to do and making sure it's behaving properly2:11:05That's that's a whole [different] issue now, but the kids who Lack fathers. I mean first of all they can find that to some [degree] in their friends And that's often what father boys do in particular they go into gangs and they generate the missing men2:11:20Masculinity in the game well that's not so good because like what the hell do they know Well, they don't know anything, right? They're just stupid kids And they're like [fifteen] years old and the testosterone is pumping and they're trying to get the hell [away] from their mother2:11:31Which is what they're supposed [to] do and and they're not in the right position [to] exercise any authority over themselves So that's that's not good. They can find it in education. They can find it in books they can find it in movies2:11:43They can find it in sports heroes and so forth because the image of the father is fragmented and distributed among the community But it's very very difficult To not have a father2:11:52[right] and you know one [of] the things that we're doing in our society which I think is I think it's absolutely Appalling is that we're making the case that all families are equal. It's like sorry no wrong2:12:04Then there's no empirical data supporting that proposition by the way It's much better for kids to have two parents know who those parents are that's a whole different issue, okay?2:12:13and if I could just [add] one [more] thing of how would you ask that question so let's see a daughter [was] raised not a father because [she] would all See have different ways to find those fragments of her missing [father] than like a boy would instead because obviously they're raised differently at least2:12:25They should have been well. I think it's the same issue. You know. I mean. I think that another danger that emerges Mrs. Freud's of course famous observation is that you know if there's mom and child were father and child that2:12:38relationship can get a little closer than it should and Then the lines get blurry and mixed and I'm not saying that that happens to everyone Obviously, but but it's still a danger that that's inherent in the situation2:12:50They're thrust together too tightly without sufficient resources and so the responsibility has to be distributed more and like I really do think that it's the sign of the degeneration of the2:13:00Society when that when when single parenthood becomes anything approximating the norm it's not a good idea then the and part of the reason I believe that and I [think] this has to do with the2:13:13overwhelming selfishness of Modern life is that marriage isn't for the people who are married It's for the children [obviously] [and] like if you can't handle that grow the hell up see right now. I mean seriously yeah seriously2:13:30Thank you Once you once you have kids it is not about you period Now that doesn't mean it isn't about you at all but2:13:42That just seems so self-evident to me. I can't believe that anybody would even would even question it. Oh, it's [dino] larson Oh, yes, well, I'm certainly aware of that yes. It's questioned. It's almost illegal to question it now you know [to] to or2:13:55illegal to make the set of propositions [that] I'm making so That's the best. I can do guys excellent. Thank you2:14:09The question is going in part two the first part of first up here lecture, but it's also something that's been on my mind Listening to your lectures over the past few months, and that's when we talk about2:14:20the Psychological truth or significance of the Bible to what extent does that psychological psychological truth has to be embodied in specific?2:14:30Historical events or people and so for instance the thing that sort of been bugging on my mind There's there's a part that st.. Paul is talking about in the new testament somewhere2:14:42In one of his letters, and he's talking to the resurrection, and he says if it didn't happen Then if this whole thing just means the [faith] is meaningless like for him there had to be that2:14:53Embodiment of that his capital. Yes The nor event in that case Well the best answer I have to that at the moment is that I'm really happy that I'm not at that point yet in this2:15:02lecture series you know because because that there's a there's a crucial issue there, and I don't know exactly what to make of it and2:15:13My approach at the moment as I said is to approach this as rationally as I possibly can and I hope I know a hell of a lot more about what I'm doing by the time I get to that particular [question] [and]2:15:24I do have The beginnings of ways to answer that but I'm not going to answer that at all right now because it's so bloody complicated that would2:15:33Just burn me to a frazzle and I'm already mostly bird to a frazzle after that lecture, so I Couldn't attempt to even start to sketch it out I don't know. [I] mean part of it is to be just rational about it just to be rational about it2:15:47There is something about the idea that continual death and rebirth is a necessary precondition to proper human adaptation every time you learn something new that's important part of the stupid old you [has] to die and2:16:00Sometimes that can be an awful lot of you and in fact it can be so much of you sometimes that you just die Right you just can't handle it And so there is there is a real idea that you have to identify with the part of [yourself] that2:16:13Transcends [your] current personality that can constantly die and be reborn Now then I could say well that means that all of this is psychological and symbolic, and that's the simplest answer2:16:25But I'm not satisfied with that answer even though I think it's coherent and complete because the [world] [is] a very weird place and there are things about it that we don't understand so2:16:37so I can't go I can't go any farther than that at the moment, so Yeah2:16:47Hi, Dr.. Peterson. I just recently watched One of your videos of you debating with transgendered protesters at uoft2:16:56free speech Rally in October and one of the Protesters one of the comments one of the protesters said to you which [isn't] particularly very like very chilling was2:17:08Why do you have the right to determine whether an individual is worthy of you using their pronouns? The scary thing to me is how common this type [of] view is among Radical Left-Wing?2:17:20[protesters] on University campuses who feel they have the right to tell other people What they [can] think what words they can use and what speakers they can or cannot listen to?2:17:32The even scarier part is that our government is creating legislations to back up their ADl? ideologies which is evident through [Bill] C162:17:42M103 and Bill 89 So my question is what do you think the [endgame] is in all this because it seems?2:17:51Every year or we're in the process of finding that out? You know and I'm sorry. I'm sorry Okay, we're in [the] [process] of finding that out2:18:00I don't I mean I think the endgame that underlies all of that in my estimation Is best summed up by jacques?2:18:09Derrida's [Christiane] [her] criticism [of] western Civilization its Fal logo centric now We've already talked about what the logos means2:18:18Right and so and and so for for Derrida that was a sign of its utter What would you call it utter despit the dot early despicable dominant nature of Western Culture2:18:30Well that that's what animates the post modernists now. They may not know that because an Indie ology gets fragmented2:18:39across its Adherents And then it only acts as the coherent ideology with all those adherents come together in a mob and then you see the animating spirit2:18:48So I Said I think that there's a battle going on. That's a battle exactly at the level that Derrida Described and that's a theological battle with a philosophical2:19:02With it with the philosophical implications And out of those philosophical implications come political implications, but it's not primarily political and it's not primarily philosophical2:19:13It's deeper than that and the post modernists are out There their criticism was designed to be2:19:22Fundamental and it also emerged out of Marxism and let's not forget that the Marxist Criticism was not only fundamental But just about resulted in the nuclear annihilation of the [girl] these are not trivial issues, and we're back in the same2:19:36Insane boat and so what do I think should be done about that well? I thought about that way before any of this happened, and I think that what?2:19:46We [should] do about it is we [should] tell the truth Because there isn't anything more powerful than that And that's the right theological answer because the spoken truth brings good into being2:19:59Well, that's the [Fal] logo centric idea And I'm trying to revisit that to explain to people what it means and to see if they think that's a good idea. [I] mean2:20:11that's what we have to figure out is it is that an idea worth adhering to or not the alternative [is] the [C4] the post Modernists the world is that landscape of pyramids that I described, but there's no2:20:25Transcendent vision that's over above that and all of those pyramids are equally valid and it's a war [of] everyone against everyone2:20:34It's like it's like the nightmare of hobbes thomas hobbes except that it's not individuals. It's groups and everyone's that group You're a group. [you're] whatever your group is it's like that's death as far as I'm concerned2:20:46it's it's it's utterly reprehensible and and We better sort it out because if we don't sort it out. We are bloody well going to pay for it, so2:20:58Thank you Hey, how's it going? I just want to say thank you for doing all this and I really appreciate that's Bob and doug mcKenzie2:21:11Right yeah, hey how's it going? Yeah? I'm glad you caught that yeah yeah, yeah, well I did a Facebook poll Yeah, people who are familiar with where your work and a question kind of rose to the top like just?2:21:24Right out of their lives Spectacular and what it was you didn't really touch it here, but you touched it a bit in your lectures It was about integrating the shadow yep, and one of [the] main questions was how does one2:21:37Go about that, especially in the Modern world. You know like Really sheltered from anything resembling that kind of concept you know we don't engage like the unknown we don't2:21:48Come into life-or-death situations most of us [must] [rework] is like an ambulance. [you] know Well, that's one thing you can do with that is one thing you can do. You know well?2:21:58Yeah, you can search out experiences that put you there That's that's that's you know because well, you can do that as a volunteer for example I mean, you can one of the things I saw once2:22:10[Within] montreal I was in this outdoor mall in Montreal on St.. Hubert and saw this great big 17 year old kid you know and He had a mohawk and he was dressed in leather2:22:20And he with you know studs and like he was he was He was doing the water and Barbarian thing and he had it really down And [you] know he's standing on the corner with two pink shopping bags2:22:30Hey, because look into him And I thought you know if someone offered him the ID The opportunity to drop those goddamn sleeping bags or shopping bags and go fight with isis2:22:42He'd be there in a second Yeah, right, because what the hell is some monster like that doing standing on the corner of St.. Hubert alden [-] pink shopping bags2:22:53So I mean so some of it is that it you need you need to find out where you can push where you could you? Can need to find out that edge that you can push yourself against the tree2:23:02It's going to be different for different people But there's there's that's the call to adventure and heroism And there are life and death situations everywhere around you if you want to involve yourself in them2:23:14you know an idiot sometimes that might be like to put yourself together to the degree that you can say physically or spiritually or intellectually it could be an intellectual Battle it could be a Moral battle like the2:23:25Frontier is everywhere the Frontier is just the Edge between what you know and what you don't know you want to put yourself on that damn edge and Then make yourself into something and and you can retreat into comfort in the modern world, and I think that is a problem2:23:39You know I mean I've noticed that It's one of the pathologies of wealth I would say because one of the problems with [being] Relatively wealthy if you're a parent2:23:48is that you cannot provide your children with necessity, and that's a big problem, because they need necessity to call them into being and2:23:57You know if you don't have a lot of material resources and your children ask you for something you? Can say no because no is the [answer] it's like No, you can't do that, but if you can say yes, then it's really hard to say no because then you're just arbitrary well2:24:11I don't know it's like Kierkegaard said you know there will come a time when we have so much security and comfort that what we'll want more than anything else is part deprivation and challenge, and I think I think that's2:24:22particularly, what young men want Now I think that that's partly because young women they're stuck with that anyways because they have to it's it's it's the necessity of living in the world and2:24:34The responsibility of infant care in particular [like] that occupies them men have to do it voluntarily Women now - because of the birth control pill, but you know that's [what] thirty years ago2:24:45We hardly have to talk [about] that at all yes, so Then you have so much2:24:55Hi, Dr.. Peterson, so I'm actually a coptic orthodox and egyptian, so I found [you're] [talking] [a] incredibly interesting I've also taken a deep interest in the old church fathers and as if you're talking about Iraqis I [arkin] back to St.2:25:08Athanasius when the idea feels is that you brought up last time that God became man so that man can become like God So I was thinking about the systems of the hierarchies and is that an example [of] at the top of the pyramid the Hierarchy?2:25:19sort of gets inverted or descends to the bottom and brings it up and to the top and that sort of an attraction to of Christianity that sort of Made Christianity such a powerful idea. What are your thoughts on that? Oh?2:25:30well, it's certainly one [of] the I mean it's certainly one of the things that we not just Christianity a powerful idea because one of the things that happened this was called the democratization of2:25:40Osiris if I remember correctly and like what happened see if I can answer this question Using this approach for sex is that going to work?2:25:59Hmm, I don't know if I can answer that [question] that way the the part of the attraction of2:26:08Christianity, but this was something that emerged across time was the notion that even if you were in a lowly position that there was something About you that was akin to the divine and now you might say well, that's just wish fulfillment2:26:20That's what freud would say that's what Marx would say right the opiate of the masses Tweeted yesterday something. I thought was pretty funny which was that like religion was the opiate of the masses2:26:30but that marxism was the methamphetamine of the max of the masses, so So so I think the attraction was that it it [it]2:26:40Allowed people to recognize their intrinsic dignity and one of the things I've been thinking about is the juxtaposition Between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 because what I was in genesis 2 is that human beings collapse and fall?2:26:52right and then were these fallen creatures that no evil, but in the beginning in Genesis 1 It's really [an] optimistic story because it says well we're the sorts of creatures that partake in the calling forth of being from Chaos and2:27:05Then that's in our essential nature and to some degree if you juxtapose both of those it's as if that's the entire biblical story rammed Together in the first two chapters2:27:15Which is partly why we're taking so long to get through this by the way is that to return to genesis 1 is the antidote to genesis 2 it's like to continue to Act out the2:27:25Doctrine that you're made in God's image And that means that you're you're capable of speaking good being into existence through truth2:27:34And that that's also the antidote to the fall which I think is actually the fundamental narrative message of the entire Biblical structure, and I also think of [western] civilization for that matter, so2:27:46There's a nobility and this is also I think Nietzsche was fundamentally wrong in his [criticism] with Christianity because he thought about it and slaves morality you know the vengeance of the bottom against the talk2:27:57That's more historical than theological so it gives dignity it illuminates the dignity [of] the human being and2:28:08and Requires responsibility so it's not just wish fulfillment It's not freudian wish fulfillment the freudian theory which I thought about a lot is Not tenable in my estimation it also doesn't account for the [existence] of hell because if it's only wish fulfillment, why bother with hell2:28:23It means a lot more If you're really going to just fulfill a wish it's like everybody gets to go to Heaven no matter what they do You don't have hell which was of course something absolutely terrifying to medieval Christians and then to plenty of people now for that matter2:28:37so It's the nobility it's the idea of the nobility that I thinks deeply attractive to people, and that's all there is I mean What you have to fight against your worm-like?2:28:48Fragile Mortal existence is the possibility of Transcending that with nobility of speech and act. That's what you have and who can hear that without feeling2:29:01Ennoble by that now you might say well you might shudder and say well, I don't I can't bear the responsibility [it's] like well fair enough, man. You know I mean that that's a reasonable criticism, but the consequence of not bearing the [responsibility] is2:29:14That's hell really so thank you2:29:24And thank you very much beautiful um I don't know feel familiar with the words of Nasan Talib I'm reasonably familiar with them, so I think it's sad [to] say that he has2:29:37He talked about the idea that People and especially modern people have a failure to recognize the Unknown Unknowns2:29:46Yeah, such yes, right. That's a good way of thinking about it Can you move the mic up a bit so that people can hear you a little better? Thanks gary. Yes um2:29:57Well, I was wondering do you think that that failure might? Might be in some way related to the way that modern people2:30:07fail [to] relate to the idea of God so in the sense that your people can't2:30:16Really grapple with the notion of God I think as much as you can give a rational [argument] or you can't feel God in the way that perhaps a more religious person or more2:30:26[an] older person might have Felt God do you think that that inability to? recognize the Unknown Unknowns might play into2:30:36That yeah, well they're okay so that seems to be related to this idea of the absence of necessity That's something like that. Is that no because I think that I think that what you're you're making a claim?2:30:49Maybe tell me if I've got it wrong that if you're sheltered too much Then it also It also separates you from anything that's divine2:30:59[I] guess that might be right because there's not enough intensity of the experience and something like that is that is that part of the is that part of the issue it might be more related [to] the idea of2:31:09like realizing the absolute infinite root of what you don't know like the like the mysterium tremendum that that kind of You know if you believe that through statistical analysis you can get everything under control and you genuinely believe that at some point2:31:24You'll get it or wonder you know. Yeah, okay? Well, so okay, so so well, that's also I think part of the danger of2:31:33Rationality that the Catholics have been implicitly warning again forever Is that rather rational mind tends to fall in love with its own productions and then to worship them as absolutes?2:31:43Which is I think what [Melville] was trying to represent? by his Satanic figure in Paradise lost [I] think about as like a precursor a prophetic precursor to the emergence of2:31:53Totalitarian states in the Modern world and so yeah, I think that you can believe that What you know is? Sufficient to Banish permanently what you don't know and I do think that that does2:32:06Paradoxically although you think that that would make you secure it also does destroy your relationship with with with with With the spirit that might help you deal [with] what it [is] that you really don't know with the unknown unknowns, so [yeah]2:32:19I mean, we don't know to what degree extreme experience is necessary to bring Forth extreme Experience right what do you have to be through before you encounter a religious revelation?2:32:30Well people might say well, you can't because there's no such thing. It's like well. Don't be so sure about that I mean people have reported them [to] row history, but they don't generally occur when your that's my favorite tropen2:32:42You're eating [cheesie's] [and] playing you know and playing Mario brothers, right? So yeah, so that's the best I can do with that engine yes. Yeah2:32:57This has to be the last question [all] right I'll make it quick yeah earlier when you talked about Criminality and creativity trends in that in men peaking at 14 it reminded me of something. You said, I think it was Joe Rogan2:33:10[talking] about Sjw's and Kind of and how they create their own Chaos talking about how adolescents have this drive to change the world And I was wondering if if those three the criminality creativity drive to change the world are2:33:24linked and if so if they manifest differently in men and women And if they [kind] of come from the same, era well, I think they are linked2:33:33But I'm going to concentrate more on the net second part of your question So I'm going to ask you two guys some think about something, so I talked to a friend of mine the other day He's a very very smart guy and we've been talking about2:33:44While all the sorts of things that we've been [talking] about tonight for a long time and we were talking about the relatively relative evolutionary roles of men and women this is speculative obviously and and2:33:56Because our research did indicate it's tentative research so far that that the the sgs Sjw Sort of equality above all else Philosophy is more prevalent among women2:34:08Well, it's predicted by the personality factors that are more common among women so agreeable this and high negative emotion primarily agreeableness, but in addition2:34:19It's also predicted by being female And that's interesting because in most of the personality research that I've done and as far as I know in the literature at you know in more broadly speaking most of the time you can get rid of the2:34:32attitudinal differences between men and women or at least reduce them [by] controlling for personality so if you take a feminine man, and a masculine woman then you know that the [polls]2:34:42reverse but that didn't seem to be the case with political correctness, and so I've been thinking about that a lot because well men [are] bailing out of the humanities like mad and2:34:52Pretty much out of the universities except for stem the women are moving in like mad And they're also moving into the political sphere like math And this is new right we've never had this happen before and we do know [no]2:35:02do not know what the significance of it is it's only 50 years old and So we were thinking about this and so, I don't know what you think about this proposition, but imagine that that historically speaking2:35:14it's something like Women were responsible for distribution and men were responsible for production Something like that, and maybe maybe that's only the case really in the tight confines of the immediate family2:35:27But that doesn't matter because that's most of the evolutionary landscape for human beings anyways What the women does it did was make sure that everybody got enough? okay, and that seems to me to be one of the things that's driving at least in part the Sjw demand for for equity and2:35:43Equality it's like let's make sure everybody [has] enough. It's like both look fair enough You know I mean you can't you can't argue with that But there's there's an antipathy between that and the [the] reality of differential productivity2:35:56[you] know because people really do differ in their productivity, so All right, so to answer your question fully. I do think that the rebellious tendency of adolescence is2:36:07Associated both with that criminality spike, especially among men and with creativity. Yes I think that the sJw phenomena is different and I think it is associated at least in part with the rise of women to political power and and2:36:21We don't know what women are life when they have political power because they've never had it I mean There's been [queens] obviously and that sort of thing [just] being female authority figures and females have2:36:31Wielded far more power historically than feminists generally like to admit But this is a different thing and we don't know what [a] truly female political philosophy would be like but it might be2:36:42Especially if it's not been well examined and it isn't very sophisticated conceptually it could easily be well Let's make sure things are distributed equally well yeah But sorry that's that's just not going to do you fly do you think in terms of the rest of this?2:36:56Jw's and you talked about last lecture as well creating Chaos when there is none otherwise. It'd be static Do you think there would be any validity in saying that in a country [like] Canada were pretty gender equal is2:37:08There any merit to thinking Sjw's are trying to create Chaos Even when they're arguably is none on the mass level obviously there's still problems Why would they do that otherwise it would be static and that well doesn't if it wouldn't for them2:37:22So I read this I read this quote once and I don't remember who Who said it it might have been robert heinlein for crying out loud science fiction author that Springs to mind2:37:32But a problem it probably wasn't And his the proposition was that men tested ideas and that women tested men, and I kind of like that2:37:41There's something about that. You know and now it obviously it's an [over] [generalization], but we also don't know to what degree women test men Cheerilee through2:37:51Provocation it's a lot because like if you want to test someone you don't have a like little Conversation [with] them like you [poke] the hell out of them And you say okay like I'm going to let go after you and see where your weak spots are and it seems to me that2:38:03This it seems to me that in this constant protest and use of shame and all of that that goes along with this with this sort of radical movement towards egalitarianism that there's a2:38:14Tremendous amount of provocation and God, I'm going to say this too even though I shouldn't but it but we mean how I don't believe this, but I'm trying trying to figure it out2:38:24You know I thought it was absolutely Comical when [fifty] [Shades] of [Grey] came out a not just I [just] thought that was just so insanely comical that at the same time2:38:33there's this massive political demand for like radical equality and and And say with regards to sexual behavior and the fastest-selling novel the world had ever seen2:38:46Was S&M domination right? It's like. Oh, well. We know where the unconscious is going with that one don't leave and and sometimes I think like because one of the things that I've really tried to puzzle out and2:38:57It's not like I believe this right I'm just telling you what I wear the edges of my thinking of being going is that you have this crazy Alliance between the feminists and the radical islamist that I just do not get it's like the [feminists]2:39:10[it's] like why they aren't protesting non-stop about Saudi Arabia is just Completely Beyond me like I do not Understand it in the least and I wonder - I just wonder bloody well is this is the [freudian] means that is there an attraction?2:39:24You know the is there an attraction that's emerging among the female radicals for that Totalitarian male dominance that they've chased out of the [west]2:39:34And I mean that's a hell of a thing to think but I after all I am [psychoanalytically] [minded] and I do think things like that because like [I] just can see no rational reason for it the only other2:39:45Rational reason is that well the west needs to fall and so the enemy of my enemy is our [yeah] It's a guy exactly now. What is it? I thought that wrong with the enemy of enemy is my friends2:39:58Yes, exactly [so] Elements tend to vote liberal as well. Yes Well, so that that could be the case but I am not going to shake my suspicions about this unconscious balancing because as the demand for2:40:10egalitarianism and the eradication of masculinity Accelerates there's going to be a longing in the unconscious for the precise opposite for the [problem] of that right the more you want you?2:40:22Scream for equality the more your unconscious is going to admire Dominance and so Well, that's that's that's well. That's how you think if your cycle analytically minded2:40:34And you know I'm a great admirer of freud he knew a hell of a lot [more] than people like to think and and so which is partly why everyone still hates him even Though it's late a hundred years since he's you know really really being around so all right. We should stop0:00:00Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death
0:00:000:00:13Hello Everyone so [Hopefully], We're Going to get Past Genesis 1 Today that's the Theory so I0:00:24Finished My new Book Yesterday0:00:35Yes That's that's Taken about Three Years of writing it's Quite A long Time to write something so yeah I'm It's done except for the Mopping up you know Copy Editing and That sort of Thing so0:00:47Hopefully it's as good as i [can] Make it I don't know that's any Good but it's as good as I can Make it Anyways [alright] so this Is0:00:56The Stories That I'm going to tell you tonight I've Been Thinking About Well like the Ones Last Week For that Matter for [A] very Long period of Time but I [think] These even Longer and0:01:05One of the things that I just do not understand I cannot Fathom this I Cannot Understand How There can be so much Information in0:01:14Such Tiny Little Stories Especially The Story of Cain and Abel that Story Just every [Time] I read it it just Flattens me because it0:01:24It's only like Paragraph Long There's Just Nothing [To] it you know and I Think About it I think About it and I think About it I [think] About it every Time I [think] About it0:01:35Another Layer Comes out from Underneath and Then Another layer Comes out from underneath it and i can't Figure that out like You know the rational Approach that I've Been describing to you is Predicated on the Idea that0:01:47These Stories Have Somehow Encapsulated Wisdom that We? Generated Interpersonally and Behaviorally in That an Image over very vast Stretches of Time and Then Condensed it Into very very dense0:02:00Articulated Words that are then Further refined by the act of being Remembered and Transmitted and Remembered and Transmitted and Remembered and Transmitted Over vast Stretches of Time and That's a pretty Good [Argument] I'm Willing to0:02:13I'm willing to go with it but It Still never Ceases to amaze [me] how much Information Such Tiny Little0:02:24Passages Can Can Contain so We'll Take that Apart Today? And i think it's especially True with the Story of Cain and Abel because it Works on0:02:36The Individual Level and it Works on the Familial Level and it Works on the Political Level and it Works at the Level of warfare and it Works at the level of Economics and it's0:02:45That's A lot for a little Tiny One Paragraph Story to cover man now you know you could object well With These Stories you? Never Know what you're Reading Into It and what's in The Story right that's Part of Let's Call it the postmodern Dilemma and0:02:59Fair Enough [and] [There's] Really, no answer to that Any More Than There Is an answer to how do you know your Interpretation of the world Is well let's not Say Correct but Sufficient0:03:09There's Some answer to that It's sufficient in if you can act it out in the World and other People don't Object too much and you don't die and Nature Doesn't Take A bite out of you any more often Than Necessary you know Those are the Constraints Within which0:03:22We live so it you have some way of Determining Whether your Interpretation Is at least Functionally? Successful and That's and that's Not Trivial!0:03:32and i guess you can Say the same Thing to the interpretations that [might] be laid out on These Stories and at the Moment That's Probably good enough Hopefully you find the Interpretations Functionally significant at multiple Levels and I0:03:46Also Think the Chance of Managing that by chance is very very Small you know to be able to Pull Off an Interpretation of The Story That Works at Multiple Levels [Simultaneously] You Think With each Level that0:03:57It Applies the Chances [that] you've Stumbled across something by chance Have to be Decreasing right There's A, technical Term [For] that in Psychology it's Called something like Multi Method Multi Trait0:04:10Method of Determining Whether Or not something is Accurate and the idea Is The More Ways that you Can measure it and get the Same result The more Confident you can be that you're not Just Deluding Yourself With your a priori Hypothesis you know that There's Actually something out There0:04:26So i guess that's Another part of this Method Is that and it's Also a Method that I use in [my] in my Speaking I think I don't try to tell People anything that isn't Personally relevant0:04:36you Know Because you Should know, why you are Being Taught [something] right you Should know what the fact Is good for and it Should be good for [you] Personally at least in Some Sense and Then if you [act] [it] out in the World it Should be good for your Family and Maybe0:04:48Should Have some Significance for The Broader Community And i think That's what Meaning Means and I don't really See the Utility in Being Taught Things That Aren't Meaningful facts That aren't Meaningful because There's an Infinite Number of fact and There's no way0:05:01You're Going to Remember all of them they have to be they have to have the aspect of tools Essentially something like that Because We are tool using creatures, well These These Stories Have that aspect Is0:05:11As far as I Can Tell There's Nothing There's no doubt about that So here's The Stories in Genesis Two0:05:22very Famous Stories Obviously Virtually Everybody Who's Even Vaguely versed in Western Roughly Speaking western0:05:31Western Culture Knows These Stories and That's something That's Interesting too that Stories Can [Be] so Foundational that everybody Shares Them i mean you can say the same Thing about a fairly large Handful of Fairy tales as well0:05:42Or you Could at least until Recently But the fact That Stories are Foundational I think, also means that they have to be given out Kind of?0:05:52Well Even if You, don't give Them any Respect you have to at. Least treat them as Remarkable Curiosities so why Those Stories and why Did They Stick Around and why Does everybody know them and it's not Self-Evident by any Stretch of the Imagination and you Can use0:06:07Explanations Can Use the Freudian Explanation Freud Sort of Thought that The Judeo-Christian was Predicated on the [Idea] that?0:06:16The Figure of The Father The Familial Father Was expanded up Into Cosmic Dimensions so that Mankind? Existed in The Same Relationship to the Cosmic Father let's Say that an, infant or a small Child0:06:29Existed in Relationship to his or her [Own] Father and That's A reasonable Critique I would Say to some degree but it does and0:06:41This was Purposeful it Does Imply More Than implied for its Case that People who Adopt0:06:50Religious Belief That has A Personified Figure As at its Apex Are Essentially acting out the role of Dependent Children and0:06:59you Know I thought About that critique for a Long Time and believe Me that's Been A powerful critique One of the Best Books I've Ever Read Called The denial of Death by ernest Becker [I] think Took that line of Argumentation it developed it as0:07:11Well as Any Any Book I've Ever Seen Argue it Necker Tried To bring Closure to Freudian Psychoanalysis on Religion0:07:21he did a pretty Wicked Job of it like I think the Book Is Seriously Flawed and Wrong But it's Really a great Book like some Books are Well Some Books are Wrong in Really good Ways Right They Make a Powerful Powerful Argument They Really Take it [to] its extreme I think0:07:36[Becker] missed The Point and he Missed it in the Same Way that Freud Missed Jung's Point and Becker who wrote this Book On the Psychology the Psychoanalysis of Religion Never Referred to jung except very Briefly in the?0:07:52Introduction and I think that was a major Mistake but Becker took the Argument That The Hypothesis of God Is Nothing but an attempt by human beings to recreate0:08:04Quasi, Infantile State of Dependency and To be able to Rely on an All-Knowing Father and to Thereby Recover The Comfort Perhaps That We Experienced when We were Young [and] had A?0:08:17Hypothetically All-Knowing Father for Those of Us who are lucky to have Someone who Rig Vaguely Resembled [that] but the more I thought about that the More0:08:27That Struck Me is Quite implausible across Time charles Taylor I think [it] was charles Taylor wrote an Interesting Book Called the I Think it was Called the origins of the modern Self he's a mcgill Philosopher and I0:08:40Wouldn't Necessarily Call him A friend of Classic Religion but it doesn't Matter he Made A very Interesting Point About Christianity in Particular he Said If You're going to invent a religion that offered you Nothing but Infantile Comfort why in the World Would you bother with Conceptualizing hell0:08:56That Just Seems like an Unnecessary Detail to Add to the whole story right if it's it's all about Comfort why, Would you? Hypothesize That0:09:05The Consequence of of A serious Error was eternal Torment that doesn't Really Sound very? Isn't the sort of Thing that that is Likely to Make you feel Comfortable0:09:17James Joyce When he wrote About that Said he Had Terrible [Nightmares] When he was a child Because of The Hellfire Sermons That Jesuits used to0:09:26Spout Spew Forth Let's Say and he Wrote Down What he Remembered of Them and They Were pretty Hair-Raising I think in James Joyce's Book I think it was Portrait of The Artist of a young man man he Talked about0:09:36The Jesuits Telling Them and Telling him that hell, was a like a Prison With Walls that were seven Miles Thick that was Always in Darkness and Consumed by fire and that the people who were Trapped There0:09:48Were Continually Burnt by this Dark fire that gave New light Which also Simultaneously Rejuvenated Their Flesh So that it Could be Burnt off Eternally in case You were wondering how it was going to be Burnt off Eternally that's Apparently the0:10:02Process it's not Easy for me to see that as an Infantile Wish-Fulfillment I'm Afraid you know you Could Well You could be a Cynic about it and Elaine Tasos who0:10:11Wrote a book on the devil was cynical About it in this Manner she Thought that the Christians so to speak Invented Hell as a place to put Their Enemies and you know yeah0:10:23Fair Enough but no that's not, Accurate Really, well Although it's Convenient to have a place [to] put your enemies Charles Taylor did Point out for example that0:10:33The Modern Terror of loss of Self Let's Say The existential loss of Self and Loss of Meaning was Perhaps Roughly Paralleled by? The Medieval Terror of [Hell] you know in Terms of the Existential0:10:45Intensity and so it wasn't hell wasn't merely a place Where Those People that you Didn't Care for Would end up it Was the place Where you, were going to go if You Didn't Walk the line Properly and so I don't think Freud's0:10:56Freud's Critique Really Holds Water in The Final Analysis and Then Marx's Critique of Course, was That Religion was [The] Opiate of the Masses and he Made an Argument that?0:11:05Was similar To Freud's Although Somewhat Earlier and? Made The Based upon the Presupposition that Religious Beliefs, Were Stories Told to the gullible Masses [in] Order to Keep them Pacified [and] Happy, well Their0:11:20Corporate Overlords for lack of A better Purpose Continue To Exploit Them and and and Weaken Them and you know I0:11:32Find that I find the critique of Human Institutions [as] driven Entirely by power very Let's Say questionable to to Say the least and of Course Every Human Institution is Corrupted by0:11:46Corrupted Is Corrupt by for one Reason or Another and it's also corrupt Specifically by such Things as Deception and Arrogance and the demand for Unearned Power and The Same Thing of Course can be Applied to0:12:01Religious Systems but that doesn't mean That they are in Some special Way Characteristic of Those [Faults] and Maybe you think They Are and you know, Maybe you can0:12:10Make A case for but it's not Prime Fs I think that's how you Say that Evident that That Is that also is a Particularly Useful0:12:21Criticism I don't Buy it I think There's I Think That's far Too cynical I think that the People who wrote These Stories First of all what are you going to do you can, [oh] really?0:12:31You're Going to run a bloody Conspiracy for Three Thousand Years Successfully it's like good luck With that Can't run a Conspiracy for [fifteen] minutes Without Somebody Ratting you out you know it's it's impossible so0:12:45Whatever Is that the Basis of the? Construction Not Only of These Stories but of the Dogmatic Structures That Emerged from Them I think that it's a terrible Mistake to Reduce them to unit Dimensional0:12:55Explanations in fact I generally Think that reducing Any Complex Human behavior to uni Dimensional Explanation Is often The Sign of A seriously limited Thinker [you] know I say that with some Caution because Freud0:13:07Did do that With Religion at least to some [degree] and Freud Was a serious Thinker and marx I suppose was a serious Thinker - Even Though?0:13:16Well Yeah Is [he] Someone you Just if You Have Any Sense Marks Just Leaves you Speechless so?0:13:29So Anyway so that's all to Say that [I] don't think There's Any Simple Explanation for how These Stories Have the Power that they have I really Don't I don't think you Can Reduce it to political Conspiracy that's for sure I don't think you could Reduce it to psychological Infantilism I0:13:45Think you Can, Make A case, like I have that they are Repositories of The collective Wisdom of the Human Race [I] Had an Interesting letter This Week from someone I0:13:55Get A lot of interesting Letters I think I'm going to Make an archive out of them and put Them on the web at some Point With People's Permission Obviously0:14:04and he Said That he'd Been Following my lectures and Noted That I had Been Making what you might describe as a quasi biological or evolutionary Case for0:14:14for the Emergence of the Information that the Stories Contained and he Said well How do you know that someone from a Different Religious Tradition or Speaking of a Different Religious Tradition0:14:25Couldn't do Exactly the same Thing and I thought Well First of All to some degree They Could because There is Overlap like? I've Talked to you a little bit [About] Taoist for example in The Taoist view of being as you know0:14:39The Eternal Balance between Chaos and Order One Thing I didn't tell you I [don't] think about that I don't know if you know this but There's A, neuropsychologist Named L Conan Goldberg who is a student of Alexander Luria and Luria0:14:51Was i think The greatest Neuropsychologist of The 20th Century he [was] a russian and? He, was one, of The first People to really? Determine in Large Part The Function of The Frontal Cortex Which was Quite a mystery for A very Long period of Time and0:15:05Goldberg You know you know How We have Two hemispheres Right They have A left Hemisphere and The right Hemisphere and People often Think of the Left for Right-Handed People Right-Handed Males More Particularly Because Women are more Neurologically Diffuse0:15:18It's one of the things that Makes [them] more Robust to Head Injury for example and Maybe men Are Less Diffuse and Somewhat more specialized Which Makes Them A bit [more] Specialized but a little more Subject to damage Anyways0:15:30We have to him [is] Left in The Right and no One Exactly knows why? And We know that the House? Quasi-independent Consciousness is Because if You Divide the Corpus Callosum that that unites Them which, was done0:15:42[To] in Cases of Intractable Epilepsy for example That each Hemisphere is Capable of developing its Own Consciousness to some Degree The Right Generally0:15:52Nonverbal and the Left verbal and so There has [Been] This Idea that the left is A verbal Hemisphere and the right is A nonverbal Hemisphere but That Can't be Right Because of Course animals don't Talk and They have a Bifurcated hemisphere so0:16:03If it's right it's not Causally right Now Goldberg Hypothesized Instead That the hemispheres were were Specialized for Routinization and Non Routinization or for Novelty and0:16:16Familiarity Or for Chaos and Order And so that's Pretty Damn cool When [I] ran across that [I] also Thought about that as A as A signal of0:16:25What Would you Call it? Multi Method Multi Trait Construct Validation Because I'd never Thought of the hemispheres as Operating that Way and Goldberg Came up with This in A0:16:38Historical Pathway That was Entirely independent from Any Mythologically Inspired Thinking Completely Independent fact it was Motivated more by0:16:47Materialist Russian Neuro Psychology Which was Materialist for Political Reasons and Also for Scientific Reasons But the idea Is that We have one Hemisphere That reacts very Rapidly to things0:16:58We don't know and it's more Imaginative and Diffuse in It and [it's] associated more With negative Emotion because negative Emotion is what you Should Feel Immediately When you encounter something you don't understand0:17:08Because it's A form of Thinking right negative Emotion it's like I'm somewhere Where things aren't With what they Should be? Right Hemisphere does That generates Images very Rapidly to Help you figure out what might be There and then the Left Hemisphere0:17:21Takes That and develops it Into something [that's] more Articulated and and Algorithmic and Fully Understood and so then There's this Dynamic balance between the right and the [Left] hemisphere where [the] Left0:17:32Tries to impose order on the World that's Ramachandran who's a neurologist in in [California] very Famous Neuro Neuro0:17:41Neurologist who, also Developed a theory like Goldberg who Said that the Left hemisphere [or] imposes Routinized order on the World and The right Hemisphere generates Novelty and and0:17:52and reacts The Novelty and generates Novel hypotheses and he Thought and There Is some good evidence for this that's what's happening during the dream Is that0:18:01Information Is moved From the right Hemisphere to the Left Hemisphere in Small Doses Basically so that the Novel Revelations of The right hemisphere don't demolish the Algorithmic Structures that the Left Hemisphere has so Carefully put Together0:18:17so And i like That Theory too because it, also does Help0:18:28Justify The Hypothesis That I'd be Laying out for you which is [that] You Know, There's Part of Us that extends Ourselves out Into the World in Tries to understand what? We don't know and that that Part Extends Itself out With0:18:39Behavior and Also With Emotion and also with Image and then Maybe with Poetry and then Maybe With Storytelling and Then as that develops then We develop More and more Articulated Representations of That Emergent Knowledge and so you Can map that Quite Nicely Onto the?0:18:54neurologists and The Neuropsychologist Presumption about What Constitutes The Reason for The Hemispheric Differentiation but the other Thing that's so cool [About] The Hemispheric Differentiation Argument as far as I'm Concerned and This is Really This is Worth Thinking About man Because it's A real0:19:09it's a real Is A word that ned ned Flanders uses for that Noggin scratcher I think it's something [like] that0:19:19Anyways You know, We do Make the assumption that what it is that We are Biologically adapted to is Reality right it's Actually an Axiomatic Definition if You're a Darwinian0:19:29Because Nature Is what selects By Definition that's what Nature is its What selects and If the Nature [That] selects has Forced upon you a dual0:19:39Hemispheric Structure Because Half of you has to deal with the chaos and Have to have A view Has to deal with order then You Can Make a pretty Damn strong inferential case that the World Is made out of Chaos and Order and0:19:49That's Really Something to that's Really something to think, About man you know so [you] Can think [About] that for a while if You want so Anyways For Whatever Reason There is a lot to packed Into These Stories and so0:20:02Let's Investigate A, couple More of them We'll start With This Story but of Adam and Eve Now you May Remember that? The Bible Is a Series of Books bible Actually means something akin to library and These Books0:20:16Were written by all sorts of Different People and Groups of People and Groups of Editors and Groups of People who Edited over and Over across very very large Periods of Time so they're Altered by0:20:27no One and Many at the same Time If There was a tradition for A long Time that the Earliest books [were] written by Moses but that0:20:36That's Probably not Technically Correct Even Though it might be Dramatically Correct Let's Say Or correct in the Way that a Fairy tale is correct and I'm not0:20:47Trying [To] put Down Fairy tales by Saying that but There's a number of Authors [and] the way the Authors Have Been identified Tentatively Is by Certain Stylistic0:20:56Commonalities Across The Different Stories Different uses Of words like the Words for God Different Poetic Styles Different Topics and so Forth and People Have Been Working for Probably [200] Years?0:21:07Roughly That to Try to sort out who wrote What and How that was all Cobbled Together but it doesn't Really Matter for our Purposes what Matters Is that it's an Aggregation of0:21:18Collected Narrative Traditions and Maybe You Could Say it'S an Aggregation of collective narrative wisdom, We don't have to go that far but We can at [least] Say it's?0:21:27Aggregated Narrative Traditions and That There was some Reason that Those Traditions and Not Others Were Kept and [That] There was some Reasons Complex Though they, May have been why, They Were Sequenced in The order that they, were Sequenced Because, one of the things that's Really0:21:39Remarkable About The Bible as an as a Document Is that it Actually has A plot and That's Really Something [I] mean it's it's Sprawling and it Goes Many Places but the fact That something's being Cobbled Together Over several Thousand Years Maybe four Thousand Years Maybe longer0:21:54Than That if You include the oral Traditions That Preceded it and God Knows How Old Those are but that collective Imagination Part of The Human collective Imagination has Cobbled Together A, library With A plot0:22:07And like I see the bible as an attempt A collective attempt by Him You solve the Deepest Problems that We have and I think Those Problems are the Problems of?0:22:17Primarily That The Problem of Self-Consciousness The fact that not only, do we are Immortal and that we die but that, We know it and that's the unique that's the unique0:22:29Predicament of Human Beings and it Makes all the Difference and I think that's laid out in Adam and Eve in The Story of Adam and eve I think The Reason That that Makes Us unique and is laid [out] in That Story and0:22:40Interestingly and I really realized This Only After I was doing last Three lectures so the bible presents A0:22:49Cataclysm of okay A [Cataclysm] at the Beginning of the Top of Time Which is [the] Emergence of Self-Consciousness and Human beings Which Puts a risk Into The Structure of Being that's the right way to [think] About it and That's Really given Cosmic significance now you can0:23:03Dispense With out and Say, well Nothing that happens to human beings That Have Caused me Significance Because, we're These [Short-Lived] you know Mold like Entities That Are like Cancers on This Tiny Little Planet that's Rotating out in The Middle of Nowhere on the Edge of some0:23:17Unknown Galaxy in The Middle of Infinite Space and Nothing That happens to us Matters and it's fine you like you can Walk Down that road if You want [I] wouldn't recommend it [I]?0:23:27Mean and That's Part of the Reason I think that for all Intents [and] Purposes it's Untrue You know it isn't there it isn't a road you Can Walk Down and live Well in fact I think if You really Walk Down that road and you Really Take it Seriously you end up not Living at all0:23:41So it's Certainly very reminiscent I mean I've Talked to Lots of People who are suicidal and Seriously Suicidal and you Know The Kind of Conclusions That They Draw Both The Utility of life0:23:51Prior To Wishing for its Cessation Are very Much like The kind of Conclusions that you draw if You Walk Down that particular line of Reasoning Long Enough if You're Interested in That You Could Read Tolstoy his Confessions Leo Tolstoy his Confession it's A very Short Book0:24:04It's A it's a Killer man it's it's a powerful Book very very Short and Tolstoy Describes his Obsession With Suicide When he, was at the height of his Fame0:24:15Most Well-Known Author in The World you know Huge Family International Fame Wealth Beyond Anyone's Imagining at that Time0:24:24Influential Admired Everything that you Could Possibly Imagine That Everyone Could Have and for Years he Was Afraid to go out Into his Barn with A rope or a gun Because he Thought he'd Either Hang Himself or Shoot Himself and0:24:35he did get out of that he and he Describes why that happened and Where he went when that happened So if You're Interested in That that's A very Good Book but0:24:47So the biblical Stories and Starting With Adam and Eve They present a Different story They present The Emergence of Self-Consciousness in Human beings as0:24:58Cosmically Cataclysmic Event and You Could Say, well what do? We have to do With the Cosmos and the answer to that Is it depends on what you Think? Consciousness Has to do with the Cosmos and Perhaps that's Nothing and Perhaps it's everything0:25:09I'm going to go with everything because that's how it looks to me Now of Course Anyone who wishes to is welcome to disagree but [if] You believe that consciousness Is a Force of Cosmic significance0:25:20Which Britt Which Which being Itself Is dependent on in Any real sense at least in Any Experience will sense that it's that it's not unreasonable to Assume that0:25:30Radical Restructurings of Consciousness Can Worthily Be granted Some Kind of Cosmic Or metaphysical Significance and Even if it's not True0:25:40From Outside The Human perspective Whatever that might be it's Bloody Well True from Within the Human perspective that's for Sure and so that's the that's the Initial0:25:49Event in Some Sense after The Creation is the Cataclysmic Fall and then the entire Rest of the bible Is an attempt to Figure out What the hell to do About that? And everything in it is Is and0:25:58So you could Say for example in The Earliest in [The] Old Testament Stories what Seems to happen? Is that the State of Israel Is is Founded and it?0:26:07Rises and Falls and Rises and Falls and so There's This Experimentation for Centuries Millennia Even With the idea that the way that you protect Yourself against the tragic Consequences of Self Consciousness Is by organizing Yourself?0:26:21Into A state But then what happens is the state Itself Begins to reveal its Pathologies and as Those Pathologies Mount the State Becomes an Unstable and Collapses and Then it0:26:33Rises [Back] Up and Becomes Unstable and Collapses and Then it Rises [Back] [Up] after it does This a number of This is Primarily from [Northrup] [Prize] Interpretations0:26:42People Start Wondering if There's not something Wrong With the idea that the state Itself Is this is the is the Pathway is the place of Redemption that There's something Wrong With [that] Idea and0:26:53So then I think on on the Heels of that? Comes The Christian Revolution With its Hypothesis that it's not the state That's that's the place of [Salvation] it's the Individual Psyche and then0:27:07There's There's a, there's A an ethic that goes Along With that too which Is Quite Interesting [so] The Ethic of Redemption0:27:17After The State Experiment Fails Let's Say Is that It's it's the it's Within the Individual That [Redemption]0:27:26Can Be Manifested Let's Say and Even in so far as the state is Concerned Because the [state's] Proper Functioning Is dependent on the Proper Functioning of the Individual rather than the Reverse Most Fundamentally and0:27:37That The Proper Mode of Individual Being That's redemptive is truth and Truth is the Antidote to the Suffering that's It emerges With The Fall of man in The Story of Adam and Eve and0:27:50Then That Relates Back to the Chapters that we've Already Talked about because There's this Insistence in Genesis 1 That It's the word in The Form of truth that generates order out of chaos but Even More Importantly and This Is something like I said0:28:05I most clearly realize Just doing These lectures for the last Three Weeks is God Continues To Say as he Speaks order Into being With Truth that the being he0:28:14Speaks Into Being is good and so There's This Insistence That The Being That Spoke Into Being Through Truth is good and so there's A hint There so interesting [is] A hint There0:28:25Right at the Beginning of the story that the the State of Being That adam and Eve Inhabited Before They Fell before They Became Self Consciousness0:28:37Conscious Insofar as. They, Were Made in The image of God and Acting out the truth that that being Itself Was Properly Balanced and it Takes the entire Bible to rediscover that Which is a which [Is] a Journey back to the beginning0:28:51Right and that's a Classic, See it's a classic mythological Theme that The Wise Person is the Person who finds what They Lost in Childhood and Regains it right so that's a I0:29:02Think that's A jewish Idea that zadok if I remember Correctly who is a Messiah Figure is the Person who Finds what he Lost in Childhood and Regains it his idea of this0:29:12Return to the Beginning except that the return is you, don't fall Backwards Into Childhood and Unconsciousness you returned Voluntarily to the State of0:29:21Childhood, Well Awake and Then Determined to participate Through Truth in The Manifestation of Proper Being Now you know0:29:30I'm a psychologist and I've Taught Personality Theory for A very Long Time and I know Personality Theory Is that Profound Personality Theories Pretty, Well and I'm Reasonably0:29:39Well Versed in Philosophy Although not as Well-Versed as I should be but I can tell you in all the things I've [ever] Read Or Encountered Or thought [about] I have never Once Found an Idea That Matches That in Terms of Profundity but not only Profundity0:29:52Also in Believability Because the other Thing I see is a clinician and I think This is very Characteristic of Clinical Experience [and] Also very much0:30:01Described Explicitly by the great Clinicians Is that what Cures in Therapy is truth? That's The curative Now There's Exposure to the things you're Afraid of and Avoiding as0:30:12Well But I would Say that's A form of Enacted truth Because if You Know There's Something you Should do by your own Set of? Rules and You're Avoiding it then you're Enacting a lot you know you're not Telling one but you're acting0:30:22One out it's the Same Damn thing so if I can get you to Face what it Is that you're Confronting that you know you shouldn't be Avoiding then what's happening Is that we're Both Partaking in0:30:33The Process of Attempting you to act out [your] Deepest Truth and what happens Is that that Improves People's Lives and it Improves them Radically and The evidence The clinical Evidence to that is Overwhelming0:30:43We know that if You Expose People to the things They're Afraid of But That They're Avoiding? They Get Better and you have to do it Carefully and Cautiously and with Their Own0:30:52Participation and all of that but of All the things that Clinicians Have established That's Credible That's Number One and That's nested Inside This Deeper Realization that the clinical0:31:02Experience Is redemptive Let's Say Because it's designed to Address [Insofar] [as] The People who are engaged in The Process are Both Telling each other the truth and then you think0:31:12Well [Obviously] because if if you have some Problems and you come to talk to me about them Well First of all Just by coming to talk to me [About] them you've Admitted that they Exist man that's a pretty good start and Second, well if You tell me About them then0:31:25We know what They Are and then if We know what they are we Can? Maybe Start To lay out some Solutions and then you can go act out the Solutions and See if They Work But if You don't admit They're There and you0:31:35Won't Tell me what They are and I don't and I'm like Posturing and Acting Egotistically and Taking the Upper Hand and all of that in our Discussions, well how the hell Is that going to Work0:31:45You know it might be Comfortable Moment to moment while We stay encapsulated in Our Delusion but it's not going to Work So a lot of that Seems to Think it Through it Seems pretty Self-Evident and you know0:31:57Freud Thought That Repression was at The Heart of much Mental Suffering the Difference between Repression and Deception is A Matter of Degree and That's all its Technical it's A technical Differentiation and Alfred adler who, was one of Freud's greatest0:32:13Associates Would Say and Much Underappreciated I would Say he Thought that People got Into Problems Because They Started to Act out A life lie that's what he Called it A life lie that's Worth Looking up because I0:32:23Blur Although not as Charismatic as Freud was very Practical and and and Really Foreshadowed A Lot of Later developments in Cybernetics Theory and of Course Jung believed that you Could bypass0:32:35Psychotherapy Entirely By Merely Making a proper Moral Effort in your Own Life and Carl Rogers believed that it was Honest Communication Mediated Through Dialogue That Had Redemptive0:32:46Consequences and The Behaviors Believe that you do a Careful Micro Analysis of the Problems that are laid before you and Help Introduce People to what They're Avoiding it's like all of Those things to me are Just Secular Variations of the Notion that0:32:59Truth will set you free Essentially so so you know it's a pretty Powerful Story and A0:33:09It's not that Easy to dispense With and B The Other Thing is you dispense With it at your Peril because what I have Seen as, well is that? The People That I'Ve Seen, who've Been Really Hurt0:33:20Have Been Hurt Mostly by Deceit And that's all so we're Thinking about that you know you [get] Walloped by life There's no doubt about that Absolutely, [no] doubt about that0:33:29But I thought for A long Time that Maybe Maybe Maybe People Can hang Handle Earthquakes and Cancer and Even0:33:38[Gasparini] But They Can't Handle betrayal and They can't Handle Deception They Can't Handle Having the Rug Pulled out from Underneath and By People that they Love and trust that Just does Them in0:33:49You know it [it] Makes the meal but it does Where it Hurts that you know Psycho Physiologically it damages Them but More Than that it Makes Them cynical and bitter and Vicious and Resentful and then They0:34:01Also start to Act all that out in the World and that Makes it Worse so So you know the story starts God uses the spoken Truth to create being that is good and0:34:14Then The Cataclysm Occurs and Then Human beings Spend until Millenia Trying to Sort out Exactly what to do about the fact That they've Become Self Conscious and you know by the way0:34:26We have right We Are in Fact Self Conscious no other Animal? Has That Distinction now You'll Read that? Chimpanzees Can for Example if You put Lipstick on A chimpanzee0:34:38It's kind of A strange thing to do Yeah Well I won't Pursue that Any Further but?0:34:48But the Chimp a, chimpanzee, will wipe off the Lipstick if You Show it a mirror and Dolphins Seem To be able to recognize Themselves in Mirrors and There is so there is the Glimmerings of Self Conscious Recognition in other animals0:35:02but to put that in The Same Conceptual Category as Human, Self-Consciousness Is Into my way of Thinking It's it's0:35:13Well it's uninformed to Say the least but. I also think that it's Motivated it's Motivated by a kind of Anti Humanistic underlying and Underlying Motivation Because our Self-Consciousness is so0:35:25Incredibly Developed Compared to that that They're Hardly in The Same Conceptual Universes it's like Comparing the The Alarm Cries of vervet Monkeys when They See a Predator to the language of Human beings it's like yeah yeah There's some Similarities0:35:39Man There are utter Insanity Nning But They're Not Language and the Self-Consciousness of Animals is Proto Self-Consciousness and it's Only [They're] A Very Small Number of Animals and it's it's Nothing like ours They're not, aware of the future like, we are They're not0:35:53Aware of Their Boundaries in Space and Time and That's The critical Thing and Most Particularly Time Human beings Discovered Time and When0:36:03We discovered Time We discovered The end of each of our Being and That Made all the Difference? And that's what the Story of Adam and eve is about so0:36:14Genesis One Is derived From the Priestly source Where God Is Known as elohim or L Shall die and There's God in The Singular and There's god's in The Plural and I suppose that's Because it Seems that if You analyze the0:36:28History of The development of Monotheistic Ideas that Monotheism Emerges out of a Plurality of Gods and as I mentioned I think it's because the Gods represent0:36:39Fundamental Forces at Minimum and Those Fundamental Forces Have to be Hierarchically Organized for with some with something Absolute at the Top Because Otherwise They do Nothing but0:36:49War like you have to organize your values Hierarchically or you stay Confused and that's True if You're an Individual and It's true of your Estate if You don't know what the next Thing you Should do Is0:37:00Then There's 50 Things you Should do and then how are you going to do any of them you can't you have to prioritize Something Has to be above Something Else Has to [be] arranged in A hierarchy for it not to be Chaotic and so there's some Principle at the Top of the0:37:12[Hierarchy] and Maybe The Organization of the Gods Over Time That's the Battle of Gods that Machiya Le [Ada] Talked About and if You're Interested in That you could Read A0:37:21History of Religious Ideas Which I would really recommend it's a three-Volume Book It's actually Quite as Straightforward Read as far as These things Go and [Elliot] it Does A very nice Job of0:37:31Describing How and Even why Polytheism Tends Towards Monotheism Even in Polytheistic Cultures There's A strong Tendency for The Gods to organize Themselves in the Hierarchy With0:37:42One God at the Top in A Monotheistic Culture [in] Some in Some sense all the other Gods Just Disappear across Time and There's Nothing left at The Top God but Even in A Polytheistic society There's a hierarchy of Power Among the Gods0:37:56The First Story is Newer Than the second one so the story I'm going to tell you today is actually older Than the one [I] Already Told you even Though Their order, was Flipped by the Redactor who's the Hypothetical Person or Persons who Edited These Stories Together, We don't know Exactly?0:38:10Why, he or the Committee Or what I suspect it was a single Person but who knows. We don't know why? The Stories Were Edited Together in The0:38:19Order That They Were Added Together but We could infer [I] mean they were Edited Together in That order Because the Editor Thought they Made sense that Way Because that's What an Editor Does right0:38:29an Editor Tends to Take Diverse Ideas and then to organize Them in Some Manner that Makes sense and Part of the Manner That Makes sense Is that you Can Tell them [to] People and The People stay interested and you Can Tell them0:38:41To People and People Remember Them That's That's one of the ways you Can tell if You've got an Argument right Because it's Communicable and Understandable and Memorable and so he This Person0:38:52Was let's Say Motivated by Intuition to Organize the Stories in This Particular Manner? so the Second The Yahwist Strand0:39:03Contains The Stories The Classic Stories in The Pentateuch that's Five Books Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers and deuteronomy Which We'll Try to get Through Perhaps in These twelve lectures We'll see we'll [See] how that Goes it's Strongly on Through?0:39:16Perfect so the god in The August account Is for all Intents and Purposes A sort of Meta Person And I dealt with that [a] little bit Last Week Because People tend to0:39:26you know Think of that as Unsophisticated but When you think that the mind that the the ground of Consciousness Is the Most Complex Thing that We know of?0:39:36Then it's not so unsophisticated to assume that the most Complex Thing that There might be is like that or it's at Least it's as good as, We can do With our Imaginations and so I don't think it's so0:39:47It's so It's so unsophisticated it's, also the case and This is Practically Speaking Is that it Is not at all unreasonable to think of God the father as the0:39:59Spirit That Arises From the Crowd that exists Into the Future Right and that's We talked about that in Relationship to the Idea of Sacrifice at least a little bit more Or we're Going to0:40:09You Make Sacrifices in The present so that the future is happy with you The Question Is what Is that Future that Would be happy with you and [the] answer to that. Is it's the Spirit of?0:40:20Humanity That's that's [who], you're Negotiating With because you, Make the assumption that if You Forego impulsive Pleasure and get your Medical Degree That when, You're Done in 10 Years and you're a Physician0:40:32Humanity as Such will Honor your Sacrifice and Commitment and Open The Doors to you right so you're Treating the future as If it's a single being and you're, also treating it as. If it's A0:40:43Something Like A compassionate Judge, You're Acting that out and Maybe, We had to Imagine God in That Form before we Could? Understand Once We started to Understand that There was a future perhaps0:40:55We had to Imagine God in That Form in Order to? Concretize Something that We could Bargain with so that We could Figure out how to use? Sacrifice to Figure out how to guide Ourselves Into the Future0:41:04Because That Sacrifice [is] a contract with the future but it's not a contract With Any Particular Person it's It's a contract with the Spirit of Humanity as such it's something like that and so when you think About it that Way0:41:16That Should Make You faint With Amazement because that, is such a bloody Amazing Idea to come up with that Idea that you Can Bargain with the future that Is some idea man that's that's like the major Idea of Human of Humankind?0:41:29We suffer what do We do About it We Figure out how to Bargain With the future and We minimize Suffering in That Manner? It's like no other animal Does that either you know like the Lions They Just eat everything I think A0:41:40Wolf Can eat 40 Pounds of meat in A single sitting? Right it's like There's [A] meat eat it it's [light] not like save some Mammoths for Tomorrow That's A that's that's not A wolf Thing man that's a human Thing and that might mean you have to be Hungry Today0:41:54Or, Maybe you're a farmer you know several Thousand Years Ago six Thousand Years ago Or so what Agriculture first got going and you're Starving to Death Waiting for The spring [Planting] and You Think, We bill it Bloody well [Better] not eat Those Seeds?0:42:06Right and That's Really something to be able to Control Yourself To Make the future Real to put off what you could use today and not Just in Some impulsive Manner man Maybe your Kids are0:42:16Starving to Death you think, We are not Touching the Seeds that We need to the future and for Human beings to have Discovered that and then to Also have Figured out that We could Bargain with the future it's like man0:42:26That's Something and I think that that I think [that] the Stories that are laid out in This Book Actually Describe at Least in Part The Process by which that occurred0:42:35the Always Stories Begin With Genesis 2:4 This is the account of the heavens and The Earth Wind so there's two real Creation Stories at the beginning0:42:44The Newer One Which is the first one and [the] older one Which is the Second One and The Older One Begins in [Chapter] Two and that's the story that, we're Going to that, we are getting Into now?0:42:53Adam and Eve Are in That Can enable Know what the tower of Babel In the yahwist Strand exodus Numbers Along and There's some of the Priestly Version in There Too as, well as the ten Commandments0:43:05Well There are Some? Lovely Representations of A Paradise This is [A]0:43:14Garden Earthly delights What's his Name Say the Boss yes I wrote it was Boss he Has [a] crazy i mean if you0:43:23How he Didn't get Burnt at The Stake is Absolutely Beyond me I mean You know some of you know About [Salvador] Deli I suppose most of you do [I] mean Delis a piker Compared to hieronymous Bosch man0:43:33You Could Spend Because There's Three Pieces of This Particular Painting You Could Spend A very Bizarre and Surreal0:43:43Looking at that Painting, [I] don't know what it was with Bosch but he, was some Sort of Creature That Only Popped up Once and Probably for the best and0:43:54So there's Been very Many, Representations of Paradise i mean God only knows what that [Is] it's like I? Could Probably Guess but I won't0:44:04And then Look I mean that's that's that's the Lion lying Down with the lamb right so that's this Idea that's Maybe Projected Back in Time That There was a Time Or maybe will be a time When0:44:14When that the Horrors of Life are no longer Necessary for life Itself to exist right and The Horrors of Life are of Course That Everything Eats Everything Else and That everything dies and That [everything's] Born and that the whole Bloody0:44:28Place Is at Charnel-House and it's it's a catastrophe From Beginning To end and This Is this is the Vision of it being other Than that and You Know, There's A strong Idea this is also in Implicit in the Alchemical Ideas and I think it's, also implicit in the Scientific revolution0:44:44That Human Beings Can Interact With Reality in Such a. Way so that the tragic and Evil Elements of it can be Mitigated and so that0:44:53We can move Somewhat Closer to a state [That] might be Characterized? [oh] that's Obviously Imagistic but it might be Characterized by something like that Where We have the Benefits of actual Existence Without all of the?0:45:04Catastrophe That Seems to go Along with It [and] Carl jung When he wrote about The Emergence of Alchemy Or the Emergence of science From Alchemy he Thought of Science as being Motivated by a dream0:45:13Because for Jung dream, was the dream was the Manifestation of the instincts it was the Boundary between the instincts and Thinking Said Well Science Is nested Inside A dream and the dream Is that if We Investigated the Structures [of] Material Reality With sufficient Attention and0:45:28Truth That We could [then] learn Enough about material Reality to alleviate Suffering right to produce the Philosopher's Stone to Make Everybody Wealthy to Make Everybody Healthy to Make Everyone live as long as they Wanted to live or perhaps Forever0:45:41That's The goal to alleviate the Catastrophe of Existence and that that Idea the Idea That Mysteries The Solution to the Mysteries of Life That might enable Us to develop Such a substance0:45:54Or let's Say a multitude of Substances Provided The motive for for The development of Science and You'll Trace that the development of that Mode of Force Really over a thousand Years and0:46:03If You were interested in Reading his Books on Alchemy Which are extraordinarily difficult and That's Really Saying Something About Young because all of his Books Are difficult and then The Books on Alchemy They kind0:46:12Of Take a quantum Leap that's Actually very Small leap so i shouldn't Say that they Take a massive leap Into A whole Different Dimension of Complexity but that's what he was trying to get at0:46:21He went Back Into the alchemical Texts and Interpreted them as if They Were the dream on Which science was Founded Newton was an Alchemist by the way i mean [you] know0:46:31[Goddesses] Are Certainly well Supported by the historical [Fact] science did Emerge out of Alchemy the Question Is what, were The Alchemists up to and They Were Trying to Produce the Philosopher's Stone and that was the universal medical meant for mankind's0:46:44Pathology Jung Felt that what Had Happened Was that You [Know] Christianity Had Promised that the Cessation of Suffering Promised it for a thousand Years and Yet Suffering went on unabated and0:46:54At the Same Time Christianity [Had] Attempted to Really put Emphasis on Spiritual development let's Say at the Expense of Material development Right Thinking of Material development as something akin to a sin trying to get A0:47:06Control of Impulsivity and All the things that went Along with A to embodied Existence There was a reason [for] it but that By About a thousand ad the0:47:16European Mind Somewhat Educated By That Point [Somewhat] able to Concentrate on a single Point Perhaps Because of A very Long History of Intense Religious Training Turned its dream to the0:47:29Unexplored Material World and Thought Well you know the Spiritual Redemption that we've Been Seeking Didn't Appear to Produce the result that was Promised or intended and so Maybe0:47:38There's Another Place [that] We Should Look and that was in the [Damned]? Material World right Which which which was supposed to be at least According to Some Elements of Classic Thinking Nothing but The Creation of the devil so but the point I'm Making. Is that you know0:47:54It's very difficult to underestimate The amount of Human Motivation that's Embedded in The Attempt to Alleviate Suffering to eradicate Disease to help People live a healthy A0:48:06Healthy Life and [That's] the Disease Obviously but to live A long life as Well and Make Things as Peaceful as Possible I mean you can be cynical About People and you Can Talk about them as Motivated by power and0:48:16Being Corrupt in All of Those Things and all of Those things are True but you Shouldn't Throw Away the baby With The Bathwater Because We have Been Striving for A very Long Time to set Things right and we've Done Actually not too?0:48:26Bad A Job of it for Half Starving Crazy insect Ridden Chimpanzees With Life Spans of 50 To 70 Years So you know, We could deserve A bit of Sympathy for [our] Position as far as I'm Concerned [so]?0:48:48Some other Representations This, one I like The one on the Left that's Paradise Has A walled garden and That's What Paradise Means it's Paradise i which [is] I don't remember the language it's0:48:59It's it's A it's A it's associated with Persian Paradise that means Walled garden and why a walled garden [Well] it goes Back to the chaos order Idea so this is where God Puts man and Woman after the Creation in A walled garden0:49:12Well The wall is culture and Order and The garden is Nature and the idea is the Proper Human habitat is Nature and Culture Imbalance as, well, We like gardens, well why Because?0:49:22Well They're not Completely Covered with Weeds and Mosquitoes and Black Flies right so they're Civilized a little bit but Still Within that Civilization Nature in its More benevolent Guys is encouraged to Flourish and People find that Rejuvenating and so the Idea that0:49:37Paradise The Proper Habitat of A human being is a walled garden is A good one and it's walled because Well You want to Keep things out Right I [mean] Raccoons for example if You want to Keep Those things out man even Though it's?0:49:48Impossible and You know You don't you, don't want, well There's all sorts of Things you Don't want your garden like snakes, walls don't Seem to, be much Use against Them but the Idea that0:49:59Paradise is [A] walled garden is is A An echo back to the chaos order Idea walls culture right garden Nature so the Proper0:50:11Human Habitat Is a Properly Tended garden now the radical Left-Leaning [Anti-Theist] Environmentalists tend to Make the case that0:50:24The Predations of The Western Capitalist System [Are] Consequence of the Injunction that was delivered in Genesis by god to man to go out and Dominate the Earth0:50:37David Suzuki Has Talked A lot about this by the way They Believe That that Statement has given Rise [to] our0:50:46Inappropriate Assumption that We have the right to Exert Control over the World and that that's what's turned us Into These terrible Predatory0:50:56Monsters Sometimes Described as Cancers on the Face of the earth Or? Viruses That Have Inhabited the entire ecosystem who are doing Nothing but [What] Wandering Everywhere and Wreaking Havoc as Rapidly as [we] Possibly Can?0:51:08Which is another Perspective on the Essential Element of Humankind That I find Absolutely Deplorable I0:51:17Mean if You Look at the historical Record for example even Casually you'll find out that as Early as as late as the late 1800s 1895 Thereabouts Thomas Huxley who0:51:27Was Aldous Huxley's Grandfather and A great defender of Darwin Prepared a report for the British Government on? Oceans Sustainability and his Conclusion was0:51:38Fish away Guys man There's so Many Fish out There the oceans are so Inexhaustible That no Matter how Hard Humanity Tried for for any Number of Years the0:51:47Probability That We could do more than put A dent in what? Was out There was a Zero now Huxley turned out to be Wrong he Didn't Realize that our Population? Was going to Spike so Dramatically Partly Because?0:51:57We got a, little bit Rich and our Children Stopped Dying at [The] Rate of Like 60 Percent before They, were One Years Old and you know we actually Managed to populate the0:52:06Earth With A few People but it wasn't Really until 1960 Or so that We woke [Up] to the fact that There Were so many of Us that we Actually Had to start Paying Attention to what we were doing [to] the Planet and that's like what0:52:1650 Years ago, well we've Just Started to develop the Technology or the Wherewithal [to] Understand that? The Whole World Might Be Well Considered a garden and We need to live Inside0:52:27The Proper Balance Between Culture and Order Or Culture and and and Chaos Before that We were Spending all of our Time?0:52:36Just Trying not to die and Usually very Unsuccessfully so So I don't [agree] With [That] Interpretation of the Opening0:52:47Sections of Genesis I don't believe that It's given Human being The right to act as super Predators on the Planet I think that Instead the Proper0:52:56Environment for Human Beings Is Presented Quite Properly as A Garden and that the role of People and That's Explicitly Stated in in the Second Story in Adam and Eve was to tend the garden and that0:53:07Means to Make The Proper Decisions and to Make the sure That everything thrives [in] Flourishes and and so that it's good for the things That [Are] Living There that aren't Just People but, also good for the People too, so fine I think0:53:18We can we could at least Note That that's A? Slightly Different Take on the Story Than the Ultimately Cynical Interpretation That's so Commonly put Forward Today Now Inside That0:53:31Wall garden is a couple of Trees and Adam and Eve and Some Animals and all of that and Unfortunately The Tree happens to have a snake Wrapped Around it Now that's an Interesting Thing0:53:41We're Going to talk about that A lot and the snake in Both of These Representations Is no Ordinary snake Say it's got a human Head and it's got a human Head There too so whatever that snake Is0:53:52Well Let's Forget About Looking at this From A religious perspective like if you Can just Imagine that you're an Anthropologist we've Never Seen This Image before It's like what do you See0:54:01Well you see walls and you See? Something [A] Fairly Pleasant Enclosure and then You See a Tree and People are Eating from the Tree but the tree has a snake in It that has a human Head and so then you might Think0:54:11Well what's a snake With a human Head and then [you'd] Think, well it's half Snake and Half Human that's Hardly Revelatory it's Just Self Evidence so Whatever that snake0:54:21Is isn't Just a snake It's snake and Human Or it's it's its Snake and Partakes in Whatever Human beings Are and That's very Important so we'll Continue We'll Consider That Later and you0:54:31See the same Thing Here and and you [See] in This Particular Version There's the head this one Also has wings and so this is a winged snake Sort of Like a Dragon and0:54:42So it Curls on the ground like a reptile and it's got an Aerial aspect or a spiritual Aspect So here it's a snake Which is like the lowest Form of of Reptilian life Say0:54:52Something That Crawls on the ground it's something that's Human and something that's Spiritual at the same Time and it Inhabits the Tree Which Look A Lot like Magic Mushrooms by the Way and0:55:02You Can Look that Up if You want that's Quite an Interesting little Rabbit hole to wander Down if you're Curious About it [But] But There's an Idea Here too is that There was something in The garden at the Beginning of Time that0:55:12Was like [A] snake that, was like a Person that Was like Something that was Winged it was something Spiritual so it's Spiritual Human and Reptilian all at the same Time and it's the animating0:55:22Spirit of the Tree Okay, so Keep that in Mind Thus The heavens and The Earth Were [Finished] This Is in Relationship to genesis One and all the host of Them and on the seventh0:55:33Day God Ended, his Work which he Had Made and he Rested on the seventh day from all his Work which he Had Made and God Blessed the seventh day and Sanctified it [Because] that in it he Had rested from all his Work Which God0:55:43Created The need That's Wisdom in That One - I think the idea of the Sabbath you know Because One of the things I've Worked with A lot of People who Were Hyper Conscientious and Thing About Hyper Conscientious People Is that they'll Just Work Til they0:55:55Die and That's Actually not very productive Because then They're Dead [and] They Can't Work and so what you have [to] do with Hyper Conscientious People is you have to Say Well I know you'd rather do Nothing but Work and Maybe you're Just as Guilty as you Can Possibly Be when you're not Working0:56:07But Let's Figure out what you're up to and what you're up to in all Probability is the attempt to be Productive in the Least Problematic Longest Sustaining possible Manner and That might mean you have to take A rest and0:56:20So one of the things I used to Work With lawyers With People Who had risen to the [Top] of large law Firms and They Were hyper productive Types They're often you know trying to hit Their impossible Quota for Yearly Hours and and0:56:33Burning Themselves To A frazzle as A consequence and One of the things that, we used to, do? was He Couldn't Work Fewer Hours Because that a day that Just Didn't Work but what we did was We Have them Take more Time off?0:56:42You know Like A Four-Day Weekend Every Two Months or something that, was Plotted out Into the future and then We track Their Billable Hours Which Is the degree of Productivity it Would Actually Increase0:56:52So that was so cool, because you could Take Hard-Working People and you could Say Look, you know Take a Break why Well Because you'll Be more Productive if You take a Break no that couldn't Possibly be like I should Just Work Flat out all the0:57:05Time it's like to test that out you Take a Break now on that it's like Well what Happened was Their Productivity Would Increase often By 10% so there's a there's Wisdom here Too Which Is okay and this Is0:57:16Alludes to the adam and Eve Story near the end you're Self-Conscious You Discover the future you have to Work Well then The [Question] Is How much Should You Work and One Answer is you better Bloody?0:57:27Well Work all the Time Because no Matter how Much Work you do you're not Solving your Problems? They're Coming Along man and you Can Stack up all the Money you want you Can Stack up all the wealth you want it Is0:57:36Not going to protect you in the Final Analysis so you, better be hitting the ground Running and You better run Flat out all the Time, well what happens if You do that Well then you die That's not [A] good Solution [so] maybe you Should Rest and so how Does that rest get0:57:50Instantiate it well It's not Easy To tell but one way to do it Let's Say Conceptually is to Say Look even God had the rest one day A week and so you don't have to be so0:58:01Presumptuous To Assume that if God Had dressed one day A week [that] maybe you know you are allowed to Work Non-Stop Without a Break at all0:58:13you know and I think our Culture has Slipped Into That in Quite A dangerous Way Because everything Is Open all the Time and i mean I Find that Just as Convenient as the rest of you but you know0:58:23It's so strange to Talk to modern People Because, one of the things They [always] tell you we Say? Well how are you and what do they always Say they, don't Say good they, don't Say Bad they Say, busy, like yeah, well0:58:34okay This is where Genesis 2 Starts and We Finally got There These are the Generations of the heavens and of The Earth When0:58:43[They] Were Created In the day that the lord God Made The Earth in The heavens and Every Plant of the Field before it was in The Earth and every Herb of the Field before it Grew For the Lord God Had not Caused it to rain upon the Earth and There was not a man to till the [Ground]0:58:57But There went Up a mist from the Earth and Watered the whole Face of the ground and The Lord God Formed man of the Dust of the Ground and Breathed Into his Nostrils The Breath of Life and man Became a living soul0:59:09Well you know There's some Archaic Thinking and There the Breath is life right that's Psyche that's Spirit that's Inspiration that's Respiration That's that's Also citizens [it's] [numa] Like Pneumatic [hire] [its] its Breath and the Reason That People associated life With Breath0:59:24Well that's not so foolish you know I mean you're Breathing man and Something you do all the Time and? When you die you start Breathing and so the Idea that There's something Integral to life About Breathing it's a perfectly reasonable0:59:35Supposition it Actually Happens to be very True and [Now] then to associate The Act of Creation With the Act of First of All Inspiration and Respiration and and The Breathing of Life Into something that was inanimate is Is?0:59:49Well what do You [Expect] for a One-Sentence Description it's not A Bad One Sentence Description you know So and the Lord god Planted a garden Eastward in Eden And eden Means0:59:58Well watered Place and That's Particularly relevant I suppose if You're A desert Dweller right? Because the issue There is Can you get enough Water to Make things Grow And so the the walled garden Which is Paradise is also eden Which Is A1:00:11Well watered Place and Water has the Element of Chaos? We Already saw That in Relationship [to] Genesis [one] Where the underlying chaos was often Assimilated Symbolically to Water and so?1:00:22The Idea [too], Is that a Certain amount of chaos has to be Brought Into the order in Order for it to be Fruitful and you Can See that in The Form of Allowing in The Water and out of the ground Made the Lord god to Grow1:00:33Every Tree that Is pleasant to the sight and good for food the tree of life also in The Midst of the garden and the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil so two1:00:42Trees Are Marked out Among the rest one is the tree of life And one is the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil now You know you know when you read something like that if you're Thinking [about] it that you're in A metaphorical Space1:00:54Now we've got to be Careful About Metaphors Because? You Know I could Say yeah that the chaos order idea is a metaphor but then I also Said Oh wait a second it's a metaphor but it's1:01:05Also what your Brain Is adapted to and so you know let's Just not be Pushing the Idea that it's Merely a metaphor too hard And the Same Thing Is here is Happening here These are Metaphors the [Tree] of [life]1:01:17When the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil but that? Doesn't Exactly Mean That They're mere Metaphors Because Sometimes as I mentioned before and as if you have A set of Things and You abstract out from them a Common Element1:01:30You Can Make a strong case that the Common Element Is More Real Than the Set of things from Which you extracted it that's the whole Utility in Abstraction [why] Would you bother with it Otherwise if You can't?1:01:40Take A set of Things and Say Look There's Something in Common across the Set of Things It's more important than the Differences between Them then you Wouldn't Bother Abstracting at all and so the tree of life and the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are Abstractions now1:01:52One of the Questions Is this is a tough one Man I've Been Trying tried to figure out for A long time why A Fruit and Something you eat Would be associated with the1:02:03Transformations of Psychology Because That's Basically What happens in The Adam and Eve Story why Would it be something that you eat? Now Eric Newman who is one of ewing Students Had written a fair bit About this and got a fair Ways with it1:02:14He said, well you know We do have noted we've noticed Forever that the Act of Eating Especially if You're Hungry Especially if you're Starving Produces A rapid Spiritual Transformation Right I mean1:02:24Some of you this is Worth Knowing you Probably have a crabby Partner Or child because Everyone Does and One Thing you might Try. [Is] that if They Get Erratic during [the] day and you know get all1:02:37Volatile About Nothing at all Just Give Them something to eat Really I'll Tell you man Made this Sauce if I do this with [my] clinical Clients all the Time it's like they Say Well i fly off the Handle at the littlest things like, okay?1:02:48Yeah Just try this for a week when you're Crabby and unreasonable eat a piece of cheese or eat a peanut butter Sandwich Eat something That's High Protein High fat and then Just wait [ten] Minutes and See if You're sane and1:02:59You'll find out [that] you're Saying after you eat so often that you [Just] Can't believe how Crazy you are when you're Hungry? Look Here's it's Really Absolutely Bloody Remarkable so i'm Telling you try this It'll-It'll1:03:13Especially if You don't eat Breakfast This will Change your life and so Here's A practical bit of Information for you [too] for all of you1:03:22Antisocial Types who are going to end Up in Prison so If You're in Prison and you want to go on Parole Okay, so you have to go in front of the Judge and Tell them why?1:03:33You're not going to do it again so here's the deal here's the deal it doesn't really, Matter, what you Did and it doesn't Really Matter What you [Promise] what Matters is Whether you see the Judge before lunch or after Lunch Because if You see the Judge after Lunch1:03:47Probability That You'll Get Parole IS 60% higher yeah right [that] [is] Just like So never Have an Argument With your Partner when you're Hungry?1:03:56Or when They're Hungry Especially if You want something from them it's like? Here's The Sandwich They'll Eat it then They'll be Happy then you Can, Manipulate them Because1:04:05Before That man no So you know it's not [that] unreasonable to [think] that There's a spirit in Food because Food1:04:17Rejuvenates and it Just doesn't rejuvenate you Physically it rejuvenates You Spiritually and Then of Course There's The other Things that We Consume that aren't Exactly like Food that have A? Walloping Spiritual Impact like Alcohol Let's Say Which is a spirit and is regarded1:04:31Dionysius Right I mean it's the god of The vine and the god of the vine Possesses You and Makes you act all the fun Ways that Alcohol Makes you act you know the fun Ways that you regret the next1:04:40Day and so there's The Spiritual Element of that too and And then But There's Something even Deeper that I think Is so cool that's associated With Food and Information because1:04:51The Story of Adam and Eve represents The Fruit as Producing A psychological Transformation And so the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil IS an Abstraction across Trees and it's trying to Say1:05:03Here's Something That's Common across Trees it's it's A fruit [that's] Common across Trees it's something like that and so The Fruit Across its Common Across Trees is something you might Call food Fair Enough that's a generalization but Here's something that's even [More] cool1:05:19The Food that's Stable Across The Entire Domain of Food isn't food it's Information [Its] Information and We use the Same Bloody Circuits in our Brain to Forage for?1:05:31Information That Squirrels Use to Forage for Food [but] animals used to Forage for food it's the Same Circuit and why Is that Because We Figured out [that] Knowing where things Is Knowing where the food?1:05:41Is is more Important than Having the Food and so so Knowing Where The food is is A form of massive Food Information is A form of Meta Food and Once You have1:05:51Well that's why, we're Information Foragers and so Once You grasp That and and that Ideas Is? Embedded Into The Story of Adam and Eve so whatever it is that they Ingest is A form Meta Food it's it's Infinite Information and and you know. We'll trade food for Information right so if You're1:06:07Stuck on The Edge of the highway [and] you know your your hoods Up and [You're] You're going Places Thing has turned Into a pile of junk that you don't understand and1:06:16Somebody Pulls Beside you up beside you in Their Mechanic and They Point to something to Say [Well] Just put that wire back on There you'll Immediately give Them a sandwich Right Or you'll Offer them something in Return you know what I mean Because They've Provided you With?1:06:28[Information] That Has Value and it has Value Because it Actually Provides You with Energy Because Information Provides You with Energy Because otherwise why Would We bother With It and so food Provides Energy but so does Information and so?1:06:40There's The There's the idea of Food that you abstract from everything you can eat but then There's the idea of what you Could abstract From all sources of Food and the answer to that Would be Information and the Trees1:06:50That are being Referred [To] in Adam and Eve are These Method trees They're not Ordinary Trees Just Like Paradise is no Ordinary Place Like Adam and Eve are no Ordinary People and Just like the logos that God Is using at the Beginning of Time is no Ordinary1:07:04Conception and These aren't They're Not Metaphors There more Than Metaphors There I think of them as hyper Realities it's something Like that is [There] more real1:07:13Than what You see There more real Than the Reality that presents Itself to you [and] Lots of Things are like that right Numbers Are Like that We wouldn't Think Or Abstract If There weren't things that, were more real than what, we can See?1:07:26So what's most real, Well that's Partly what? We're Trying to Figure [out] and out of the ground [Make] the lord god to Grow Every Tree [that] Is pleasant to the sight and [good] for food The Tree of Life1:07:35also in The Midst of the garden and The Tree of Knowledge of [Good] and Evil and a river went out of eden to water the garden and from Thence it Was Parted and Became Into Foreheads That's Produced a tremendous amount of Speculation now you know the garden of eden Is?1:07:49Also the Holy City that's Another way of Thinking About or it's jerusalem right Or it's the ideal state Which Could Be the [ideal] city Or to be an Ideal State of being Or could be the ideal site here if all of Those things Stacked1:08:00Up at, the same Time right this is a mandela and This is the Mandela Form that People What we Call [Hypothesised] that? Constituted The Structure of Paradise You notice it's got this Cross Form that's1:08:12Eaten Itself and There's the The Center of Eden and There's the Rivers Those are Rivers not snakes Those are the Rivers that go out of it and They're turned Into These Mandela images that are Representative of what [jung] described as the Self which Would be the Center1:08:25Element of Being That he Associated of Conscious being that he Associated With Divinity I would Say but Also with the idea of the Holy city so I'm just Showing you that to show you what where the Imagination has Taken Ideas of Paradise so?1:08:40The Name of The first River is Pisan that is which Compasses The Whole Land of Havilah Whether is Gold and the Gold of that Land is good There's BDellium and The Onyx Stone and The Name of the Second River is gijón1:08:51The Same is it that Compasseth the whole Land of Ethiopia and the Name of the Third River is Heady [kal] or? Hideki [I] don't know that is it which goes Towards the east of Assyria and the Fourth river is the euphrates1:09:03[so] there's This Strange Intermingling There of Geography With Mythical Geography right Which you see happen Fairly Frequently in The Books and The Lord God Took the man and put Him in The garden of eden to dress it and Keep it1:09:16okay So that's that's A good That's A good Command that's what you're Supposed to do Is Take Care of the Damn thing with a lot Of Work to Make right Took a, whole Week1:09:25and The Lord God Commanded the man Saying of Every Tree of the garden Thou Mayest Freely eat but Of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil Thou shalt not eat of it for in the day that thou eatest1:09:38Thereof Thou Shalt Surely die Well There's a sponge of Questions There That People have Been? Puzzling They're Puzzling over For A Long Time Gaudy1:09:48[He's] Tricky Character in The Story of Adam and Eve it's like okay if We can't eat the Damn Thing Well why put in The garden to Begin With that Would be One Question and?1:09:57You Made Us and then you told us not to eat this Knowing Perfectly, well that the first Thing We were going to do Is eat it because People are of Exactly that? Type Which Is that if You Say to them with Their insatiable1:10:08Curiosity This is all fine [and] [Nice] but Over Here is something you Should never Look at and then you leave the room it's like everybody is over There trying to Figure [what] [the] hell that thing Is1:10:17Instantly Right Because, we're Curious Curious Curious Curious Creatures and so you have to Wonder [Exactly] what God was [up] to here and There's Gnostic Speculation that the original God was not Really A very Good God he1:10:30Was kind of an Unconscious Evil [God] and that he Wanted his Creation to [be]? Unconscious and so Forbade Them from Developing Consciousness and that it was a higher god who and Maybe in The Form of The Serpent who Tempted Human beings Towards Consciousness and you know that that Idea got1:10:44Scrubbed out of Classic Christianity Pretty Early Although There's something That's Interesting About it and There are Remnants of it in Different Forms that Stayed inside the story1:10:54Like the idea that the Fall was? you Know A terrible Tragedy but on the other Hand It was [the] Precondition for The greatest event in History which was The birth of Christ and The Redemption of Mankind and so?1:11:07It's complicated Let's put it that way God only knows what God was Up to but you Know This is A good example of That Ambivalence [to] me again that it's an Indication of the1:11:17Sophistication of The People who put These Stories Together [I], also Consider this somewhat Miraculous because you, know if you [Were] Just a simple Propagandist of sorts you [Wouldn't] Leave This sort of Complexity in The Text you Just Get Rid of That Because if You're A?1:11:29Propagandist Everything is supposed to Make sense Along the ideological Plane and here God is supposed to be good it's like Well We better Get There to that line Because? Something's up With It and Obvious what it Is but that isn't what People, did and to me that Indicates that that they1:11:43Were doing two things as, they, were Trying not to be too Careless With the Traditions that they, were Handed they, they, were they, were Touching Them at Their Peril They1:11:54Were very Careful with them and also that they, were Actually trying to understand what was [going] on because why? Otherwise Keep This why not Just Simplify it Or Maybe Just to tribute this to the devil That Would be Easier and Having god do it but and1:12:07The Lord God Said it Is [not] good that man Should be alone I will Make Help Meet for him None of the Ground The Lord God Formed Every beast of the Field at every Fall of the Air and Brought them Unto1:12:17Adam to see what he Would Call them and Whatsoever adam Called Every Living Creature that, was [the] Name Thereof and Adam gave Names to all the Cattle in The Fall of Cattle Means animals Basically and to [the] fall of the air and1:12:29Every Beast of The Field but for adam There was not Found to help meet for him, okay, well a couple of things There Speculations Number, One it's like why Does god Care what1:12:38Adam Calls The animals and the answer That Seems to be it's associated again with the Magic of Speech Right so that We know? According to the Story [That] Human beings1:12:48Were Already Made in The image of God and that god used language in Order to call order Forth from Chaos and [that] Human Beings Were Made in That Image and so There's an echo of that here even Though it's from an independent1:12:58Tradition in the echo Is the Thing isn't quite real Till you name it and That's Quite and That's that's an Interesting Thing and We don't exactly know how far that Extends it's Certainly the case [that]1:13:10Like Seeing Things often Exist in A strange Potential Form Interconnected Form Where everything's Confusing like a massive Confusion before you put your Finger on [it] name it1:13:21What's going on Here you Name it it's like it it Carves it out from all that underlying chaos it Makes it Into Agrippa [belen] Today that you Can then contend With and you might Say, well it was real before you Named it it's like well1:13:36yes it was real before you Named it the Same way things are There when There's no one There to perceive them and It isn't Obvious how things are There When1:13:47You're Not There [to] perceive them I'll tell you something Bloody weird about Perception you Can Look this up at John Wheeler John, leader's a physicist so here's a really cool thing Let's Say You go Outside at night and you look Up and you [See] a Star and1:13:59Like so a Photon from [that] Star Enters your eye Then Maybe That Photon has Been Cruising Along for like 30 Million Years do you know1:14:08That That Photon Would not Have Been Emitted from [that] Star at that Time if your eye Wasn't There at that Time to receive it you think Well how the hell Can That Because it Happened [20] Million Years Ago it's like1:14:18Well I don't know how it can be to tell you the truth but I know that John Wheeler has done A very Good Job Of Detailing out why That's True and Necessarily True and so in Wheeler is also the physicists who?1:14:30Develop The Notion of it from bit and he Believes That the World Is Best Construed as A? The Potential of the World Is Best Construed as a place [of] Information it's something like Leading Information and at1:14:42What Consciousness Does is transform the latent Internet in Information Into something like Concrete Reality He doesn't Mean That Metaphorically and One of the Cases that he Makes in That Regard Is this story, that I just told you1:14:54Is that the Photon Couldn't Have Left from where it was Unless it Had a place to go Now it's it's Complicated and Confusing Because From The Perspective of a beam of [light] from a Photon There is no Time and There's no Distance from one Point to another1:15:07When of Course That's Completely impossible to Understand - but from the perspective [of] a Photon the Universe is Completely Flat Perpendicular to the [Direction] that The Photon is Traveling so it's There and Here at the same [Time]1:15:19For Us it's not it's like 20 Million Years Ago but for the Photon it's it's all here and now so Anyways The Reason I'm Telling you all that is because the Relationship between Consciousness and Reality Is by no means1:15:31Straightforward it is Seriously not Straightforward and Physicists Physicists Debate What the Relationship Is [between] Consciousness and Reality and They debate about?1:15:42What the sort of Phenomena that I just described Mean and I'm not Really Qualified to enter Into that debate Because I'm not A physicist But I do know and I've Read it for A bit of Wheeler as but as much of it as I can1:15:51Understand and I do at least know that that's what he Claimed and I Also know that that Claim Is not that's the Claim that's Taken Seriously Among Physicists of the caliber of the physicists who Can understand Wheeler1:16:03so that's Pretty Interesting so Anyways There is Emphasis again on This Importance of Naming in order to Make things real you know and1:16:12Sometimes People won't Name things just so they don't become real so you know if you're if you have a relationship Which Undoubtedly you do and it has Problems Which Undoubtedly it Does You Bloody, well Know That Lots of Times There's something under the Carpet that1:16:24No one wants to Name and Everybody's Thinking, well as Long as We don't Name it it's not Really There and in Some sense it Really, isn't there Because you Could act as If it's not There and get away with [it] at least for Short Periods of Time it Sees you Name that thing it's like you1:16:37Give it Form and it's There and no one Can ignore it and that's Annoying Because then you have to deal with it or [noor] Or face the Consequences [but] the Reason I'm Telling you that is Because, We have [A]?1:16:47an Intuition even That We can have things not exist by not Naming them you name it and it Comes Forward With Staggering Clarity and it's not as if Naming it is the only Thing that Gives it Reality but it is something Like it1:17:00Sharpens it brings it Into Focus and Gives it Borders and Barriers and Borders and Boundaries and so Anyways Gods interested Enough in What adam has to1:17:09Say that he has Him Name all the animals [and] That sort of Makes Them Into animals Now There's More to the Linguistic story, than that so [the] social Psychologist roger Brown was One?1:17:19Of them Studied This Really Interesting Phenomena Which is associated With Relationship Between Perception and Action you know How A Kid will Call a particular animal A cat1:17:29Well the word Cat Is very Short like the word dog and it Turns out that you know you could think that we could Perceive?1:17:38Cats as Multicellular Organisms like We could See The Cells We could See the Molecules We Could See the atoms We Could See Or we Could See the ecosystem? That the cat is part of but?1:17:47We don't or maybe the Broader Mammalian Classification that it's part of We Could Perceive that as the unit of Perception but We don't we perceive things at the level of Cat and1:17:59You Can Tell the perceptual level that People Naturally Perceive that which doesn't Seem to be Socio-Culturally Determined to any Great Degree by the Way Because the words are often Short and Easily Remembered and Early Learned and so There's This Level of Analysis1:18:15Out of all the possible Levels of Analysis that the World does exist that, we? Perceive it at a Certain Level of Analysis and That Level of Analysis Seems to have something to do with the world's Functional Utility1:18:25For Us at. That Level and the Perception at that level and the Naming at that level Gives Things a reality at That Level you know Because the thing about1:18:35Things Is that They're Not Easily separable from other Things They Tangled Together in all sorts of Strange Ways and Yet when, We cast our Eye and and Use our Language to orient Ourselves in the World we cut Things up Into discrete?1:18:50Discriminable Objects that We Can then Utilize and There's something about that that Makes them real in A way that They're Interconnected? Potential The Interconnected Potential that They were before that that it's not it's not real in the same way at1:19:03Least I think it's even Less Real I think that's the right way of Thinking About it even Though it's not Completely unreal but It'S an echo [Atoms] a little God at that Point a little god the Father and god's Already Done the Groundwork but adam has to come Along and1:19:16Says Say Well that's A cat it's like Poof? Whatever that Is is now A cat and that's dog and that's a Sheep and you know it gives Them It Gives Them something like Pragmatic Form1:19:28But for [Adam] There was not Found to help Meet for him And the Lord god Caused A deep Sleep to fall upon adam and he Slept and he and god Took One of his Ribs and Closed Up the Flesh instead1:19:38Thereof and The Rib Which [the] Lord God Had [Taken] from man Made he A woman and Brought her Unto the man And adam Said This is now Bone of my Bones and Flesh of my [Flesh] she shall be [called], woman because she was Taken out of man?1:19:50Therefore Shall A man leave his Father [and] his Mother and Shall Cleave Unto, his wife and They Shall Be one Flesh that's a walloping statement to put in There at the end of Those Three Sentences and1:19:59Therefore Comes as Somewhat of a surprise but There's an Injunction There Well it's a good Injunction man you'll tell you people who? Don't do that they have A hell of a Time in Their Marriage and1:20:09So this is a good thing to know if You are Married Or if you're Planning to get Married is like You Know, We Have very Strong Orientation Towards our Parents and for good Reason it's like the Injunction here Is?1:20:23That Secondary Since you're Married and And Failure to do that Makes your marriage Collapse and then you deserve it to collapse [-] as far as I'm Concerned Because it's A1:20:33Reflection of your Pathological Immaturity and your Unwillingness To extract Yourself From the you know [Tellin] like Grip of Parents who are a little bit too much on the Interfering Side but the Injunction There's A Deep1:20:44Injunction Here it's very Complicated so one of the ideas is that The Original Adam wasn't a man like like a separate man it was more like A1:20:55Hermaphroditic Being and in That Him Hermaphroditic Being There was a kind of Undifferentiated Perfection and then that Was Split Into Male and Female and then that Part of the goal of Human beings Is to Reunite that as the singular Unity that1:21:09Reestablishes The Initial Perfection and That's Actually the goal of marriage from a Spiritual Perspective and you Could Read [About] that if You Read Young because he wrote Quite A bit about that so lovely it's such A good1:21:18Idea [so] i had These Friends that went to sweden to get Married They Were Northern they were from Northern Alberta but his Heritage Their Both Their [Heritage's]1:21:27Were sweden swedish and in This Ceremony they, did This cool Thing yes They Were being Married and they Had Two hold a candle Up between them right [while] they, were being Married and you think1:21:38Well okay what's the Candle? That's A source of light the source of Illumination Right the source of enlightenment it's the Candle that you put on Christmas Trees in1:21:47Europe so it's the light that emerges in The Darkness in The Depth of Winter it's a symbol of life in Darkness it's the Reemergence of the sun that the at the darkest coldest Time of the year Which is also associated1:22:00Symbolically With The Birth of Christ for all sorts of Complicated Reasons and so the Candles all that and then the next Question is why? Do you hold it above you and the answer is because what's above you is what you're Below [too]?1:22:12So it's single Simplify Something transcendent and so why do you both hold on to it Well Because you're Both Supposed to hold on to the light Right and you're Supposed to be Subordinate to the light and so you ask, well who's in Charge in Marriage, well the light?1:22:26That's the idea so you come together as one Thing you No longer Two things It isn't what's good for you and it's not what's good for your wife it's what's good for the Marriage and the Marriage is About1:22:36The Combined Being Which is the Reassembly of the original Hefferman Herma? Frenetic Hermaphroditic Being at the Beginning of Time that's the Idea and that's all packed1:22:47Into Like These Four Sentences and You Know There's Been, well all of These Sentences Have Tremendous History of Interpretation Associated With them right it's Just Endless and Endless and Endless and That's one of the lines and so it's1:22:59Also an Antidote to the Idea that women Taken out of man Which is Obviously the Reverse of the biological Process by the way Makes Women in Some sense Subordinate to man that Is not built Into This Text I don't see that1:23:11At all is Built Into the Text and There's something Else That's associated With it too and There's an Idea that1:23:21you know in in [Sleeping] [beauty] you know what Sleeping beauty goes to sleep and The Reason She Goes to sleep is because you have to remember what happens Is1:23:30She has Parents who are quite Old and so they're Pretty desperate to have a child [Like] so many People are Now and They only have One Child like so many People do Now and1:23:39They Wanted it Happen to this Child Because like hey it's a miracle and There's Only One of Them and so She's the Princess and so it's like1:23:48We're Not letting Anything Around here so they have [A] big Christening Party right and They Invite everybody But They don't Invite Maleficent and Maleficent is the Terrible Mother She's Nature She's like the thing that goes bump in The Night She's the Devil Herself1:24:03So to Speak She's everything that you, don't want your child to Encounter so the king and Queen Saying well We just want to Invite her to the Christening it's like good luck With that That's an Eatable Story Right The eatable Mother is the mother who, devours her Child by refusing by over Protecting him1:24:18Or her so that Instead of being Strengthened by an Encounter with the terrible World They're Weakened By too much Protection and Then when They're Let out Into the World They Cannot live and1:24:29That's The Story of Sleeping beauty and that's what the king and Queen do and They Apologize to the Two maleficent when She first Shows Up and Say, well you know they have a bunch of Half-Witted excuses why, They1:24:39Don't invite her We Forgot like I don't think so? you know you Don't forget something [like] [that] and She kind of Makes that Point it's right the whole Horror of life you1:24:49Don't forget about that when you have a child that's for sure you might wish that it Would Stay at Bay but you do not forget about it the Question Is do you Invite it to the Party and the answer Is it bloody well1:24:58Depends How Unconscious You want your child to be and if You want your child to be Unconscious Well then you have the Added Advantage but Maybe They? Won't leave Home and so you Can Take advantage of Them [for] the rest of your Sad Life Instead of Going off to find something1:25:10To do for Yourself Well and Then of Course you Can Take revenge on Them if They do have any Any what Would you Call Impetus Towards Courage that you? Sacrificed Yourself [30] Years Ago and want to Stamp out as soon as you See it Developing your child that's Another Thing that Would be1:25:24Quite Pleasant and so that's What happens in Sleeping beauty yeah? Well None of This is pleasant and Nothing that happens in That Story Is pleasant so sleeping beauty She's naive as Hell they put her out1:25:34in The Forest and Have her Raised by these Three like [Goody-Two-Shoes] Fairies [That] are, also Completely devoid of Any Real Potency and Power Right There's no Nothing Maleficent About Them and then The first Idiot prince that Wanders by she falls in Love With so badly that She has Post-Traumatic1:25:48Stress Disorder When he Rides Off on his Horse? Great That's what happened And then she then [she] goes Into the Castle and She's all Freaked out Because she met The love of her life for like Five1:25:59Minutes for God's Sake and you know that's when the spinning Wheel that's the Wheel of fate Pops Up and She Pricks her Finger? Right [I] try to get Rid of all the Spinning Wheels they try?1:26:08To get Rid [of] all the Wheels of fate With her Pointed end but She finds it Poke Pricks her Fingers and Frame her and Falls Down Unconscious [While] she wants to be Unconscious and no Bloody1:26:17Wonder She was Protected her Whole life [She's] so Damn naive that her first love Affair Just about Kills her she wants to go to sleep and Never Wake up and so That's Exactly What happens and then She has to Wait for the prince to come and Rescue her, well you think how1:26:30Sexist Can You get that story Well Seriously Because that's that's the way that that Would be Read and in The modern World it's like she doesn't need a prince to Rescue her That's why I disney Made Frozen That Absolutely Appalling Piece of Rubbish1:26:50so you know you Can Say you Can Say Well the Princess doesn't need a prince to rescue her but you know that's a boneheaded way of Looking at the story Because the prince1:26:59Isn't Just a man who's coming to rescue the woman and believe Me he's got his Own Problems right he's got a whole Goddamn Dragon he has to contend With but but the Prince1:27:08Also represents The woman's Own Consciousness the consciousness Is Presented very Frequently in Story That's Symbolically Masculine as it is with the logos Idea and the idea Is that1:27:17Without Without That Forward Going Courageous Consciousness A Woman Herself will Drift Into unconsciousness and Terror and so you Can Read it as1:27:26Well the woman who's? Sleeping Needs A Man to wake her Up and of Course Just like a man Needs a woman to wake him Up it's the Same Damn Thing that's The Dragon Fight in Sleeping beauty but it's1:27:36Also the case that if She's only Unconscious all she can do is Lay There and Sleep like the sleep of the naive and Damned She has to Wake and Wake Herself Up and and bring her Own1:27:47Consciousness Or Own Masculine Consciousness Into The Forefront so that She Can Survive in The World of Course Women are trying to do that like Mad But That's Partly What's Represented in The Story like that and1:27:58That's Partly What's implicit in this idea Is that Unless the woman Is taken out of man so to speak then She isn't a human being She's Just a creature1:28:07And that's Partly what's embedded in This Story so you, don't want to Read it as a Patriarchal You want to Read Anything that Way so really it's It really it's yeah I will I won't bother Without but Really, We can?1:28:22Do Better than that man Therefore Shall a man leave his [Father] and his Mother and Shall Cleave Unto His wife and They Shall, be One Flesh it's like [ya] [Seeing] The other Thing About Marriage This is Really Worth Knowing too is that I've1:28:33Learned This in Part From Reading Young it's like what do you, do when you get Married that's Easy you [Take] Someone Who's Just as Useless and Horrible as you are and then you shackle Yourself to them and then you Say1:28:46We're Not running away No Matter what happens yeah, well that that's Perfect because then you, don't get to run away and the thing Is is [like] if You Can run, away you can't tell each other the truth?1:28:58Because if You Tell someone The truth About you and They don't run away They weren't Listening and so if you don't have someone Around the can't run away then you can't Tell them the truth [and]1:29:07So that's Part of the Purpose of the Marriage it's like, okay? okay I'll Bet on you you bet [on] me it's a losing Bet We both Know that [but] Given our Current Circumstances were Unlikely to find Anyone Better that's for Sure you know1:29:24There's Two Things That Come Off of that One is you know People are Waiting Around to find mr.. Or mrs Right it's like Here's Something to [think] About man to put Yourself on your feet right if You went to a party and you found1:29:34Mr.. Right and he Looked at you and Didn't run away, Screaming that Would Indicate that he, wasn't mr. Right at all right it's like the Old Nietzsche and Joke if1:29:43Someone Loves you that Should Immediately Disenchant you with them Right Right [Or] it's the Woody allen Joke I never belonged to A club that Would take me as a member1:29:54So so that's A that's an Interesting that's A very Interesting Thing to think About and so you're Going to Shackle Yourself To someone Who's Just as1:30:03Imperfect as you are and then the issue Is You you you might be in A situation where you Can Actually Negotiate Because you might Say1:30:12Well There's Some Things About you that aren't Going so right and There's Some Things about me that aren't Going so right and we're Bloody Well Stuck with the Consequences for the next 50 Years? So, we could we Can either straighten This out Or?1:30:23We can suffer Through it for the next Five decades and you know People are of This or that Without that Degree of Seriousness Those Problems will not be Solved you'll leave things unnamed1:30:33Because There's Always an Ounce like and it's the Same Thing when you're Living together With someone you know that People who live Together before They're Married Are More Likely to get Divorced not Less Likely and the Reason for that is what Exactly are you Saying to One [Another]1:30:45When you live with each other Just Think About it Well for Now you're Better Than Anything Else i Can trick but I'd like to reserve the right to trade you in1:31:05Conveniently if Someone Bitter happens to Stumble Into Me1:31:16Well How Could how Could someone not be insulted to their core by an Offer Like That Now They're Willing to play Along With it because, They're going to do the same thing with you now Well That's Exactly and it's like yeah Yeah I know You're not Going to commit to me so that means you don't value me Or1:31:29our Relationship Above Everything Else but As long as I get to escape if I need to then I'm Willing to put [up] with that it's like that's A Hell of a say i mean you might Think how Stupid [is] it to Shackle1:31:38Yourself To Someone it's like it's Stupid man There's No doubt about that but Compared to the alternatives it's Pretty Damn good because Without that Shackling There Are Things you will Never ever Learn Because you'll avoid them you can1:31:51Always Leave and if you Can leave then you Don't have to tell each other the truth it's as Simple as that because you Can Just leave and then you Don't have Anyone you Can tell the truth to1:32:05So there are some Representations of the Idea of the Original it's not This isn't all adam this Is this Is an Old Chinese Symbol I Think it's [Fuxi] and New I think I have the1:32:17Pronunciation Wrong but it's Really cool, see it's See, the snakes Down Here They're Kind [of] Like A dna Symbol Which I find very Interesting and So that's the original1:32:26Cosmic Serpent That's Sort of the Potential out of Which that emerges and then that's the Differentiation of That Into Male and Female and so that's like the Predatory Unknown that's one Way of Thinking about it that's the most Fundamental1:32:38Conception of Mankind Is something like that is the Predatory Unknown and then the Bifurcation of that Into the Two Fundamental Cognitive Elements of Human Perception Masculine and Female and You See the same Thing here this is Chinese this is egyptian1:32:51Also extraordinarily Old it's the it's the [great] [Serpent] that underlies everything matt Advocating Itself Into Isis Queen of the Underworld and Osiris King of the King of King of King Pharaoh1:33:04King of Order You See the Same Thing in an Old Alchemical Symbol I love This One it Looks Quite A lot like the little Thing That Harry Potter Chases Around it Yeah and that's not Accidental by the Way Because the seeker Is the thing the thing that chases this and1:33:17The Seeker [That] Chases This and Catches it Wins and that's A Really Old Idea and How the hell'd jk Rowling Knew that I cannot Figure out Because that is A very very Archaic symbol1:33:26Arcane Symbol on Google it's Called the round Chaos and the only Reference to the Round chaos that I Can find on Google Is on my web Page and so I1:33:36Have no idea how Rowling Came up With that i mean I know she looked at a lot of Old Texts but the idea that if You Play the Meta Game and You Catch this you Win all the games is Exactly right not and that's the Motif for what's the Name [of] That Quidditch1:33:49Yeah so there's the Potential that's like The Potential out of Which God Made the World at the Beginning of Time and What Emerges out of that Is some Kind of that's a Dragon [you] know that in The Dragon fight that's Partly the1:34:00Serpent that's in The garden of eden and then that's the Manifestation of Masculine and Feminine out of that Potential Predatory Unknown1:34:09Masculine and Feminine it's like a single it's like a single Representation of the evolutionary History [of] Human cognitive Consciousness so cool and that's also an Image of the Ideal it's the union of sun and Moon and it's this Hyper Creature1:34:24Hermaphroditic it's Also the adam and Eve That existed at the Beginning of Time before the Fall and it's the Purpose of Marriage All of that as a Sacrament all of that in These images it's just Absolutely unbelievable what images Can pack Into them1:34:39And There's A more Classical Representations of Eve Being extracted from adam And this is [A] cool line and they, were Both Naked the man and his wife and we're not Ashamed1:34:53Well that See someone who wrote [that] Would only write that like that if They, were Surprised that They weren't Ashamed because why? Would you Point it out Otherwise and so there's this Intimation that1:35:02Of Two things Number one Is There was a point at Time in Time When Human beings Were Naked and They weren't Ashamed of it and There is a point of Time Which is now where They're?1:35:11Naked and They Are Ashamed of it and then the Question Is well what's the Association with Nakedness and Shame and That's all often given A sexual Connotation in in1:35:22Classic Interpretations of The Adam and Eve Story Because of its Association With Nudity I presume but I think it's A lot more Complicated Than that So you [think] I know I would notice my Daughter1:35:35She Probably Won't be very Happy that i'm Revealing This in This lecture but My Daughter was Never Really Concerned about Nudity when she was a little Kid? All the same to her One Way or another1:35:44But my son by the Time he was three man that Kid was Private he, his his Bedroom door, Was shut The Bathroom Door? Was shut it was Like Get the, hell out of Here and That Seemed to just happen of its Own Accord and you know1:35:56We had Two Children and One was like that the other? One wasn't i didn't think We had much to do with it at all but it was Really Fascinating to Watch That Emerge in Him and you know that that sense of of1:36:06[Self-Consciousness] Does Seem To Emerge in Children Somewhere Around the age of Three and you know that's Generally, also when We start Thinking That Maybe Having your Baby Wander Around naked on A beach isn't Exactly the best Idea There's This There's something like that1:36:17It's the Nudity and Children is Generally okay under some Circumstances in Public Display We seem to think of that as Merely as Acceptable?1:36:26Why, I don't know why it stops being Acceptable Well That has something to do With Sexuality? Obviously But it's A very Complicated Phenomena But You know That Whole Nudity Thing Is then is A very Complicated Thing [I] mean first of all People are kind of Strange1:36:40Because we're Hairless Roughly you know Compared to most animals and We don't know why that Is some People Think it's Because We lost our [Heroin] We're Wandering Around in The debt in The Desert Running Around in Africa Because?1:36:52We're Really Really good runners, We Can run Down animals Say like A Human Being in Good Shape Can run a Horse to death in A week We Can Really run man and A lot of our Ancestors the Kalahari bushmen Still do this they Just run an Animal for like1:37:06Until it dies and that bushman doesn't die [I] mean They Also sometimes Shoot Them With Poison Arrows but They Can Just run them Till they die so We have Tremendous Endurance and you and You have to be able to get Rid [of] A lot of Heat if You're Going to run1:37:17Around in The desert so, we don't have much hair that's one Explanation and Buckminster Fuller Had an Interesting Explanation Which Was he Thinks that at some Point during our Evolution [We] Spend A [lot] of Time near the Water and so1:37:28We're like fish Apes something like that, well you [know] We like to be on the Beach and There's Lots of Food There and We like to swim and we're Really good [at] Swimming for? Terrestrial Creatures and We cry Salt Tears like some Seagoing Creatures - and Women have a layer of?1:37:41Subcutaneous Fat Like Some Seagoing Creatures - and We have kind of our Feet Are Which are very odd Things Are Kind of good for? Flapping in The Water Although, We Can, also Walk with them and so he Thought that Maybe that Adaptation was too?1:37:55Water Existence Like seals and so Forth like, We kind of went back to the Ocean but not Quite and so? But Anyways The Evolution of that Hairlessness Is an Interesting Thing but it Certainly Does Make Us1:38:06Exposed To the World in A way that animals that have A covering of Fur aren't and Then We're upright Which Is very Strange Because most animals aren't [They're] on all Fours and so they're very1:38:16Vulnerable Parts Are Protected and Not Exposed to view and then of Course when, you're Standing up nude your your1:38:25your Visit Let's Call it your psychophysiological Quality Is on Painful Display Right and People Complain About that all the Time you know if you look at the feminist tack for example on beauty the Idea that Women have1:38:37Eating Disorders Is Directly Attributed to the Presence of Too Many Beautiful Women on the Cover of Magazines Something Like That Even Though women Buy Those Magazines and They're Attracted [to] the [Bandar] Mood Goes Up when they Purchase them and1:38:51If the if the Stimulus was negative The Women Would avoid the Magazines and not Buy Them so as a Theory it's A very very Bad one But it's still the case that you know it's still the case [that]1:39:02Standards of Beauty Shame People and That's for Sure [and] Everyone Because if You're not ugly now man You're Going to be at some [Point] in your life1:39:11So that's kind of A rough thing to contend With right it's it's a rough [Thing] to to know that That There's an Ideal that you could be and Maybe even [One] [Swear] that you're not going to be for Long or1:39:21Norden Or Never Were and it's really an Appalling Issue Because I think it's Harder on Women Because Women are Judged By men More for Their1:39:30[What] for Their Youth and Fertility that's how it Turns out From the evolutionary Point of view men Are Judged more on Their Socioeconomic? Status By women it's Harsh Both Ways but so anyways it's you know it's a terrible Thing to1:39:43to Carry the Knowledge with you that you're Exposed to the Most Serious Possible Evaluation of The Quality of your being that you Can Possibly be Exposed to all the Time and That that's Further1:39:56Amplified if You're Without Clothing and so Part of Clothing is Protection but A tremendous Amount of it is Merely Stopping other People from Evaluating you too Harshly all the Time it just Gets in the way so1:40:10Anyways This Store This This Story Makes the case that at Some Point We [Would] like that, well Animals aren't like that so it Seems Perfectly Plausible at at some Point1:40:20We weren't Like that but at some [Point] that Changed and They were Both Naked the man and his wife and we're not Ashamed of? [A] serpent1:40:29Was more Subtle Than Any beast of the Field which [the] lord God had Made [and] He Said Unto the woman yea hath God Said ye Shall not eat of Every Tree Of the garden i like this this is um, oh?1:40:41I can't remember who did the Edging Yell who is it [Da-Rae] yeah Deray Exactly he Door A did etchings for Paradise lost That Are Absolutely Remarkable and This Is satan and this is the snake Here and of Course in the Genesis Story satan is Weirdly1:40:55Associated With the Snake and I'll tell you that's a that's a that's a tough one To sort out Because in The Story of Adam and Eve There's no Indication Whatsoever that the serpent who?1:41:06Tempts Eve is also satan the Author of all Evil and How in the World Those Two Stories got Tangled together Well I think I figured that out and1:41:15I'm going to tell you that tonight but It took A very Long Time to Figure it out and it's Absolutely it's so Bloody Brilliant [I] just Can't believe that People Figured it out it's so it's so unbelievably1:41:25Spectacularly Brilliant and That's a that's A an Intimation of that Idea right that There's a kinship between These two things so Anyways The Serpents More Subtle Than Any beast of the Field Subtle Is an Interesting Word This is from the oxford English [Dictionary]1:41:39So because will Amplify the word A bit this Is what you do in Union dream? Interpretation for Example is to kind of Look at the Connotations of the Concepts that are associated with the dream1:41:50Subtle of a Person Or animal and Action behavior Crafty Cunning Sly Treacherous So it's something That sort of Sneaks Along right it's not something that you Really pick [up] on that Easily1:41:59of A look or glance Sly furtive Surreptitious of a Person Skillful Expert Clever of A Work of Art mechanical Device Cleverly made or designed Ingenious1:42:10Well that that's I think that's all Fairly? All Those Terms so far are Fairly, well Attributed to snakes I mean They are very Cool things and and They are very1:42:20Well designed They're Quite Remarkable and They're also very Subtle on? The Nature [of] Or Involving Careful Discrimination of fine Points Or fine Points difficult to Understand and Abstruse1:42:33of a Person the mind Or Intellectual Activity Intellectual Activity Characterized by Wisdom [and] Perceptiveness Discriminating Discerning and Truth That's Interesting Because1:42:46Milton's Satan Is also the intellect and You know you see that very often you know it's so often The Bad Guys an Evil scientist right and There's Something About and then1:42:57You See the Same Thing in the Lion king With Scar I mean Scars and Intellect and Arrogant Deceitful Intellect There's Nothing Stupid about scar he's not Wise But he's the he's the1:43:06Evil Voice that's Always Whispering in The kings ear and That's associated With the pride of the Intellect and the catholics Had Warned [Warned] Humanity About the pride [of] the Intellect for Centuries That's Partly what Produced somewhat of the Schism between1:43:20Catholicism and Science Although that's much Overstated if You look at the historical Record The idea, was that The Intellect has its Own Particular it's A remarkable?1:43:30Faculty Let's Say it's the highest Angel in God's Heavenly Kingdom that's the way that Milton Portrayed it but it's Also the thing that Can go most Terribly Wrong Because Intellect1:43:39The Intellect Can Become Arrogant About its Own Existence and accomplishments and it Can Fall in Love With its Own Products and That's what happens when your ideological Ii possessed because you1:43:49End up with a, Dogma like, say a human Constructed [Dogma] in Solzhenitsyn's Words that possesses you Completely of Which you believe Is 100% Right right so it eradicate the Necessity for Anything transcendent and so that's the subtil Element of the1:44:05Intellect That's associated Symbolically With the snake in The garden of Paradise of A feeling scent Sensation acute and Keen Involving Distinctions that are finer delicate Especially to such an extent as to be difficult to discern or analyze1:44:18Also almost Imperceptible and Elusive Having Little Thickness or Breadth thin fine Subtil Matter now Historical1:44:27Rarefied Mouth Barely There at all and the [women] Said [Unto] the Serpent We May eat of The Fruit of the Trees of the garden? One of The Fruit of the Tree Which Is in the midst of the garden God This God has Said he Shall not eat of it1:44:39Neither Shall You Touch it lest you die and the serpent Said to the woman Ye Shall not Surely Die For god Doth [know] in the day that you eat Thereof then your eyes Shall be Opened and you shall be as god's Knowing1:44:51Good and Evil Sneaky Subtle it's a nice Story a the first thing Is for [Instance] the Instant Implication Is1:45:00Well you can't trust God? so that's Pretty Sneaky and the next is when he's Trying to he's Trying to pull A fast one on you and the next one Is what He's Trying to do that Because he's Jealous?1:45:10And he doesn't want you to know things that he Knows because that Would be so good and He's lying to you anyways Because you're not going to die and If you eat it1:45:19Contrary to what You've Been Informed then all that's going to happen is your eyes will be Open and you'll be like god's Knowing good And Evil that sounds Pretty Damn good so you know [a] [night] I mean eve but as she, [no] and Hold Still Wonder She's1:45:33Susceptible to such blandishments and it's Quite Interesting Too Because out of and Eve God tells adam and Eve not to eat the Damn Fruit but They Never Promise not to [Write] so they haven't Promised They've Just Been Told to and, well Should They be Obedient1:45:46Well How obedient do you want your Children to be you want them to be Obedient enough so they? Don't get Hurt but Disobedience Enough so that they go [Up] in the World and do Something Courageous and They Break1:45:55Some Rules That They Learn some things and so you know it's it's it's A very Paradoxical story Anyways The Serpent One That Wins this round man and so eve Pays Attention to the snake1:46:10So again, We have the same Set of images right We have? Adam and We have Eve We have this Tree and We Have this Strange Serpent that's A? Dragon-Like Form [They're] A, Sphinx Like Form That's associated With the tree the snakes Eternally associated with the tree, well the snake1:46:26Wasn't Eternally associated with the Tree? We spent God Only Knows how Many Tens of Millions of Years as Tree Dwelling Primates and? The Primary or One of our Primary Predators, We had Three Primary Predators?1:46:39Snakes Birds Cats and So the snake has Been Associated With the tree for A very very Long Time and the Lesson the snake tells People is you1:46:49Bloody, Well Better Wake up or something you Don't like will get you and who's going to be more Susceptible Susceptible to Paying Attention to the snake and that's going to be Eve and the Reason for that is eve has1:47:01Offspring and There's Nothing Tastier to a snake Than a child and so eve Had Every Reason to be Self-Conscious and Neurotic and Women Are more Self-Conscious and Neurotic than men By quite a substantial amount and that's true cross1:47:14Culturally and it Emerges at Puberty and Part of the Reason is as far as We can tell Is [that] Women are more Sexually vulnerable They're also Smaller?1:47:23So that's a problem if You're Engaged in A physical Alteration but Most Importantly I think Is [that] why Would you ever Assume that a human females Nervous System is adapted to her Or?1:47:35Her well-being why, wouldn't you assume Instead that her Nervous System is adapted to the female infant dyad Because if It isn't then the infant's die and so you might Take1:47:46Well women Are way more Susceptible to Depression and Anxiety than men Are that's A, hell of A Burden to bear and that's Also true Cross Culturally by the Way and it Also Kicks in At Puberty and The biggest Differences Are in Scandinavia for Those of you who Think it's socio-Cultural Which isn't1:48:01So but There's Reasons for it you know and it's Also at Puberty When Men and Women start to become Sexually Dimorphic in Terms of Size and men Are Way more Powerful in Their Upper Bodies it's1:48:12Incomparably more Powerful and so that Makes Them A lot more Dangerous and Human Human Primary Human defense Mechanism is punching like With Kangaroos For Because There's A mother animals the Punch Chimps Can Punch too but Human beings it's a punch and1:48:25Most of the Force and that Is [Upper-Body] and Shoulder and so A woman's no Match for a man in A fight so she has every Reason to be Nervous Especially When You Add that to [that] her Additional sexual Vulnerability and the fact that She has to Take Care of extraordinarily1:48:37Dependent infants who are extremely Fragile For [A] very Long Period of Time and so she Had Every and Women are More Self-Conscious Than Men The Empirical Literature on that is Clear it's associated With Trait Neuroticism Because1:48:48Self-Consciousness is Actually an Unpleasant Emotion who wants to be Self-Conscious If I'm Self-Conscious on the Stage Talking to you then all of a sudden [I] can't even Talk to you all I'm doing is thinking1:48:58About Me and all the things that are wrong with Me and I fall inside Myself it's like Self-Consciousness Although it's a great, Gift let's Say Is nothing pleasant [its] associated Primarily With anxiety1:49:10So we've Had Every Reason to Pay [Attention] [to] the snake that's for Sure [I] think [I] read this week that Among Can't Remember Which tribes Minute where it was Unfortunately Although I did put a Footnote in [my] new Book about this1:49:24These were Jungled Dwelling Tribal People 5% of the Adults Had Been Attacked by a Python and A substantial Number of Children Had Been Killed by them so snake Predation1:49:35was no Joke it Shaped our evolutionary Past and Still is no Joke in Many Places and so we're A tuned to snakes and The Thing Is as Lynn has Bel Pointed out an Anthropologist, We are Really good at1:49:47Detecting the Camouflage Patterns of Snakes Especially in The lower Half of our Visual [Field] and There's Evidence That Part of the Reason That Human beings have Such a cute Vision1:49:58Which Means that our Eyes [Opened] Let's Say is because we were? [We] [co] evolve with snakes and We learned how to see Them and then the Price, We paid for Seeing?1:50:07Was that our Brain Grew Because you need A lot of Brain to be able to See and the Consequence of our Brain Growing Is One day We woke Up and Discovered the future and the future [is] where all the snakes might live Instead of Where they live right now1:50:21so there's That The Same Thing and The Same so Interesting again These images you See in This one You Have [the] specter of death in the tree with the snake and The Fruit no fruit Is1:50:32Interesting [-] I already Made the case that There's A tight linkage between what you eat and Information right a conceptual link as Well as a practical link but it's, also the case that1:50:41We can See colors and The Question is why and the answer is Because? We evolved to see Ripe Fruit? So in The Story of Adam and Eve Human beings are given Vision by the snake and The Fruit and that Turns out [to] be1:50:53Correct So isn't that something and then you think what role do Women Play in Relationship to men, well first They Make them Self Conscious Let's not Ever Forget About That Because I would Say the Primary1:51:04Role That Women Have [in] Relationship to Manage to Make them [Self-Conscious] and men don't Precisely Like That There's Nothing that will Make a man [more] Self-Conscious Than being Rejected and why because why1:51:15Is he Rejected well Obviously mother Nature in The Guise of that Particular woman have Said You're not so Bad for A friend but There's no Reason that your Genetic material Should Propagate Itself Into the Future1:51:32Right well it's not like men Are Exactly happy About being Me but Made Self Conscious by women right it's a major source of Continual Tension between Men And Women and it's no Wonder but it's1:51:42Also the case and This is something Really cool and interesting to know you know [we'd] [Evolved] dive Divulge [Guy]1:51:51Whatever that's it Diverged We diverged from the Common Ancestor between US and Chimpanzees About Six Million Years Ago here's why at least in Part1:52:00Chimpanzee Females Are Non discriminant Mater's They'll mate With Any Male When They go, Into heat Which Human females don't?1:52:09When They go, Into heat then Any Male is allowed Access Now the dominant Males Chase the subordinate Males away And so the dominant Males Are more Likely to leave Offspring but it's not because of the female choice it's not the case with Human1:52:21Beings Human females Engage in Hypergamy and Hypergamy is the ten This is also to cross culturally and it's, also Quite1:52:30It's just as extensive in Scandinavia not Quite There's A bit of Attenuation but not much Women Mate Across and Up dominance Hierarchies Man-Made across and Down1:52:39okay, when that has to be the Case Because [if] Obviously it has to Work that way if One Goes up the other has to go Down the Socio-Economic Status of A woman Is1:52:49Almost Determines Almost Zero of her Attractiveness Towards a man? Whereas The Socioeconomic Status of A man is a major Determinant of his attractiveness Towards A woman and it isn't as wealth either because that's Been Tested it's1:53:01his Capacity To Generate and Be Productive and to Share Because that beats The hell out [of] wealth wealth Can Disappear right but the Capacity to be Productive and Share1:53:11That's that's a much More Important Element and why not be Chosen on the Basis of that Especially Because women have to have infants and Infants Make The Women dependent and the woman is just looking Logically Rationally and from an Evolutionary Perspective1:53:25for someone [Who's] useful Enough to give A tool and A hat so Women Make Intense demands on man and it's no wonder but the thing is is that because women1:53:35Engaged in Hypergamy at Least in Part We diverged Quite Rapidly from Chimpanzees Because The Selection Pressure That Women Placed on men Developed The Entire Species Now There's Two things that happened as far as I [could] tell the men Competed for Competence Let's Say1:53:49So the male Hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best man to the Top Virtually by Definition and then that's That's The Effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women who are a program must Peel from the top and so that the1:54:03Males who [are] the most competent Are much more Likely to leave Offspring and That Seemed to [Be] What drove our Cortical Expansion for example Which happened very very, Rapidly, over the Course of evolutionary Time1:54:13so And when the woman [saw] that the Tree was good for Food and it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to Make one Wise she1:54:24Took of The Fruit Thereof and did Eat and gave, also Unto her Husband With her and he did [eat] [oh] yes and women Share Food That's A very Strange Thing because Most Creatures don't do that right most animals1:54:35Don't Share Food like if you if you're a wolf and you bring down something in A hunt you eat your fill the dominant [Mate] Creatures Eat Their Fill and Then if There's some Left over the subordinates Get to eat too but [that] isn't how Human beings Work1:54:46We share Food Now you Can Imagine How That evolved because Lots of Female Creatures Share Food With Their Offspring? okay, you Don't need much of A twist in That from an Evolutionary Perspective1:54:56[Til] You start to Share Food not Only With your offspring se but With your Mate and that's Another Way [that] you entice a mate It's like, we're Going to be Better Together [then] alone, well that's the offering of the Fruit, well what's the Self Conscious Part?1:55:09Well Here's Part of The Bargain you know I'm going to wake you up and Partly I'm going to wake you up because you need to be Woken up because I have this infant that Needs some Damn Care1:55:18so you Bloody Well [Better] Be awake and Part of the Bargain is all offer you something I'll offer you some Food and in Response We're Going to Make a team and that's the deal on that's the Human deal and that's why, we're?1:55:30More Or Less Monogamous by why We more Or less Pair Bond and why something Approximating marriage is a human [Universal] it's1:55:39Cross-Cultural Now You Can find Exceptions but who the hell Cares Just Really man who cares the vic you look at the vast Pattern the vast Pattern, well in the Price1:55:49We Pay for Having large brains Is that we're very dependent and it Takes A long Time for Us to get Programmed and Because of That We need Relatively Stable Family Bonding and That's Basically what we've evolved and you [know] you?1:56:00Don't get That Without Making men [Self-Conscious] because Male Creatures why not Impregnate and Run I mean why the hell not And that's something to Really, no Kidding like that's the thing to think About it is not why1:56:11man Abandoned Their Children That's the Mystery it's why, Any men Ever Stick With them that's the Mystery because you just have to look at the animal Kingdom and1:56:21That Like The simplest and Easiest Thing is always the most likely Thing to Occur So it's the Exception that Long-Term Commitment That Needs [Explanation]1:56:31She took of The Fruit Thereof and did Eat and gave, also Unto her Husband With her and he did eat and the eyes of Both of them were Opened Implying That before That They were Closed1:56:41and they Knew They were Naked and They sewed Fig leaves Together and Made Themselves Aprons So that's so Interesting so their eyes Are Open Which Indicates that they weren't to Begin With so whatever God Created to Begin With1:56:51Was kind of blind? [Indian] but not blind in Some Strange Way because they weren't Obviously wandering Around in the garden Bumping Into Trees it was some sort of? Metaphysical Blindness That's Been Removed By Whatever has Just happened and Whatever's Just happened, also Made them realize that they, were Naked1:57:06Okay, [so] what sort of Eye Opening Is that what does it Mean to realize that you're Naked It Means to Realize that you're Vulnerable That's What People Discovered it's like, oh?1:57:17We can be hurt so you're A Zebra in A herd of Zebras and There's a bunch of Lions Around There? Laying on the grass you, [don't] Care1:57:26Those Are Laying Down [Lions] Laying Down Lions Are no Problem it's Standing up Hunting Lions that are the Problem You're not smart Enough to Figure out that Laying Down lines Turn Into Standing up Hunting [Lions] so you're not like1:57:38Building A fort to Keep the Lions out you're Just Mindlessly Eating grass You're not very Awake but that's not what happens to human beings Is they Wake up and they Think, we're Vulnerable1:57:48Permanently it's Never going away right it's the it's the Recognition of that Eternal Vulnerability What happens The first Thing They do Is Clothe Themselves?1:57:58Well what Happens when you're Naked when you need Protection from the World well Obviously Look, you're all wearing Clothes you know why? Well we've Been doing that for A very very Long period, of Time it's tens of Thousands of Years at minimum1:58:12Factor you Can Track More Or Less When Clothing Developed because you can do dna Testing of the kind of lice that cling to clothes Rather than hair and so We have a pretty good Idea of When Clothing Emerged and of Different types as?1:58:24Well so that's Quite cool but The point Is they're Naked and They Think that's not so good We're Vulnerable so Their eyes Were Open Enough so they become Self-Conscious and They Recognize Their Own Vulnerability and The first thing they do is the first Step of Culture is to protect Themselves With something1:58:38From The World and You Protect Yourself From the World and From the Prying Eyes of other People This is the Book by linnaeus, [bell] why, We see so?1:58:47Well From The Temptation of the Eve to the venomous murder of the mighty Thor the serpent Appears Throughout Time and Culture as a Figure of Mischief and Mystery Misery The Worldwide Prominence of Snakes and Religion Myth and Folklore1:58:58Underscores our Deep Connection to the serpent but why, when so few of Us have First-Hand Experience The Surprising [answer] This Book suggests Lies in The Singular Effect of Snakes on Primate Evolution1:59:11Predation Pressure From Snakes [Líneas] Bell Tells Us is Ultimately Responsible for the superior Vision and Large Brains of Primates and For A critical Aspect of Human Evolution that was tested Recently?1:59:22Psychologists Have Known for A long Time that People are Can Learn Fear to snakes but They Discovered in primates Recently A set of Neurons [Palvin] Or Neural Neurons Which are1:59:32Specialized That That's an Old Old Perceptual Systems reveal neurobiological Evidence of Past Selection for Rapid Detections of Snakes so that's from1:59:412013 so the snake Definitely woke us up Color Vision As an Adaptation to Fruit Eating in Primates it's not by Accident that women Make Themselves Look1:59:53like Ripe Fruit in Order to be attractive to men Right and that's also not Socio-Cultural in Origin so2:00:02and They Heard the Voice of the lord god Walking in the garden in The cool of the day and Adam and his wife Hid Themselves From the Presence of the Lord amongst the Trees of the garden That's Interesting [so]2:00:12[What's] the Implication? Prior To being Woken up prior to recognizing Nakedness and Vulnerability There is no Reason for god for men and Women to hide from god Now are They Hiding from God While They're Naked2:00:26They're vulnerable, [ok], so think About this Think About this it's like Imagine that You Have the Capacity [to] live Truthfully [and] Courageously and2:00:36Forthrightly Just Imagine That and then Imagine why you might not do that and then Imagine how about Fear and Shame how Would that Work2:00:45Well Let's Say that the Idea of Living Forthrightly and Truthfully and Courageously Is Analogous Given What We Already Know about These Stories [-] Walking with God in The garden What stops People from doing that what stops People?2:00:57From Hiding Well it's Their Own Way it's a recognition of Their Own Inadequacy they Look at Themselves and I think How in The [World] Is a creature since his I2:01:06Supposed To Live Properly in This World With Everything that's wrong with Me and so what do you hide from Well you you go home you sit on your bed for five Minutes and Ask Yourself what have you hidden from in your life man?2:01:19You'll Have Books of Knowledge Reveal Themselves to you in your Imagination right so, well why are you hiding Well it's no bloody, Wonder you're Hiding it's no wonder that People hide that's the thing that's so Terrifying About this story2:01:31We woke Up and we thought? Oh my god Look at this place like This is Seriously There's Some Serious Trouble Here and We're in Some Serious Trouble and we're not what we could be? And so we hide and that's what the story, Says People Woke up they2:01:44Became Self-Conscious They recognized Their Own Vulnerability and that Made [them] Made them hide from Manifesting Their Divine Destiny It's like yeah that's Exactly right and the lord go There I love This part of the Story and that's so Funny and the lord2:01:57God Called and We could Use a little humor at this point and The Lord God Called [Him] to adam and [Said] Unto Him Where Art Thou and Adam Said I2:02:07Heard [Thy] Voice in The garden and I was Afraid because I was naked so in Case There was any doubt [about] that that's why and I hid Myself2:02:23and god Said who told you that you, were Naked did you eat of the tree where have i commanded you that you Should not eat and2:02:32This is where Adam Shows Himself in All his Post-Fall Heroic Glory? And the man Said the woman whom?2:02:50Thou gave Us to be with me She [gave] Me of the Tree and I did eat so that's that [heard] man that's such that it's so you know2:03:01Again There's A modern feminist Interpretation of The Story of Adam and Eve that Makes the Claim that Eve was Portrayed as the universal bad Guy of2:03:10Humanity for Disobeying God and Eating the Apple it's like Fair Enough you know Looks Like She Slipped Up and then She Tempted her Husband and you know2:03:21That Makes her even Worse, although he's was foolish Enough to Immediately eat so it just Means she Was a little more Courageous Than him [then] got There first2:03:30But it's adam who Comes across as Really one Sad Creature in This Story as far as I'm Concerned [Well] C'mon [he] Manages in One, Sentence it's like first of all it wasn't him it was the Woman and Since it even Blames God2:03:43More Than Just the woman [it]. Was that Woman and you gave her to me And She gave Me of the Tree and I did eat it's like so hey Adams all innocent except now he's not only Is he2:03:55Naked and Disobedient and Cowardly and Ashamed He's also Snively backbiting2:04:05Think he wraps her out like the sick and he Gets the [Opportunity] and Then he Blames God It's like and That's Exactly right that's Exactly right man you go online and you Read2:04:16You Read the Commentary that men Write about women when They're Resentful and bitter about women You Read it it's so interesting it's like it's not me it's Those Bitches2:04:25Okay, that's right it's not. Me it's Them and not only that what a bloody World this Is in which they? [Exist] it's Exactly the Same Thing it's Exactly the same Thing [and] it is Absolutely Pathetic2:04:39All right and the Lord God Said [Unto] the woman2:04:50What is this that Thou has Done and the woman Said The serpent beguiled Me and I did eat, well he She has a Bloody Excuse First of All it's a snake I mean Those things are We Already Found out There's Subtle and2:05:00Second it Turns out that the Damn snake Is Satan Himself you know and He's Rather treacherous so the fact that she got tangled Up in his mess let's Say Is2:05:11Well Problematic But it's A, hell of A [lot] better excuse that adam has and The Lord God Says Unto The Serpent Because Thou has done Done This2:05:20Thou Art Cursed, above all Cattle and above Every beast of the Field upon thy, Belly shalt Thou go and Dust Shalt Thou eat all the Days of my life [and] snakes by the way are2:05:33Lizards That Lost Their legs Just so you know and I will put Enmity between Thee and the woman and Between Thy Seed and her Seed it Shall Bruise thy Head and Thou Shalt Bruise his Heel [I]2:05:45Love These Pictures They're so smart and again Strip The Religious Context from Them and Just Look at them for a second what, do you see you see the eternal Mother2:05:57Holding her infant away from the snake See it Down There Right Crocodile Snake2:06:08Everything Predatory That's, Been After Us [for] like 60 Million Years the reason, we're Here is because of that That's why, it's a sacred Image2:06:17you know This one I like even Better See, down There There's something like the Moon and Then There's A? Reptile Down There That [Eve] is Standing on this is Really Old and I showed you this before but I think it's so cool2:06:29She's Coming out of this thing that's like a hole in the Sky you know Because it Indicates The eternal re Presence of This Figure it's something like that the eternal Recurrence of This Figure it'S an Archetype but then the2:06:42Potential out of which she is emerging These are all musical Instruments Back Here and so what the Artist is Representing is the great Patterns Complexity of Being and2:06:52The Emergence of The protective Mother from That Background Protecting The Infant Eternally against Predation [it's] like how Can I not be a Holy image if it isn't the Holy Image if you2:07:03Don't Think it's a holy Image then There isn't something Wrong with the Image There's Something Wrong With the Perceiver Until the woman he Said, well God's Just Outlining the Consequences of this right now it's like, okay?2:07:16Well Now You've Gone and Done it you've Woken up this, Is what's going to happen I'll Greatly Multiply thy Sorrow and thy Conception In Sorrow Thou Shalt bring Forth Children and thy Desire Shall be to thy Husband and he Shall rule over Thee2:07:30to Say he Should Says he will Why in Sorrow Shalt Thou bring Forth Children Well when you develop A brain that big?2:07:42So that you Can See It's not that Easy [To] give Birth Anymore and Then You Produce something that's dependent the Own Belief and That's one of the things that you Would Say Dooms you to Precisely This2:07:55[So--that's] Ease Punishment for Waking Up and Adam Because Thou has Hearkened Unto The Voice of thy wife and his eaten of the tree of Which I commanded Thee [Saying] Thou shalt not2:08:06Eat it Cursed is the ground for [thy] Sake in Sorrow Shalt Thou eat of it in all the Days of thy life What's that the Invention of Work2:08:16Thorns and Thistles Shall it bring Forth to Thee and Thou shalt eat the Herb of the Field It's the Invention of Work what do People do [that] animals don't Work what Does Work Mean Means you've Sacrificed the present for the future [why]?2:08:29Do you do that because you know You're vulnerable Because you're awake [and] so from here on in From This Point There's no return to Unconscious Paradise [I] don't care how Many2:08:38Problems You've Solved so that Today is okay? You've got A Lot of Problems Coming Up and no bloody Matter how much you Work You're Never Going to Work Enough to solve Them and So all you're Going to do from here on in is be Terrified of the future and that's the Price of Waking Up and2:08:51That's The end of Paradise and that's the Beginning of History and that's how that story Goes In the Sweat [of] thy Face Shalt Thou eat Bread Till Thou return Unto the ground for out of it was Though Taken2:09:04For Dust Thou Art and Unto Dust Thou Shalt Return and Adam Called, his wife's Name Eve Because she was the Mother of all Living?2:09:15Unto adam, also and Unto his wife did the Lord God Make Coats of skin and Clothed them that's William blake by the way and the lord god Said2:09:24Behold the man Has become as one of us to know good [and] Evil and Now lest, he put Forth his Hand and Take also of the Tree of life and Eat and live Forever I'll go over This again next Week2:09:35Therefore The Guillard God Sent Him From the Forth Forth From the garden of eden to Till the ground from Whence he was taken so he drove out the man and he Placed at the east of the garden of eden Cherubims and2:09:44A flaming sword Which turned Every Way to Keep the way of the tree of life2:10:01One More Thing and then We'll stop So i thought why in the World so adam and Eve2:10:11Are Tempted by the snake They eat the Fruit they Wake up they, realize They're Naked They Realize That They're Vulnerable They, Realize the future They, realize They're going to die They Realize that they have to Work2:10:22It Accounts for Difficulty in Conception and The Fall of Humankind from Unconscious Paradise, okay That Makes sense What About the Knowledge of Good and Evil2:10:33What in The World does that mean? The Mesopotamians Believed That Human beings, Were Made out of the blood of king knew who was the worst Monster the Time out who?2:10:43Was the Goddess of Chaos Could Imagine and Then Produce so their Idea? Was that Whatever was About Humanity There was something Deeply Deeply Deeply?2:10:53Demonically Flawed so that's Their Conception and Then Some of that Same Milieu That These Stories Emerge2:11:03so what is Opening your eyes and Realizing your Vulnerability have to do with the Knowledge of Good and Evil Really [I] thought about that I really Thought about that I got to tell you I thought about that for like 20 Years Because I2:11:13Knew There was something There that I could not put Together and at the same Time I was I? Was Reading Things I'm Going to tell you something Truly [Awful] and so if you need a trigger Warning you're you're Getting one and2:11:25Believe me I do not give Trigger warnings Lightly so i'm going to tell you something you will never forget So this is what Unit 731 used to do in China and China Said Japanese Unit during the first [Second] [World]2:11:36[War] right as far as I can Tell they, did the most Horrific things that, we're Done To Anyone during World war Two and that's Really something so this is what they, [did]?2:11:47They Took Their Prisoners and they Would put Them in A Position so that Their Arms Would freeze Solid and2:11:56Then They Would Take them Outside and Pour Hot Water Over Their Arms and then it Would Repeat that Till the flesh came off the Bones and2:12:05They, Were doing that to Investigate The Treatment of Frostbite for Soldiers You Can Look up unit 731 if You want to have Nightmares2:12:14so that's a unit 731 that's [Human-Beings] someone Thought that Up and then people did it2:12:23That's Knowledge of Good and Evil Here's the here's the key man you know, you're Vulnerable No other Animal Knows that you know what Hurts you?2:12:34Because you're vulnerable now that you know what Hurts you [you] Can Figure out What Hurts Someone Else and As soon as you know what Hurts Someone Else and you Can use that you have the Knowledge of Good and Evil2:12:48Well it's a pretty good trick that the snake Code because it doesn't Look like it's Exactly the sort [of] Thing that We might Have? Wanted if We would have known what the Consequence was? But as Soon as a human being Is Self Conscious and aware of his Own Nakedness2:12:59Then he has the Capacity for Evil and that Is that's Introduced Into the World Right at that Point and Here's the rest of the story So there's the snake Right and You're Some Tree Dwelling Primate and the snake eats you and that sucks so that's like2:13:13Let's Watch out for the Damn snakes and then you think, well wait a minute your brain Grows and Think Wait a minute Well There's not Just? Snake There's Where snakes live why, don't we Just get the2:13:23Hell out [of] the Tree and Go hunt Down the snakes and get Rid. Of Them so those are sort of like Potential snakes and so the snake Becomes Potential snake and it's the Same Circuit that you're using to do this Thinking and then you get Rid of the2:13:33Damn snakes it's like St.. Patrick Chases the Mug of Ireland no more Snakes everything's Paradise it's like, no No no, that's not that's not how it Works no2:13:42Well Now you've got the human snakes you're a tribe you've got Tribal Enemies You got to defend Yourself against the human snakes right so Maybe2:13:52your empire Expands and You get Rid of all the human snakes and Then what happens Well They start to Grow Developed Inside it's like? You get Rid of all the external Enemies and You make A big City and all of A sudden There's2:14:03Enemies That Pop up inside Because The Snake isn't just the snake in the garden and the snake isn't just the possible Snake and the snake isn't just the snake that's your enemy the snake is your friend2:14:15Right Because your friend Can Betray you and then it's even Worse, than that Because you Can Betray you and [so] even if You get Rid of all the outside Snakes2:14:24You've got an Inside Snake and God Only Knows what it's up to And that's why the bloody Christians Associated the snake in The garden of eden With satan it's2:14:35Unbelievably Brilliant Because you got to think what's the enemy Well it's the snake Fair Enough But you know that's good if You're a tree Dwelling primate but if You're A2:14:45Sophisticated Human Being you know With Six Million Years of that Additional Evolution and You're Really [Trying] to solve the Problem of what it Is that's the great enemy of Mankind2:14:55Well it's the human Propensity for Evil right as such Well that's the Figure of Satan that's what that Figure Means Just Like There's A logos that's the truth that Speaks order?2:15:07Out of Chaos at the Beginning of Time There's an Antithetical Spirit the hostile Brother That's Cain [-] abel Which We'll Talk to Talk about next Week?2:15:16That's Doing Exactly the Opposite it's Motivated By Absolutely Nothing but Malevolence and The Willingness To Destroy and it has Every Reason for doing so2:15:29and that's What's Revealed in The next Story in Cain and abel in One Paragraph? The First Glimmerings of That Outside of the Strange Insistence By the Christian Mystics let's Say2:15:42On the iDentity between the snake in The garden of eden and The Author of all Evil Himself2:15:58Okay, so we only Have 15 minutes Today i i wanted to finish that so? Apologies for Going over a little longer2:16:07All right Hi Dr. Peterson Over The Last couple Weeks and Further Back [You] talked a lot about Consciousness and The Importance of it [I] was hoping to get your Opinion on an issue of?2:16:18Consciousness That has often Seen Christianity Among other Groups and Politics Kind of clashed so I'm hoping to get your views on [any] Consciousness or lack Thereof of a human Fetus and How that2:16:31Impact [Or] even Bortion Whatever They are and Any Legislation2:16:45Thank you thank you2:16:57okay so the first [Question] Is do I have an answer [for] that that's A good enough answer to Actually reveal I Know I don't but I can Flail About a little bit Around it Abortion is Clearly Wrong [I]2:17:14Don't Think Anybody Debates that you, wouldn't recommend that someone that you love have one okay now Having Clarified that2:17:25That mere Statement doesn't Eliminate the Complexity of the Situation The First Question Is is Should everything Wrong be illegal2:17:36That's A Tough Question Everything that's wrong isn't illegal Then There's the additional Complication of the2:17:45[Difference] Let's Say in Gravity Regarding The Problem in Relationship to men and Women and We don't know how to deal with that2:17:59Having Said that I would Say that it's Actually the Wrong Question There's A something Leonard cohen Said Once he Said that in A Massacre There's no decent place to stand2:18:09And what he meant by that was sometimes you're Where There is no good Decision Left No Matter what you do it's wrong2:18:19so then the Question Is how did You get There, well let's Say, you're in A Position where you are Inclined to Seek an Abortion The Question Is2:18:28How did [You] get There Now, We have a lot to straighten out About the sexual relationships between men and Women in The modern World2:18:38They're Bent and Warped and Demented out of Shape One of the Things I see with Young People for example is that They will Engage in Sexual Acts With One Another that they Would not Talk about With One Another I2:18:48Mean Couples will do that for that Matter like Married couples will do that but They're Married That's that's a Different story It Seems to me that if You are Willing to engage in A sexual act With someone with whom you Would not Discuss that act2:19:00you Probably put The Cart before the Horse so The Discussion Regarding The Legality of Abortion Is nested Inside a larger Discussion2:19:12About The Morality of Abortion and That's Disconnected Inside A larger Discussion About the Proper place of Sexuality and Human Behavior and2:19:23To me that's the level at which the problem Needs to be Addressed [Now] I don't have the answer to that you know Because the Old answer was get Married that2:19:34Was a good answer and it's an answer that People Should Still Listen to But We'll Put That Aside Momentarily [I]? Had A client at. One Point who, was I don't know she was Probably?2:19:46I'm not i'm going to Disguise her in A Variety of Different Ways she was 27 2008 Come from A relatively Conservative Background Quite A Timid Fearful Person and also2:19:59Not very, well not Sophisticated in Relationship to Relationships and She Never had Sex What was a bunch of things She'd [Never] Done?2:20:08Well The Answer From me to her wasn't Continued to be Timid About everything because that wasn't working out for her She needed to go have some Adventures2:20:23Now sexual Adventures Like other Adventures Are Dangerous and So you have to be very Careful when you encourage People to go [out] and Have Adventures but2:20:34But but too much Timidity and Caution, also Constitutes a Pathway to perdition let's Say You can't Just Say to People in The modern World, well you [know]2:20:46[Sex] Till you're Married Unless [you're] Going to get Married when you're very Young and Perhaps you Should I don't know about that But I2:20:55Don't Think that We're Mature enough as a culture to [have] a serious Discussion About sexual Propriety Especially in The Aftermath of The Birth Control Pill and We Seriously need [to] do that and We have it and so I think the2:21:07Eternal Debate About Abortion Horrible as it is is A It's the Surface Manifestation of A much Deeper Problem2:21:17Now i talked a little bit Today about the Utility of marriage like the Spiritual Utility of Marriage and That's something that I think2:21:26We're so immaturely cynical as a culture like We don't we're not Wise [Enough] to look at an Institution like Marriage and to Really Think about what it means [and] what it signifies it signifies A?2:21:36Place That [People] Could tie the Ropes of Their lives Together so that They're Stronger it signifies a, place where People can Tell The truth To One Another it Signifies a place Where Sexuality Can Properly Be Integrated Into Life that's, no Easy that's an Easy Task, it's a place where Children at least in Principle Can2:21:51Be put First and Foremost as they Should be Once They exist and so there's A much Broader Discussion That has To happen I think before2:22:02Any Concentration on the Legality of Abortion is liable to get Anywhere at all that's what it looks like to me So that's the Best I can do [with] that Question2:22:21Hi Dr.. Peterson! Earlier you Showed a picture of [foxy] [and] [noah] [yeah] right uh and and Osiris And in your Maps of Meaning life yeah you2:22:32Also explained That Cultures Around the World Have These twin snakes yeah They're Everywhere man Yeah and so you mentioned that you believe this is a representation of dna2:22:42You Would bring that up to Jesus what is it with you Guys Tonight [huh] yeah, well yeah, no? I wouldn't say I believe that [I] have my suspicions that that might be it yeah Because believe is too strong A word but Those2:22:54Representations Are Everywhere and Read This Book This is A good one, [oh]? Man Now I have to remember the Book By an Anthropologist who went down to the Amazon Jungle and Experimented Intensively With Ayahuasca [I]2:23:08Think it's Called the Cosmic Serpent I think that's the Name of the book you could Read that There's Another One Called Breaking Open The head Which is also pretty Damn Interesting and There's Something to those2:23:18Books I mean The Cosmic Serpent Kind of Goes off On A bit of a tangent I would Say Although Breaking open the head Is it's Better Better2:23:28It Seems to stay more Constrained and Tight but There's We don't know the limits of our Perception Especially under Certain Conditions and I think People have Had Intimations of2:23:42Dna as the Cosmic Serpent Forever So yeah! But that's a like that's way out on the frontiers of my Knowledge right like I'm2:23:54Guessing in A dreamlike way when i'm Making? Statements Like [that] so Because he Didn't Mention that you did believe in and that There were sort of Maybe2:24:04Some Some Dreams and [Interpretations] That might Have emerged but. I don't see how, We Could perceive dna as it Is Right2:24:14Well yes We did We Didn't Objectively but I'm not so sure We Didn't Subjectively? But it Means very Strange That These did These Double Helixes Exist in so Many Places and That They're often Utilized as Healing Symbols2:24:26With the snake so Anyways Like I said that's What do You Call that I'm?2:24:36It's not hypothesizing it's one Thing Worse than that Speculating Those Are Speculations I'm I'm Operating at the Edge of my understanding but2:24:45Our Perceptions Can are very Mutable and They can, We can See Things under some Conditions that you? Wouldn't Think That Anybody Could see so?2:24:55okay yep So I was just starting to have a thought while you're Talking About2:25:07Sort of getting to the end of the Talk about the snake and the Apple and so on so What you're Saying is the moment that that?2:25:16That Adam and Eve Eat the apple They, become Nervous or Whatever so that's Awareness of Their Own Vulnerability so then like you said it's Also Awareness of Their Own Capacity to, do harm so it's like when, they are eating the apple then that's them2:25:30Their immediate Sort of Nervous Reaction Is is because. They ate the Apple and They Kind of Became Evil in That moment or something like that2:25:39Well They woke Up and Because they, they, woke uP and realized how They Could Be Hurt How They Could and Would be hurt, over the, over the, over the Upcoming2:25:48Overtime it's the Same as the Discovery of the Discovery of your own Nakedness and the Discovery of Time are very very Similar Phenomena I mean2:26:00Sure as soon as you know how you can be Hurt Well you know if you are to just consult your Evil Fantasies it's like What'll Really hurt him Oh, yeah that Would Work it's like how, do you know that2:26:10Well you Just Think About it what Would happen if That happened to me that Would Hurt Oh yeah! That'll Work It'Ll Hurt him Or her and you know you Probably think [that] way twice a week or maybe twice a day2:26:21Jesus Every Time you have an Argument with someone all you have to do is look at the back [of] your mind a little bit You, don't want to that's for sure but if you do you'll see These sorts of Thought Process is generating2:26:33Constantly it's like you know in A back-And-Forth Discussion Particularly With People you love it's like you're Always Looking for a place to put the knife in so2:26:42It Seems Really similar to me Or Seems like They're Kind of Discovering the kind Of like Union Shadow Within Themselves so that that is the moment where it got? Introduced Into The Human Spirit Sure One of the Things About2:26:53The Shadow, Is that it's, also when you integrate that that's what Makes you a substantial Person right, oh it's Like it Seems to me That on One [Hand]2:27:02Well it Seems like this Tragedy [that's] satan the most evil the father of Evil Whatever has Introduced Into People but it, also Seems like Without that Shadow that People are Kind of [insubstantial]2:27:15So yeah, well right Right [I] mean like i said I said That There's been A multitude of Interpretations Emerge2:27:24As A consequence of that Story what was [god] up to what was God in Fact Evil the Initial god like why Would he Create a snake why, Would he put it in the garden why?2:27:34Would There Be These Trees what the hell Is going on With the whole Satan Thing you know it's very very Problematic? Well we'll Talk About it [More]? And then this again is let's Call it Speculation2:27:47Well if You want to Make something Strong you test it and2:27:56Maybe if You want [to] Make something Ultimately Strong you test it Ultimately and I think that There's an Aspect of being That Has That Element Is2:28:06That Human Beings are Tempted Ultimately It's Partly Because, We know good and Good and Evil now and so that's the Landscape in which we exist so you could Say?2:28:17The Landscape Is across Its Chaos and Order and it's good and Evil and we're Stuck in The Middle between Those two things it's A very Common theme by The Way in Videogames Exactly that2:28:26Chaos order good Evil it's the it's the basic Plot of Endless Video Games and that's Perhaps Because it's the basic Plot Those Are the things, We have to contend With?2:28:36Well I Had A vision Once Shouldn't tell you [this] but I will Anyways I Had A vision Once that I went to heaven and I was put in A in A roman Amphitheater With satan2:28:49Just Like Thor Encountering the Hulk Right that's Coming Up in that new Avengers Movie so it was Rather a shock Because I thought There was A hell of A thing to happen in Heaven and so [I] had this2:29:00Battle and I won and at the end I came Up to God and Said like you know, what's with the whole Roman Amphitheater Thing There it Seemed like it over the Top to me Said why2:29:12Would you put me in A ring with Some one Thing like that and he Said Because I knew you Could win And you know. I don't know what to Make [of] that2:29:22[haha], one Thing I should teach you [to] Make of it as I shouldn't tell you but Whatever but you know There's Something There's Something to that in My estimation it's like2:29:34do you Protect the People you love or, do you try, to Make them Strong So you think it's that it's not that, We have like satan to Thank for Making us substantial it's that God2:29:44Gave Us satan in Order to Make us substantial, well I'd [hesitate] to Say that because you know, it's so cut and Dried But I would Say that that There's this that's A strong underlying Theme in The biblical Narrative yes2:29:59Now it's Certainly not the [only] Theme it's not the only Interpretation by any Stretch of the Imagination But There Is something There and There's something There you know at the end We Didn't Talk about this2:30:09God Puts Up his Flaming Sword and These Cherubim to Keep you, away from the tree of life it's like it's See if2:30:18Paradise and Immortality are the Promised Land and what's with the whole Flaming Angel and Sword Thing We could have just had the Damn Fruit Five Thousand Years Ago and Not Bothered With the problem, well it Seems to me that There's something like I?2:30:33Don't know what it Is Consciousness Through Tragedy Clarity Through Suffering Maybe something Like that or Maybe2:30:42The Perfection that Lurks as A potential in the Future Is something that has to [be] earned Rather than given Maybe it has no value Without free Choice2:30:51Maybe, We have to distinguish between Good and Evil now that We Have the [Capacity] to Actually? Apprehend them Maybe that's what life is about Maybe That's the Separating of the Wheat from the chaff [See] that's the Idea in2:31:01Revelation Right Because When Christ comes back in the book of Revelation He Divides the Damned from the Saved and the Saved are the People who lived in Logos Roughly Speaking and the [Damned] or those who don't and2:31:15so there's This Idea that There's this Dynamic that underlies Experience that Is in fact That sorting Now I Don't know what to Make of that at all2:31:26But that's the story But what I can Make of that Is that I? I can't put A lever underneath the Argument [that] I just Made Tonight about the Relationship between2:31:39The development of Vision the Snake of Fruit Nakedness Time The Future Work and Most importantly the Emergence of Evil that Seems to me to be I2:31:51Cannot find a way to Undermine That Argument it Seems I Can't Break it and that's what I'm Always Looking for when I'm trying to formulate Ideas I'm Trying to Look [for] something that no Matter2:32:02How Hard I try I cannot Break and I can't Break that Set of Ideas Now what the full Implication Is of that Set of Ideas God only knows right but2:32:19But I could Say, also Practically you know, one of the things that I've Observed Is that Lies and Deception Destroy People's Lives and When They start Telling the [truth] and Acting it out things get A lot Better2:32:34[Gotta] Stop0:00:00Biblical Series V: Cain and Abel: The Hostile Brothers
0:00:000:00:16So I'm going to read you something. I get some I had a lot of mail And I don't know where I got this I've been a lot of different places in the last week And this showed up at one of them, and I'm going to read it to you. I have no idea what to make of it0:00:34It's written in a female hand So that's about all I can tell but there's no address or name on it This isn't a question0:00:44but a comment, or more accurately perhaps a message I Spent this past weekend in an ayahuasca ceremony0:00:53Which for those of you who don't know is a South American? Visionary plant medicine some of you may roll your eyes at this0:01:02But ayahuasca brings you into direct contact with the archetypal realm of being users of this medicine0:01:11Initiates I should say refer to ayahuasca as she Because the spirit of the plant is decidedly feminine an encounter with ayahuasca is an encounter with the great mother of creation0:01:23The Goddess the void from which all things come the feminine counterpart of logos Dr.. Peterson0:01:32You appeared in one of my ayahuasca visions0:01:45might account for why I've being ripped rather fatigued lately Dr.. Peterson you appeared in one of my ayahuasca visions, and I asked0:01:55Asked her who is Jordan Peterson. What is he doing? Which is something? I'd really like to know as well and She responded with Crystalline clarity0:02:07quote Here he is here to invoke and initiate the divine masculine principle on Earth at this time0:02:25So I'm up here to thank you Deeply and profoundly on behalf of the great mother herself to Goddess the Divine feminine principle who has been eagerly awaiting the awakening of the masculine principle into0:02:38divinity and service So you know get a letter like that every day? Actually, I get a letter to like that every day0:02:52so you know what went through my head when I read this and this is of course and completely crazy parallel but We know one of the things I learned to do as a psychotherapist was just to tell people who were talking to me0:03:07What came into my head? It isn't what I'm thinking exactly because that's not exactly the same thing you know What comes into your head is more like a dream it comes unbidden?0:03:17It's like your imagination if you're thinking there seems to be like a voluntary element of that, right? I mean some who God only knows how we think but it seems partly voluntary at least and0:03:30Jung thought about carl jung thought about it like a dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. There is a constant Continual dialogue, but when things just pop into your mind0:03:39It's not much different than walking into a room having something there which is an observation I also derived from jung by the way because he pointed out quite rightly that people don't really think that0:03:52Thoughts appear to them now you can think because you can take the thoughts that appear to you and then you can subject them to criticism and Elaboration and so on instead of just assuming that they're true right off the bat, but people often don't do that0:04:04They just something just pops into their head and then they assume that it's true anyways one of the things that I tend to do in psychotherapy is just to tell people what pops into my head because0:04:17Well, why? Because then the person that is talking to me gets one person's0:04:26Untrammeled opinion not even that reaction not opinion. It's not really an opinion. I don't think an opinion Maybe is what I think later, and there's this personal flavor to it0:04:37What popped into my head? Was the story about socrates you know? He had this when he was being put on trial by the Athenians for corrupting the nation's youth0:04:50Something I've been accused of by the way Although it's not self-evident to me that it's me doing the corrupting0:04:59He said that somebody had asked him once had asked the delphic oracle once and the Delphic oracle was this retreat that you could go to if you were an ancient Greek citizen and you'd0:05:12Be there, and you'd have a dream and then you'd go ask the delphic oracle to interpret it and nobody really knows What was up with the delphic oracle? Today how that worked exactly, but she would interpret your dream in any case0:05:24and somebody once asked her who the wisest man in Greece was and The Delphic Oracle said it was socrates because he knew he didn't know anything0:05:34That's essentially the story not popped into my mind. It's a crazy comparison, but You know I have a crazy mind, so I guess that's how it works out0:05:44so Now one of the things I'm going to do today Which I haven't done before Because I'm going to read you a little bit of I told you I finished my book last week0:05:54And I haven't read it read it to anyone. I have given it to a couple of friends to review one person in particular0:06:04screenwriter named Greg Hurwitz has been unbelievably Helpful. He's so fast and so sharp at this sort of thing and I can send him like a Twenty Page Dense Twenty page0:06:15Manuscript and he'll rip it to shreds and send it back to me in like 90 minutes It's just unbelievable he's so good at that. He's been very helpful, but I haven't0:06:24No one else has seen it apart from my editor and I haven't read it to anyone so but some of it seemed particularly appropriate for tonight's lecture So I thought I would start the lecture tonight by reading a little bitter that and it's it's from a chapter0:06:40It's on the issue of sacrifice as such this is Abraham and Isaac This is a very strange little testament story right. This is one of the stories That's contained in the old testament that makes modern people think that maybe we should just not have that punch to do with the old0:06:54testament per say it at all and especially with regards and maybe you shouldn't have anything to do with the god of the old testament either because I mean as far as Abraham is concerned0:07:05God tells him to sacrifice his own son now it turns out that God was just kidding So to speak you know I'm obviously being Flippant but you know it does raise the question0:07:16What do you make of a divine being who would who would? require such thing such a thing or Conversely, what do you make of Abraham? Who would have such delusions either way? It's a little hard on the0:07:30What would you call modern believability and Moral integrity of the old testament, but these are very very strange stories? and they're not what they seem to be or they are but and they're more so0:07:42We're going to talk a lot about sacrifice tonight, and here's some of the things that I've been thinking about sacrifice So this is from this book. It's called0:07:52Twelve Rules for life an antidote for Chaos and it's coming out in January Which I think I mentioned and this is from Rule 7 which is do. What is meaningful? Not what is expedient?0:08:06and so here's here's some of The writing I've been doing over the last three years on meat on the motif of sacrifice0:08:15I'll start with just a brief intro before I read this It took me a long time to understand What was meant in the old testament by Sacrifice and which is strange because once I figured it out0:08:28It seemed bloody obvious. It seemed like oh, yo, obviously that's what it means, but Lots of times if you figure something out correctly it seems self-evident as soon as you've figured it out correctly well0:08:39We'll see how that goes, but you know it seemed to work for me anyways, I Knew that of course at least implicitly I knew of the modern usage of the idea of sacrifice everyone0:08:53understands that motif is that if you want to make things better in the future, then you suck make sacrifices in the present and0:09:02Maybe you even do that Multi-generationally in fact you most definitely do if you're a good parent, I mean you and that's just I would say that's a really0:09:11particularly typical of of Immigrants right because immigrants often come from Terrible places and have to undergo terrible things to come to a new community where they get a rough?0:09:23reception and have a hard time getting their life going and A big part of the reason that they do it is to make their lives of their children better and luckily when they come to Canada0:09:33Usually given where they came from that actually works because where they came from is worse and here is better even though No, you know immigrants often have to struggle to to get on their feet again0:09:43Have to learn a new language and become acculturated and face the fact that they're not part of the mainstream culture and well You know many of you know the whole story, so the idea that you make sacrifices0:09:55For the future and you make sacrifices for your children And that's everyone understands without and it's part of being responsible and mature and shouldering the burden of being0:10:06Properly and you do that for yourself, too if you're disciplined in fact that's almost what discipline means it discipline means that you're capable of making sacrifices because0:10:16You're not disciplined if you just do something you want more rather than something that you're doing that's not discipline That's maybe that works and great if your life is working out that way great man, but that isn't that isn't discipline0:10:28this is plan is when you want to do something right now and Instead you think no, I'm going to force all my gratification Maybe forever but certainly for a very long period of time medium to long period of time and you0:10:41concentrate on something that you think will bear fruit in the medium to long run and so you look into the future and You decide that? By making today a little less impulsively pleasurable shall0:10:53We say you'll make tomorrow a little bit more secure and productive and then you actually do it, too And that's difficult you know and we discussed last week0:11:04Adam and Eve's discovery of the future and and the revelation of the possibility of the future including the possibility of0:11:14Tragedy and suffering in the future and and it's our knowledge of the possibility of tragedy and suffering in the future that motivates us to0:11:23Sacrifice in the present so that we can reduce the unnecessary Anxiety and uncertainty and pain that awaits us now. That's a negative way of putting it We're also doing it so that you know we can have some joy0:11:34and we can make life better in all of that and and that's not trivial, but the fundamental issue Especially once you have small children this fundamental issue is to save the suffering the hell off, right?0:11:46That's what you want to do That's your primary Moral obligation if you're a person who has any if your eyes are open at all. That's your primary0:11:55obligation and so you make the sacrifices that are necessary and you set up the future and Well the the motif of sacrifice0:12:05Is there in the old testament? But it's more it's so concrete that it's difficult to draw a parallel between the two at least for me. They didn't align0:12:15Self-eVidently, and I don't remember in my rather limited religious education as a child in the united church because I went to the united church till I was about 13 I0:12:26don't ever remember anybody pointing out that like the sacrifices that cain and Abel were making or the sacrifice that Abraham was supposed to make or sacrifices that people were making to God were the car were the0:12:41precursors, let's say the dramatic precursors to the psychological idea of Accra feist that we all hold as civilized0:12:51People in the Modern world, so although it seems obvious as I said once you lay it out it I don't remember that ever being explained to me But and then well and then let me read this so now that I've sort of introduced it. Here's what happened as0:13:05humanity developed first were the endless tens or hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of0:13:15Written history and drama the Twin practices of Delay and Exchange Began to Emerge slowly and painfully so here's a cool psychological study0:13:25So it's called the Marshmallow test And maybe it's even a reliable study even though it was done by Social psychologists. It's probably replicable0:13:35Um and it's a nice study, so you take small children and you bring them into a room and you put something that they would like in front of them a marshmallow and0:13:47You then you torture them basically you say See that marshmallow and the kid thinks yeah, I see that marshmallow. It's like0:13:56you can have that marshmallow right now, or If you wait, I think the experiment is ten minutes then you can have two marshmallows and0:14:06so that puts the child in quite a conundrum because They're being asked to trade an actual concrete tangible Marshmallow for two hypothetical future0:14:16marshmallows and it's not that easy to conjure up a hypothetical future reality that has the same tangible significance as0:14:25Something real right in front of you, and so it's amazing thing that people can do that and so Then the experimenter leaves and some children grab the marshmallow and just you know chomp that thing down right now0:14:38Other kids they videotape kids while they're waiting And they do all sorts of things they whistle they look at the ceiling they sit on their hands you know they try to distract0:14:47themselves course they're eyeing that marshmallow like a squirrel lying and not and and trying to Restrain themselves, and you know what I see in that is that0:14:58The child's Prefrontal Cortex the higher cortical systems are warring with the underlying Motivational systems more primordial motivational systems that govern such things as hunger the hunger system0:15:11hypothalamic system says there is something sweet and Fat right sitting there right bloody now grab that thing and stuff it down now And I'm sure many of you have a constant battle with your hypothalamus with regards to sweet and fat things and often lose0:15:26so you can feel Some sympathy for the child but and the hypothalamus has these tremendously powerful Tendrils upward into the Brain0:15:37Into the parts that we would associate more with voluntary control and the voluntary control centers have these little weak Ribbons going down to control the hypothalamus since it's pretty obvious if you know something about neuroanatomy0:15:50What part is actually in charge when the chips are down and it's not easy for children to learn to regulate those underlying? Primordial impulses the ones that are wired in the ones that we share with animals0:16:02But they do it and and and the cool thing is This is what Walter mischel found. He's the guy who did the study was that? the Long-term0:16:12Outcome for the children who can delay gratification in the Marshmallow test is much more positive than it is for the children that Are impulsive and eat the marshmallow?0:16:21Instantly its delay of gratification now It's likely that that's associated with trait conscientiousness although that Specifically has that specific connection has not yet been established, but they seem conceptually very very similar0:16:37So so anyways this emerges and children Probably between the ages of 2 and 4 something like that0:16:46They should have it in place by four because it's very difficult for them to really interact well with other children without having that delay of gratification in place because you can't delay gratification other kids don't like you because0:16:59You're you want everything your way, and you want it now and your lot You're liable to temper tantrums, and that sort of thing you haven't got the kind of self-control necessary to make you fun to play with0:17:09So you can see that emerging in children, and it's pretty it's pretty interesting and and not only that if it it predicts positive Long-term Outcomes just like trade conscientiousness does by the way because trade conscientiousness is the second best predictor of long-term success0:17:25over the Lifespan in Western Cultures Its second after intelligence and so in our societies The people who do best across time are the people who have high Iqs and who work hard and I would say that's a pretty0:17:37decent What would you call it? It's a validation in some sense that our cultures are working properly because what you would want I would say if the system is working meritocratic. Ly like it should and if you're trying to extract resources0:17:53From those who can contribute at a higher rate? Than what you would want to have happen is that the hard-working smart people do better?0:18:02Hopefully if that's the case then everyone does better hopefully anyways So you can see this developing in children first where they endless tens or hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of written?0:18:15History and drama the Twin practices of Delay and exchange began to Emerge slowly and painfully then they became represented in metaphorical abstraction as0:18:26rituals and tales of sacrifice It's as if there's a powerful figure in the sky who's judging you you better keep him happy or look the hell out0:18:37We've been watching ourselves deal with him for a long time. He seems to like it when you give up something you value so Practice sharing and sacrificing until you get good at it0:18:51No, one actually said any of this so long ago although they said Something very similar, but it was implicit in the practice and then in the stories0:19:01action comes first implicit comes first people watched The successful succeed and the unsuccessful fail for thousands and thousands of years0:19:13And we thought it over and we drew a conclusion the successful among us Sacrifice the successful among us delay gratification0:19:26a successful among us bargain with the future and then a great idea begins to Emerge in ever more articulated form That idea is the point of a long and profound story0:19:41It's the moral of this story, and I'm going to engage in some foreshadowing here What's the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful the successful sacrifice?0:19:55And things get better as the successful practice their sacrifices the question becomes increasingly precise and0:20:05simultaneously broader What is the greatest possible sacrifice for the greatest possible good?0:20:14You know if you if you push a question in a direction perhaps there comes a time when you can't formulate it any more precisely and broadly and0:20:24and That that's the point at which the question in some sense and perhaps even the answer the question becomes our Katha Pollitt it becomes archetypal Because it it can't be0:20:34bested and This is like an ultimate question in some sense How are you going to ask a more broad-based question than that, what is given the initial?0:20:44Presuppositions that you have to make sacrifices Then the logical end point to that is something like okay if you have to make a sacrifice What's the greatest possible sacrifice and for the greatest possible good that's a good question the answer becomes0:20:57increasingly profound for the God of Western Tradition like So many gods requires sacrifice. We've already examined why but sometimes he goes even further and0:21:10Requires the sacrifice of what is loved best? This is why and this is another one of Mankind's0:21:19fundamental discoveries Sometimes things do not go well that that's self-evident, but here's the rub0:21:29Sometimes when things are not going well, it's precisely that which is most valued that is the cause0:21:39Why it's because the world is revealed through the template of your values if the world you are seeing is not the world you want therefore0:21:48It's time to examine your values It's time to Rid yourself of your current presuppositions There's a famous experiment that I've alluded to a couple of times. I believe in this lecture series0:22:00The invisible Gorilla experiment and in the invisible gorilla experiment. There's two teams of players each with three members one dressed in block and the other dressed in white and each team is0:22:13passing a basketball back and forth to the team members and milling about you see a video of them doing so they basically fill the video screen and0:22:23The white team is passing a basketball to the white team members and the black team is passing a basketball to the black team members and Your job as as far as the experimenter is concerned is for you to count the number of times that the black0:22:37block team yes black team Passes the basketball back and forth so that's what you do so now you have an ambition and a name and a value and0:22:47The ambition and the Aim and the value they're all the same thing and that is to perform well at the task now the thing That's so cool about this, and this is really so cool. It's just0:22:56unbelievably It's just unbelievable that this is the case. It's like a complete validation of a certain element of the buddhist worldview0:23:05So they passed the ball for a couple of minutes and then the experimenter says to you how many and you say 15 and because you're happy and you're happy with yourself because you've been paying attention and and0:23:16The experimenter says yeah, that's right or maybe not Maybe you missed one and then the experimenter says did you see the gorilla and half of you say what what?0:23:26What your real eye like really and he's in the experimenter says yes And then he rewinds it and plays the video and like a minute and a half into the 3-minute video sure enough0:23:37In walks this guy in a gorilla suit six foot three or so Stands in the middle of the game right in the middle of the game the same size as the players0:23:48perfectly obviously evident the his chest for like a second and a half and then sort of saunters off and0:23:57Half the people who? Watch the video don't see the gorilla And which is absolutely shocking and what that means is that your ambitions blind you to the nature of reality?0:24:09Now they illuminate some reality But they blind you to most of it, and that's fine because you're not Does not allow to you in some ways you're a very pinpoint thing like a laser beam0:24:20And so you just can't be attending to everything all the time But one of the things that you might ask yourself once you know that is that if you're suffering dreadfully then one possibility is that?0:24:31You're so fixed on the point you're so fixed on a point The fact that you're so fixed on the point that you're fixed on might be integrally related0:24:41To why things are going so catastrophic Aliy wrong now perhaps not because you know there's a lot of arbitrariness about life and0:24:50Perhaps you suffer even when you don't deserve to that seems to happen in the book of job for example because job is a good Guy and God has a bet with Satan which seems like another relatively nasty thing to do to let's say it just torture0:25:03And he does quite nicely to see if he'll Turn against God and it seems like a rather playground sort of thing for God to engage in but the point is is that even in a0:25:17Document like the Old testament, there's Ample Suggestion that sometimes people just get wiped out and hurt even if they're living good Moral lives0:25:27Aiming properly and all that there's an arbitrariness in life you that's not It erratic low, but it's possible that It's what you're clinging to0:25:37That's hurting you and it's even possible That's the thing that you're clinging to the hardest that's hurting you the most that could easily be someone you love like lots of times0:25:46I see people in therapy, and they're miserable for one reason or another Sometimes it's because they have a very close relationship with a family member and that0:25:55Just isn't working you know the family member for the sake of simplicity Will say is not really oriented towards helping them have a good life the family member is instead oriented towards0:26:08making them as bloody miserable as you can possibly make anyone and and What would you say exploiting the the bond between family members in order to enable that and then?0:26:21sometimes The sacrifice that's necessary is either Merely distancing yourself from that person0:26:30sometimes substantively and sometimes seriously distancing yourself from like we don't talk anymore ever and so that's pretty damn rough and it hurts and all of that, but0:26:43but it's a good example of the fact that sometimes in order to Extract yourself from the miserable bit of Chaos that you happen to be enmeshed in you have to let go of what you love best0:26:58If the world you are seeing is not the world you want therefore. It's time to examine your values That's really worth It's really worth thinking about you know because the alternative to is to curse fate0:27:09Right because if it isn't you and there's nothing you can do to change there Isn't something you're doing that's wrong then it's faith itself. It's the world itself It's other people let's say because they're a huge part of the world or it's the nature of the world itself or or its God0:27:23himself in whatever Form you either believe in or don't believe in because it's fundamentally all the same in the sort of situation that I'm describing0:27:32So and one of the things that's really interesting and I mentioned this before about the israelites in the old testament is that they? They got this right. It's really something because what happens to the israelites over and over in the old testament is that0:27:45they get all puffed up about how wonderful they are and then they make moral errors because they're arrogant and Then God comes along and just cuts them into pieces for like generation after generation0:27:56And then they wobble back to their feet and but they always maintain the same attitude. Which is we did something wrong We did something wrong. It's like. It's like it's like an axiom0:28:07Rather than observation is that if we're not if things are not laying Themselves out for us as they should be then we cannot curse. God we have to look to ourselves0:28:19Well, you think well why not curse God? Because maybe it's his fault That's a really good question and one of the things that I've tried to figure out over the last 30 years is well0:28:32Why not just curse God because there is this arbitrary element to existence and we are? Vulnerable, and there is a plenty of suffering and things are unfair like there's problems, right?0:28:41There's injustice and unfairness and all of these things and endless suffering So why not just lay at the feet of God and the whether God exists or not in some sense by the way?0:28:52With regards to the metaphysics of this particular discussion is not relevant it's the point remains the same either way and the answer is as far as I can tell that if you0:29:02Refuse to take on the responsibility yourself And you attempt it to lay it at the feet of either society or being itself then you0:29:12Instantly start to act in a way that makes everything much worse not only for you But for everyone else and maybe even for being itself and so no, it's not helpful0:29:24Now if you're if you decide that it's you, you've got the problem Maybe that's not even true like maybe you are someone who's being tortured by the bet between God and Satan0:29:33And like too bad for you, if that happens to be the case, but it still seems to be the appropriate thing For a human being who's standing on his or her own?0:29:46Two feet in a proper manner to take the responsibility on for themselves Regardless of the counter-Arguments that might be made against it. That's really something0:29:58It's time to Rid yourself of your current presuppositions. I also think of that. It's a deadwood issue You know one of the things you see with motifs like the pair of the Phoenix0:30:09Remember when harry potter goes off to fight. He's like st.. George. He goes off to fight the The hell is that thing the basilisk that turns you to stone when you look at it's a dragon for all intents and purposes0:30:19Its guarding a virgin bird. What's her name for it's not Virginia. It's close to that though Ginny Ginny Ginevra, right which is a variant of virgin and very introvert for Jigna well when he gets bitten?0:30:33by the Dragon and Poisoned that's the dragon of Chaos right the thing that turns you to stone when you look at it when he gets bitten by it then he's going to die and0:30:44Yeah, well if you get bitten by the thing that turns you to stone when you look at it If it bites you man, if you're not dead, you're going to wish you are it's one of the two and Then the Phoenix flies in and cries tears into the wound and that heals them and the Phoenix is the thing that0:30:58Allows the dead wood to burn off Occasionally let's say well, it's I think it's once every hundred years with the Phoenix and of course0:31:07It's pretty dramatic the whole damn bird has to go up in flames, and then there's nothing left, but an egg But there's a very serious message there, too Which is that you know you can compare yourself in some sense to a forest fire to a forest0:31:20You know in a forest has to burn now and then for the deadwood to clear so that the forest can actually maintain its continued Existence and if you stopped the forest from burning for a prolonged period of time which happened in the United States0:31:32when they were trying to manage the forest fires too tightly Then all that happens is the dead wood accumulates and accumulates and accumulates and accumulates and accumulates Until the whole damn Forest is dead wood and then lightning hits it and it burns0:31:45So hot that it burns the topsoil off, and then there's nothing left nothing grows, and so that's a good moral Lesson which is don't wait too long to let the damn dead wood burn off. You know maybe a little self-immolation0:31:58on A daily basis might be preferable to burning yourself all the way down to the Bedrock you know once every 20 years or so because maybe There won't be anything left of you when you do that0:32:08and you know that happens to people all the time I've seen that happen to people many many times the Dead wood accumulates the mess around them Gathers the Chaos that they haven't dealt with accumulates, and then one day the spark comes0:32:20And they burn so far and so fast that there's not enough left of them to recover And then they're the people who've been eaten by the beast They're they're people who've been eaten by the dragon and now are inside its belly another very common archetypal motif and well0:32:35Maybe a hero will come along and rescue them or maybe they'll just stay in there forever And that's a precursor to the idea of hell, and it's not something I would recommend So a little medicine on a regular basis0:32:46Is a lot better too than total emulation? On terms other than your own sporadically0:32:55It's time to Rid yourself of your current presuppositions. There's another segment See in the soviet union with solzhenitsyn wrote about the soviet union0:33:05comments Pathologies it It's sort of peaked in terms of its pathological authoritarianism when it became illegal to complain that your life wasn't going well0:33:16and you just think about how horrible that is say because Because you know lots of times your life, isn't going well. I mean, and I don't mean this in some casual way0:33:25I mean Maybe I don't know maybe have diabeetus in your you know maybe you're gonna lose your your feet or something like it's really not it's nothing trivial that's going on here something is not good or maybe it's economic or maybe you're unemployed or and0:33:39But you see the idea in the soviet Union was well. We already have all the answers everything's perfect already0:33:48that's what totalitarian is fake well, if everything is perfect and you're suffering then well, maybe there's something wrong with you because0:33:59Everything is perfect after all and if you're suffering then what are you to come out? And say well? I'm suffering It's like well, then your evidence that things aren't perfect right you're like a widow or an orphan in an old testament story0:34:10You know when the kings got to high and mighty then they? Wouldn't pay enough attention to the widows and the orphans and then the profit would come along and say you know those widows and orphans a0:34:20Lot more important than you think they are and if you don't pay attention to them properly then things are going to fall apart around you in a way that you just can't even imagine and So well then you're sort of like your own widow and your own orphan0:34:31But you don't get say hey look you know things aren't perfect yet, because I'm actually having still quite a rough time here You don't get to admit to your own suffering0:34:40If you can't admit to your own suffering then you certainly See the suffering Especially the additional suffering the excess suffering should be treated as evidence that you're not doing something quite right yet?0:34:55It should be treated as evidence that you're wrong There's something important that you're doing that's wrong. I understand How harsh that is and I'm not saying that everyone who's suffering is suffering because they're doing something in some simple way, that's wrong0:35:10I was in a elevator once in a hospital It's a very terrifying thing and this person got on who was just in an absolute state of shock you know I mean it was really0:35:21not good and I don't remember how this happened, but I engaged the person in conversation and they just said that they had just had been diagnosed with what looked to be terminal cancer and0:35:32What was horrifying about it was that what they were doing was? Going over their life in the elevator trying to figure out what they had done in order to deserve such a fate you know they've immediately taken it on themselves as a0:35:44Moral failing and that's not what I'm saying you can't Come up to someone who has cancer and say well if you weren't such a bloody idiot throughout your whole life you wouldn't have cancer And believe me that happens a lot more than you think and people who have diseases like that get blamed for it0:35:57That's not what I'm saying. It's not like that. It's it's it's it's a more generalized attitude That is that if life isn't yet what it should be then you have a response you have a primary responsibility to do something about0:36:09It and the place to start looking is to your own errors and to fix them and that's and that's that's0:36:18That's a safe bet man, because you're probably doing some things that you Would wouldn't have to be doing that if you fixed would make things better So it's time to let go and to sacrifice who you are0:36:29For who you could become?0:36:44There's an old story about how to catch a monkey In case any of you aren't interested in how to catch a monkey now you now you're going to know how to do it0:36:53First you have to take a large narrow necked Jar Just large enough in diameter at the top For a monkey to put its hand inside then you have to fill it partway with rocks0:37:04So it's too heavy for the monkey to carry then you scatter some treats near the jar to attract them and you put some inside inside the narrow neck jar a monkey will come along if you're lucky and0:37:15Grab the You know goodies, but he'll want the ones inside the jar, too So then put his hand in there and grab what's in there?0:37:24And if you've set up your monkey trap properly then he won't be able to eat his hand out Because he's got good goodies0:37:33Not without unclenching his hand not without relinquishing what he already has The monkey Coucher can just walk over and just pick up the monkey because the monkey isn't0:37:44Into the whole sacrifice thing because he's just a monkey you know and so you can catch him as a consequence of his own0:37:53Unregulated hypothalamic desires, you know and to be. What would you say? Charitable to the monkey if you put out candy or something like that's like how often does a monkey get candy0:38:05He's probably a little more motivated than you are to not let go but you can get the point The Monkey Catcher can just walk over to the jar and pick up the monkey the animal will not sacrifice0:38:15The part for the whole that's actually a pretty good phrase. It's the animal that will not sacrifice the part for the whole0:38:24Perhaps this story is apocryPhal, but as an eccentric pSychology professor once told me Fiction lies to you in the most truth in the most truthful possible Manner0:38:36something valuable given up ensures future prosperity something valuable sacrificed pleases the Lord Those are equivalent statements ones0:38:45more articulated I would say that's the first statement then the second one is more dramatic and more embedded in a collective religion dream. You might say0:38:54What's most valuable and best sacrifice well obviously that depends on the culture and the time? What is at least emblematic of that a choice cut of meat?0:39:03Well if you're a herdsmen for example that that's a big deal with I mean generally speaking throughout human history meat has been a very Valuable Commodity as it is by the way among chimpanzees0:39:13Chimpanzees hunt they like to hunt colobus monkeys, and you know they'll they'll basically start eating the damn monkey alive they weigh about 40 pounds0:39:22Despite the fact that the thing is screaming away And that's pretty interesting because one of the things that indicates is that male monkeys that male chimps They're the ones that do the hunting aren't really0:39:34inhibited that much when they're in hunter mode by what you might describe as empathy and there's certain elements of human behavior that are reminiscent of that you see that sort of thing emerged now and then in0:39:46Human Battlefields when groups of men seem to Abandon all internal regulation whatsoever to a degree that makes you wonder if internal regulation even exists0:40:03So it's kind of meat. Well meats valuable you know and this is a good document by Richard, Wrangham I think while back a book about the human invention of fire0:40:13And I think I told you a little bit about this wrangham claimed that we invented fire discovered fire mastered it Maybe two or three million years ago That's a long time longer than people had thought and that that's what actually transformed us physiologically from our chimp-like0:40:26Ancestors into the Sort of Svelte creatures we are now because it's a lot easier to digest cooked meat and meat is a tremendous source of of nutrition energy0:40:36Raw materials all of that especially if it's cooked so me, it's a big deal cook meat is a big deal and maybe it's a choice cut of meat the0:40:46Kind you might offer to a guest if you're not a I always say this wrong said vegan Vegan or vagin. I always think vagin, but that's wrong. That's that's a star vague as a star, right?0:40:57They're not like star creatures. They're they're yeah Anyway, so you know you might offer that especially Especially if a guest came to your abode and you were I heard0:41:11Man, you might sacrifice a high-end animal and offer your guests a nice choice cut of meat and that would actually matter It would mean something0:41:21From the best animal in a flock. What's above even that well in terms of the thing you could sacrifice Well your best animal that's good. Well. How about you? How about your child? How about you? Well that would be next on the0:41:37Hierarchy it's kind of hard to get past that right, and I think it's a it's a toss-up whether the Sacrifice is Greater if it's you or if it's your child. I would say being a parent that it's greater if it's your child0:41:51because I think most people who have established a I Hate I hesitate to say proper, but I'm going to anyway. It's a proper relationship with their children. It's if push came to shove0:42:04They'd take the bullet and let their kid go live The sacrifice of the mother is exemplified profoundly by Michelangelo's great Sculpture the Pa de0:42:18Mary is contemplating her son crucified Andrews, so that's his body after he's been crucified. It's her fault it was through her He entered the great dream of being so what's the meaning of this sculpture? It's a great sculpture. It's just an absolutely unbelievable0:42:31Sculpture you just can't believe that someone could exist who could make something like and of course it wasn't the only thing Michelangelo made right it was like. That's it. It was something he just tossed off in a couple of months while he was doing other0:42:45unbelievable things, but you know It's it's an it's an object of contemplation. Which is why it's in a great cathedral in a great city It's an object of contemplation and the idea is something like0:42:58Well what what's the role of a mother if she's awake I? Had a client come see me a while back not very long ago0:43:07Woman in a boat who's about 30 and trying to make decisions about her life She was pretty career oriented and so I asked her about0:43:17Although maybe having a bit of trouble with career. I've seen this many many times, so this is an amalgam. This is a story That's an amalgam0:43:26and I talked to her about The other elements of her life. It's like well, you know There's only five things you do in life. So you've got your career down. You know. What do you do outside of your career?0:43:38That's meaningful and engaging How are things going with your family could be your family of origin your siblings? Whatever if you have an intimate relationship and like what's your plan for your own family?0:43:49And apart from those five things there's sort of something like get some exercise now And then don't eat too badly and try to stay away from the drugs You know that's that that kind of and the crime that kind of lays out0:44:02Life, and if you miss any of those five things or if you do any of those other things wrong Then you're in trouble, and you can get away with missing a couple of them0:44:11But not all of them you know and she said something along the lines of well I'm not sure I should bring a child into this world I thought oh God christ you got to come up with something better than that such a bloody cliche0:44:21Which is what I told her I said you know you must have thought that up when you were 16 It's like really that's here that you can't do any better. This is a very very smart woman It's like really and this can't do any better than that like yes, obviously this is a vale of tears0:44:35And you know a well of suffering and all of that. You know if you ask 30 people who are Wondering about having children. Why they're wondering 20 of them will say that and so that that tells you how original it is0:44:47It's not original at all. It's not a thought It's like this little it's like a it's like a it's a mean something that lives in your mind It's not a thought, and it's certainly not something0:44:58It's certainly not something that you should just take it face value in and say oh well I'm not having a family then it's like no. No you kind of look at that, and you criticize it a little bit0:45:07It's like well the pop It's the other one. That's the other one. That's very common. There's too many people on the planet already I0:45:17Really don't like that statement It's like just who are you going to ask to leave just how are you going to get them to leave? You know it's a serious question and who says there's too many people what the hell is wrong with people anyways0:45:31so or ruining the planet yeah It's like I think it was the club of rome Who who prophesied by the way that there would be so many people on the planet by the year?0:45:412000 that there would be widespread starvation, and they were completely and utterly wrong about that And I think it was the club of rome who either compared us to a virus or a cancer on the face of the planet?0:45:52It's like oh really that's what you think about people hmm. Aren't you something isn't that something to think about human beings? Viruses and cancer, what do you do with viruses and cancer invite them in and make them at home?0:46:04It's like no you try to eradicate them You've got a bloody well watch your metaphors folks because it isn't clear that you come up with them or that they run you So you better watch them?0:46:17so anyways Mary You know and Mary's the great mother right that she's the mother that's what Mary is Whether she existed or not is not the point she exists at least as a hyper reality she exists as the mother well0:46:31What's the sacrifice of the mother well that's easy if you're a mother and you if you're a mother who's worth her salt You offer your son to be destroyed by the world. That's what you do. That's what's going to happen, right?0:46:45He's going to be born he's going to suffer. He's going to have his trouble in life. He's going to have his illnesses He's going to face his failures and catastrophes and he's going to die0:46:57That's what's going to happen and if you're awake, you know that and then you say well perhaps He will live in a way that will justify that and then you try to have that happen0:47:06And that's what makes you worthy of a statue like that but still the sacrifice of the mother0:47:17Is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world? Well every woman asks yourself that question some say no, and they have the reasons0:47:26Mary answers yes, Voluntarily Mary is the archetype of the woman who answers yes to life0:47:35Voluntarily that's what that image means and not because she's blind She knows what's going to happen and so she's the archetypal0:47:45Representation of the woman who says yes to life knowing full Well, what what life is not Naive? not someone who got pregnant in the backseat of the 1957 Chevy you know in one in a one night of0:47:58Half-drunk idiocy, not that but consciously consciously knowing what's to come and then also allows it to happen because that's another thing that's a0:48:08Testament to the courage of mothers my mother was good at this my mother's a very agreeable person too agreeable for her own good But that's what happens if you're agreeable because you're too agreeable if your own good, that's the definition of agreeable0:48:20And so she's a nice person, and it still is luckily she's still alive and we've had a very good relationship, and I have always been able to make her laugh, which is which is a good thing and but she was tough cookie that woman, you know if if0:48:38remember once she came across I was out playing in this baseball diamond little diamond and Empty lot really in this little town. I grew up in and I0:48:49Was about ten and she walked by I was there with bunch of my friends and I was about to have a fistfight with this little tough kid that I hung around with and0:48:59There were half girls on the team and this fight had Some relationship to status maneuvering you know in Relationship to that anyways, we're going to have a fight and my mom walked by she took a look and I could see from her0:49:13Demeanor that she knew exactly what was about to happen and she looked For a second and then she walked by and I thought whoa good work mom, no kidding0:49:24It's like last bloody thing I needed at that moment was For her to come charging up and say you boys aren't planning to have a fight. Are you it's like well yeah, mom0:49:33We're we were actually planning to have a fight and now that you came and intervened. I actually lost before the goddamn saying even started0:49:45So two thumbs up for Mom She was also the person that said because I had some trouble with my dad when I was you know it adolescence He had some trouble with me. So you know0:49:56It was 50/50 that's for now. It's probably 70/30 with me on the seventy end of the being the trouble and anyways I left home when I was about Seventeen and0:50:08She said something really interesting when I left home. She said it was too. Good at home. You never leave. I thought hey mom That's pretty good. You know for for an agreeable person. You've got a real spine man. So that was pretty good0:50:22so So you know mother that's as this the mother into the person who also says Get out there. Take your goddamn lumps because you're tough enough so that you can handle it. She doesn't say0:50:38You just stay down there and your bedroom brooding away because the world is unfair and treating you badly and Your suffering is too much. She says yeah, there's a lot of suffering out there, but0:50:50You're a hell of a lot tougher than you think you are so In turn Mary's son Christ offers himself to God0:51:02So completely that his faith and trust in the world is not broken by Betrayal torture or death0:51:12That's the model for the honorable man, so You know you have an interesting dynamic there you have the woman who's willing to make the sacrifice0:51:22lays the groundwork for the son who is willing to make the sacrifice that Works out pretty nicely and it's a good thing to know in0:51:31Christ's Case however as he sacrifices himself God his father is Simultaneously sacrificing his son right that's one of the oddities of the trinitarian model is that God?0:51:43Sacrifices himself to himself same thing happens in Norse Mythology, right? Norse Zeus Germanic Mythology0:51:52Zeus sacrifices himself to himself he actually hangs on a tree. It's actually wounded in his side. It's very interesting parallel But I think part of the idea is well0:52:03The human Human Race is starting to work out. What's the ultimate sacrifice? it's something like that ultimate sacrifice of value well the the0:52:13Passion story, and I told you I was foreshadowing. I'm bringing cysts into Consideration things we won't talk about for a long time. Maybe not at all in this lecture series0:52:22I don't know because I don't know how far. I'll get is that well There's a supreme sacrifice demanded on the part of the mother and there's a supreme sacrifice Demanded on the part of the son, and there's a supreme sacrifice0:52:31Demanded on the part of the father all at the same time and then that makes the supreme sacrifice Possible and hypothetically, that's the one that renews. That's the sacrifice that renews and redeems0:52:42It's a hell of an idea man and the thing about it. Is that I? Don't know if it's true, but I know that its opposite is False0:52:52And generally the opposite of something that's false is true It's it's opposite as False It's because if the mother doesn't make the sacrifice then you get the horrible eatable0:53:03Situation or something like that in the household which is just its own absolute catastrophic hell And if you want a really good insight into that I would say watch the documentary crumb0:53:12See Ru and be a man that's been rated by some critics as the best Documentary ever made and it is some piece of work man It is the only thing I've ever seen that actually lays out the eatable catastrophe, and it's full nightmare0:53:25You know so you could you could look at that? so if the maternal sacrifice isn't there then that doesn't work if the paternal Sacrifice isn't there, you know if you're if the father isn't willing to0:53:36Put his son out into the world let's say to be broken and betrayed and all of those things then That's a non-starter because the kid doesn't grow up, and then if the son isn't willing to do that well0:53:46Then who the hell is going to shoulder the responsibility? So if those three things don't happen then it's cataclysmic It's chaotic as hell. If they do happen is it the opposite of that well, you could say well0:53:59Maybe it depends on the degree to which they happen and and it's a continuum How thoroughly can they happen well we don't know you know because you might say0:54:10How good a job do you do? Of encouraging your children to live in truth Let's say well, that's part of the answer to this question and the answer likely is well, not you0:54:21Don't do as good a job of it as you could so it works out quite well but you don't know how well it could work if you did it really well or Spectacularly well or ultimately well or something like that0:54:32You don't know and you know people have an intonation of this because one of the things that's really cool about having a young, baby This is something you don't know until you have it. There's two things you don't know0:54:44Mmm. There's a lot more than two There's three things you don't know Until you have a baby the one is that you didn't grow up yet0:54:54Because you actually don't grow up until someone else is more important than you you can't So people think they grow up if they don't have children but they don't they just think they do now there are some people who make sacrifices of other Sorts, but0:55:06This is a whole different ball of wax as far as I'm concerned. It's not a very Elegant metaphor, but0:55:15You learn that it's kind of relief relief not to be the center of attention. That's cool that you can sit back because of course your child in your family and0:55:25in societies immediately the center of attention and so unless you're narcissistic then you allow that to happen and Then you learn all sorts of really good things about other people because other people really like babies. It's so cool0:55:38I lived in Montreal when we had our first child and I lived in a pretty rough neighborhood by Montreal standards, right? It's like you know material has such a great city like Toronto. It's like even the rough neighborhoods0:55:49Are they're more like charming with a little you know dark underbelly something like that But there were some rough characters in our neighborhood It was pretty poor and we'd we'd push her around in her stroller0:56:01And he's like grizzled rat dole guys would come by They'd look at her and they just light up and they'd come over and like smile at her And you know you just saw there the positive element of their humanity just well forth you0:56:15Ask there s to be something seriously wrong with you if you don't respond that way to a baby you know I mean, this is that that's not good That's not good But it was so cool to see these people you kind of give them0:56:25Generally sort of walk four feet around them on the street. You know and yet. They were all of a sudden all that The layers that were on them would just fall off and they'd be so and the babies are sort of like public property weirdly enough0:56:38To sort of like pregnant women you know because people often treat pregnant women sort of like. They're public property too I mean in a positive way. Oh, whoa. Lord you would have a baby yeah, and you know they hey well0:56:49They do all Sorts of cute things so So you know the reason I'm telling you that is because there's a strong Impulse in people to note that there's something0:57:01Miraculous about the existence of a new human being and the Miraculous element is all the potential that's there right? That's all there. Is there is potential and0:57:11With every birth. There's the potential for something remarkable to be Introduced in the world, and you know one of the things I've thought too is the other thing you don't know is that?0:57:24babies are Generic until you have one and then Your baby, isn't a generic baby at all. It's like0:57:33Instantly it's a person with whom you have a relationship that's closer perhaps than any relationship that you've ever had and that You can keep perfect right because most of the relationships you've had already are with people who are screwed up in 50 different ways and so are you but0:57:47Here you've got this baby and like it be care, but it's not rained yet and so You know you have this possibility of maintaining this relationship?0:57:57that starts out that baby really likes you and Generally that continues for quite a long time as there are two years old you come home They're really happy to see it's kind of like having a puppy. You know. It's like. They're thrilled when you come home0:58:09It's like how many people are thrilled when you come home, you know so he'll see you again. It's like No, not a little kid a little kid is thrilled when you come home? and you can keep that going and so there's this pristine element to the potential relationship between0:58:25Parents and children that's Terribly devalued in our society terribly It's almost as if we're willfully blind to it, and I think it's an absolute catastrophe because there's nothing is very little in life that0:58:38Can compare to establishing a proper relationship with with child? They make great company a few if you keep your relationship with them Christine0:58:50And so you know it's worthwhile, you think well I'm so so the reason I'm telling you. This is because people look at infants, and they think They think this could be the potential savior of mankind0:59:00That is what they think that's how they act So that's what they think and the thing is it's also true0:59:10Now how true it is I don't know But that's I think probably because I think it's probably because people don't dare to find out that's how it looks to me0:59:26in Christ's Case however as he sacrifices himself God his father is simultaneously sacrificing his son it is for this reason that the Christian0:59:35Sacrificial drama of son and self is archetypal nothing greater can be imagined. That's why it's an architect You can't push past it0:59:45so That's the very definition of archetypal. That's the core of what constitutes religious0:59:54the greatest of all possible sacrifices is self and child of that there can be no doubt pain and suffering define the world of that equally there can be no doubt the1:00:03Person who wants to alleviate suffering who wants to bring about the best of all possible futures who wants to create heaven on Earth? Will therefore sacrifice everything he has to God?1:00:14to life in the truth So that's a page and a half from the book. I'm going to release in January1:00:31so back to genesis that were all we already up to genesis four and Adam knew Eve his wife and she1:00:41conceived and Bare cain and said I have gotten a man from the Lord now This is after Adam and eve have been chased out of the garden of Eden right, so what's really cool about this1:00:54I really think that the out of the cain and Abel story is the most profound story. I've ever read Especially given that it's you can tell it in 15 seconds1:01:03I won't because I tend not to tell stories in 15 seconds as you may have noticed but but you can read the whole thing that quickly and It's so densely packed that. I just can't it's it's actually1:01:17Unbelievable to me that it can be that densely packed okay, so the first thing is is that Adam and eve are not the first two human beings can enable are the first two human beings1:01:28Given Adam and Eve were made by God and they were born in paradises like what kind of human beings are those you don't know Any human beings like that human beings aren't? Born in Paradise and made by God human beings are born of other human beings1:01:42Right and so so that's the first thing and it's post-fall. We're out in the world world in history now. We're not in some Archetypal Beyond although, we are still to some degree not to the degree1:01:53That was the case with the story of Adam and eve. We've already been thrown out of the garden. We're already self-conscious We're already awake. We're already covered. We're already working1:02:04We're full-fledged human beings and so you have the first two human beings can enable Prototypical human beings, so what's cool?1:02:14Is that humanity enters history at the end of the story of Adam and Eve and then the archetypal patterns for human Behavior are? Instantaneously presented it's it's it's absolutely1:02:27Mind-boggling and it's not a great. It's not a very nice story, right, so they're they're brothers. They're are hostile brothers They've got their their their hands around each other's throat, so to speak or at least that's the case in One direction1:02:40So it's a it's a story the first two human beings engage in a fratricidal Struggle that ends in the death of the best one of them1:02:53that's the story of human beings in history and That man that doesn't give you nightmares. You didn't understand the damn story1:03:05Now in in these hostile brother stories which are very very common often the older brother cain is1:03:15Used and this is very true in the Bible, but it's true in all sorts of folktales and all sorts of stories of all sorts for that matter See the older brother has some advantages. He's the older brother in a1:03:28agricultural Community the Older Brother generally inherited the land Not the younger brothers and the reason for that was is that well let's say you have like eight sons1:03:37And you have enough land to support a bit of a family and you divide it among your eight sons Then they have eight sons and they divided among the eight sons it's like Soon everyone has a little postage stamp that they can stand on and starve to death on and so that just doesn't work so you1:03:53You you you hand the land down in a piece to the eldest son, and that's just how it is It's tough luck for the rest of them But at least they know they're going to have to go and make their own way1:04:03It's not fair, but there's no way of making it fair well, so the oldest son has some you might say he has an additional stake in the1:04:14stability and And the stability of the current hierarchy he has more of a stake in the status quo So that makes a more of an emblematic represent1:04:24Representative of the status quo, and perhaps more likely to be blind in its favor. It's something like that So that motif creeps up very frequently in the Hostile brothers archetypal struggled so cain1:04:38fits this the story of cain and Abel fits this pattern because cain is the one who won't budge who won't move He's stubborn, Whereas the younger son. Who's abel is often the one who's more?1:04:48Not so much of a revolutionary, but perhaps more of a balance between the revolutionary and the traditionalist something like that Whereas the older son tends to be more1:04:59traditionalist Authoritarian at least in these metaphorical representations an Adam knew eve his wife and she conceived and bare cain and said I have gotten a man from the Lord, so1:05:11There's the first human being cain. It's like I told you that the mesopotamians thought that mankind Was made out of the blood of the worst Demon that the great goddess of Chaos could imagine?1:05:23Well the first human being is a murderer and not only a murderer a murder of his own brother And so you know old testament that's a hell of a harsh book and you might think well1:05:33maybe that's a little bit too much to bear and then you might think yeah and Maybe it's true too. So that's something to think about I mean I1:05:45human beings you know like They're amazing creatures, and to think about us as a plague on the planet is its own kind of bloody catastrophe1:05:57Malevolent Low Quasi Genocide all metaphor But that doesn't mean that we're not without our1:06:07Problems and the fact that this book that sets sits at the Cornerstone of our culture would present the first man because a murderer of his brother is something that should really set you back on your heels and1:06:23Again, she bear his brother abel and abel was a keeper of sheep, but cain was a tiller of the ground There you see a very old representation there's1:06:33Abel there And he's got his sheep up on the altar and cain is bringing a sheaf of wheat and I don't know exactly what's happening here1:06:42With the blood but or it's a ray perhaps It's something like that, but the overall impression of the image is that something transcendent is1:06:53communicating with this sacrifice And you can see that so you think oh how primitive you know how primitive these people were sacrificing to their God It's like you know1:07:04Those people weren't stupid and this is not primitive Whatever it is. It's not permitted. It's sophisticated Beyond belief because The idea as I already pointed out is that you could sacrifice something of value and that that would have1:07:17Transcendent utility and that is by no means an unsophisticated idea in fact it might be the great idea that human beings ever came up with1:07:28It's an answer to the problem. That's put forward in The story of Adam and Eve right because we became self conscious and then we discovered the future and then we knew we were going to die and then we knew we were vulnerable and then we1:07:39Became ashamed and then we developed the knowledge of good and evil, and then we got thrown out of Paradise is like. That's a big problem. So what the hell are you going to do about it? Well?1:07:49Sacrifice that's the hypothesis. Well that's a hell of a hypothesis man. That's what we're doing you've made plenty of sacrifices even to sit in this1:07:58Theater and many people made plenty of sacrifices to have a theater like this existed many people made sacrifices So that we could actually freely engage in the dialogue that we're engaging in in a theater like this1:08:11And so it's like all of this is built on sacrifice and sacrifice bloody well better work because we do not have a better idea1:08:20Sacrifice what's the counter position? murder and Theft So let's go with sacrifice shall we and perhaps. We won't consider it. So damn primitive. You know because it's not so primitive and1:08:33Again, she Barrett his brother abel and abel was a keeper of sheep and cain was a tiller of the ground now some people have read into this the1:08:44Eternal Battle between Herdsmen and Agriculturalists, it's raged in the American west for example because the Herdsmen like to have their herds sheep cattle go1:08:55wherever they were going to go and of course they had your cultures the farmers like to have things fenced off and So and the agriculturalists actually won in the final analysis1:09:06But anyways abel is a keeper of sheep, and that's interesting because that makes them a shepherd and I think that's part of the critical issue here because a shepherd I1:09:17Talked a little bit about shepherds before you know if you look at Michelangelo's statue of David which is another? Stay during work. I mean that David. He's no1:09:29Trivial figure and of course David who Slays Goliath right and Goliath is like1:09:38the giant of the patriarchal enemy, it's something like that and You know middle Eastern shepherds they had to keep take care of sheep1:09:47And they're edible and the lambs are very vulnerable and there were lots of wild animals around. It wasn't like England in the 16th Century it was like there were lions you know and1:09:57You had a slingshot or a stick or some damn thing and so your job was to keep the sheep organized and not let them eat by the lions alone and so1:10:07you had to have a clue and be tough and self-reliant and all of those things had to be tough and self-reliant you had to be able to take care of a lot of vulnerable things at build do it on your own and1:10:18So that's all built into the shepherd Metaphor and it's you know It's a tough thing for it's not a great metaphor for modern people because we tend to think of the shepherd is someone like little1:10:28Lord Fauntleroy, you know like some little Certainly not a lion killing Hyper-Masculine Lion killing you know monster1:10:38That's not a shepherd the shepherd sort of dances around and you know it's not that's not the metaphor here. That's that's That's not the metaphor here so abel was a keeper of sheep1:10:47but cain was a tiller of the ground and In the process of time it came to pass that cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord1:10:57okay, so he's participating in the sacrificial ritual and abel he brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof and the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering1:11:10Now you don't know why that is and this is a built-in ambiguity I think Now I think there's textual hints, but I'm not sure1:11:20Abel brought the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof okay, so so, what does that mean well? He brought high courts a high quality sacrifice. You don't know that Abel's sacrifice is low quality1:11:33Because it doesn't say you know abel brought. God some wilted lettuce and then burnt it he didn't say that but but there isn't a sentence there that talks about how1:11:44high-Quality cain sacrifices But in any case the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering1:11:53So there's a hint that abel's putting a little bit more into the whole sacrificial thing than then cain But there's also a hint that maybe God is just like liking you a little better than he's like in him, and that's I think1:12:07Useful from a literary perspective because there is that arbitrariness about life you know with my own children for example One of them has had I would say1:12:18heat things come easy to him He's lucky fortunate However, you want to put it. He seems to be that sort of person. Where's my other child. It's like. It's just like one1:12:30horrible job like Catastrophe after another and it's so strange to see that because as far as I can tell there's1:12:39the character logical differences are Certainly not accounting for the for the for the difference in destiny You know my want the one child who's had so much trouble. I mean as a child1:12:52was just a wonderful child so1:13:02Mazing ly happy and easy to long with and fun and1:13:11Had a terrible time of it. So who knows what god's up to But distributing fate equally certainly isn't one of them1:13:23And the Lord had respect unto abel and his offering but unto cain and his offering he had not respect1:13:33And cain was very roth angry Roth is a tough word. You know when these are translated many times It's hard to get the full flavor of the words, but roth and his countenance fell well to have your countenance fell1:13:46This is sort of up to fall is to To have it be heavy depressed For sure angry for sure resentful1:13:58Probably roth that's anger so cain is not a happy clam That his hard work is being rejected by God now. That's worth thinking about1:14:09Really because you think about how human that story is you know you're out There well we could say1:14:18You might be a useless character And you know you're whining about how catastrophic Your life is and it's a pretty much obvious to everyone around you and you that it's your fault1:14:27You just don't try you don't wake up in the morning. You don't get a job You don't engage in things you're cynical and you're bitter And you're angry and you don't try to help the people near you1:14:38and you don't try to fix up your own life and you don't take care of yourself, and you know and Then things go wrong. It's like well really what do you expect but then but that's done1:14:50I mean that doesn't mean someone in that situation will just say well, that's okay. I deserve it and they'll be happy about it They won't they'll be absolutely bitter about it and angry, but you know1:15:00Put that aside for a moment there are people who seem to struggle very Forthrightly let's say and still have one catastrophe after another happened to them and so1:15:11It's there's no easy answer in this in this It's like you can fall fall afoul of God1:15:21Because your sacrifice is our second rate or you can just fall a fall of God And you don't know why well tough luck for you, and then what happens in either case is exactly this almost inevitably1:15:35Cain was rocked in this countenance fell well you know you meet and I people like this write to me all the time I've seen so many many of them as clients you know they say they're1:15:4520 not so often 30 more commonly sometimes 40 their lives haven't gone Well, you know they're in a pit of despair of one form or another and not only are they in a pit of despair1:15:56But they're extraordinarily angry about it, and God only knows what they would do with that anger if they had the opportunity To give it full voice Right you know one of the things I've always thought about hitler. Is that you know people1:16:11You have to admire Hitler. That's the thing Because he was an organizational genius You know the thing that doesn't stop people from being hitler the thing1:16:22people don't people don't Refuse the ambition to become hitler Because they don't have the genocide emotive ation1:16:34They don't follow that pathway because they don't have the organizational genius They've got the damn Motivation and you know if you take a hundred people randomly, and you talk to them and you really talk to them you'll find that1:16:49Five percent of them would take their vengeful thoughts Pretty damn far if they were just given the opportunity and in fact they do because they make life1:16:59Miserable for themselves and often for their family and sometimes for anybody they can come near and then maybe another Twenty percent of people have that bubble up in them on a pretty damn regular basis, so you1:17:13Know you can have some sympathy for cain if you don't have any sympathy for cain, then you're not So you can't enable also they don't just represent to our contempo types of being they represent1:17:26So it's not like you're cain, and you're able in here cain. You're able. It's like you're half-and-half, and you're half-and-half, and you're half-and-half It's something like this. This is two different potential patterns of destiny, and you don't manifest one purely and the other zero1:17:39It's like you're it's it's like the line between good and Evil that runs down the human heart It's exactly the same idea and maybe you're more like cain, or maybe you're more like Abel1:17:49But they're still a little cain in you. No matter how able you are and maybe more than a little and Probably more than a litter little and if you watch your fantasies, which I would very much recommend1:18:01you'll find that they Show you dark things about you. That will shock you if you Allow yourself to be conscious of what you're thinking, so1:18:14It's a good time when you're having an argument with someone especially someone that you love To just watch the pictures that flash in the back of your mind That's part of let's say coming into contact with what carl jung called the shadow and the shadow is the manifestation of cain1:18:29That's a perfect way of thinking about it and one of the things that jung said about the shadow Because jung was not someone you mess around with lightly He said the human shadow has roots that reach all the way to hell and jung meant that that's no metaphor for him now1:18:44He might not have meant it in the same way that a fundamentalist Christian from from the Southern us Might mean it but I would say that young men sit in a way, that's far more terrifying and also far more true1:18:57so and cain was very wroth and his countenance fell1:19:07So there's abel Burning is offering away there and he's in this sort of relationship with1:19:16Let's call him the archetypal figure of Culture the archetypal father and1:19:26it's something he respects that's the thing it's an indication that the posture is an indication of respect and then there's cain in the background you see in his face is in Shadow and he's1:19:40He's jealous of what's happening here, and he's going through the motions perhaps, and maybe God just doesn't like him We don't know, but he's going through the motions and he's not very happy about it1:19:53And you know that that's actually a phrase that you could you could carve into many people's Tombstones as an epitaph for their life which would be went through the motions, but wasn't very happy about it1:20:11This is really an interesting one. I think I mean so I don't know what God is doing here exactly but He's helping ignite the sacrificial flame1:20:22And that's kind of an interesting idea. I think because You know let's say that you have an impulse to make a sacrifice you think Well, I should change this about my life. Well. It's like where does that come from that impulse1:20:35It's just well, just it manifests itself out of nothing so or you came up with it Well, you might want to stop thinking about that Thinking so surely that you come up with your own thoughts. You don't come up with your damn dreams. Do you?1:20:49They just happen Kanade only knows where they come from they come from your brain. Oh boy. That's a sophisticated answer they come from your unconscious1:20:58Well, that's not much better at least it's somewhat better But there are those matan amazing dramas take place in the theater of your imagination at night? You don't even understand what they are and yet they occur night after night and those things dreams. They can contain wisdom. It's just1:21:14Well it just staggers the person who has the dream once they get the key to the dream once they remember it's like Oh look you just revealed a bunch of wisdom to yourself that you didn't know well. Where'd that come from?1:21:26Well, you don't know how in the world can you dream up things that you don't know? That's a tough one. Maybe we'll talk about that at some point in this lecture series because there are some1:21:37Reasonable things that can be said about that, but you know the idea that There's something that's not you young would call it the self karl You would call it the self which he thought of as the totality of your being across time and space1:21:50it's something like that and that you know each second that you exist is a slice Manifesting itself across time and space, and he thought of the the self is partly the voice of conscience1:22:02Whatever that is that helps guide you when you have to make a difficult decision and a difficult decision might be well What do I need to sacrifice? What is how do I need to discipline myself right? What do I need to forego well?1:22:15How do you figure those things out well? You know this picture is trying to put forth the idea that perhaps if you had established the proper relationship with God the father1:22:25We've talked about what that might mean then he would help figure out how to get the sacrificial fires burning So that you could stay in a proper relationship with him across time well, that's such an unreasonable1:22:38Proposition it what's the alternative? proposition Well this isn't working out very well. That's for sure. You know kate seems to be doing it. I don't know what it is1:22:48It's like it's as if he thinks he can only do it himself or maybe he wants only to take credit for it or something Like that he's not in this1:22:59Grateful let's say and inquiring grateful and inquiring Posture because that's what a perfect posture should be it should be grateful and inquiring and grateful is thank God things aren't worse for me1:23:12Than they are And you should be grateful about that because they could be a lot worse than they are man. They can be so bad and Inquiring would be well. I don't really know how I could make it better, but I'm open to suggestions man1:23:26If I can figure out how to do it, I'll try it That's the in that's the humility and the inquiry that's a humble inquiry. How could I make things better?1:23:36It's something like that, and that's like what sacrifices. Do I need to make in order to make things better That's a good question to ask yourself You could ask yourself that every morning1:23:46What sacrifice do I have to make to make things better you can decide what constitutes better? How about that then it's not even as if it's being imposed on you come up with your own notion of what?1:23:57Constitutes better you know we try to make it sophisticated should just be better for you cuz that isn't going to work very well Right you you're just going to fall downstairs if you do that because you have to live with other people and decide1:24:09Stupid anyways. What are you gonna? Do like? Can't even nothing you can even say about that. It's so That that's the doubts the attitude of a very badly behaved hyper aggressive1:24:20two-year-Old and I mean that technically and so you could You could ask yourself well how I have this day that lays itself out in front of me1:24:31What thing could I let go of that's impeding my progress? That if I let go of would make my life better My Family's life better my cultures life better my being better1:24:43And then that would give you something to do for the day wouldn't it and to justify your miserable life Because you need that that's the whole point of the first story of Adam, and eve. What do you have a miserable life?1:24:58Okay What am I going to do about that? Well if you just have a miserable life you're just going to suffer stupidly and get bitter about it. That's what happens to cain1:25:08It's like well. How about not doing that because that seems to just take a bad deal and make it worse. How about? Making a sacrifice and seeing if you can please God and put being on track1:25:21God that'd be something to do what could be better than that. What could possibly be better than that Well, that's why it's archetypal man, because nothing's better than that. That's where it tops out1:25:34So when you can do that you can do that every day you have to do it a little way because like what good are you you know you're not going to go and1:25:43Bring this socialist utopia into being in one fell swoop1:25:58You might also think that you know one of the things came might figure out here There's a couple of things that just aren't going right for him downwind of the fire not the right place to blow from and1:26:11The fact that he's in hand velop tin haze and smoke and breathing it in and the fire isn't burning Might be an indication that he's doing something wrong or he could be wiping his eyes and saying Jesus1:26:24What kind of stupid bloody universe would produce smoke like this? It's like yes, well, that's the more likely outcome and1:26:33The Lord said unto cain why art thou wroth and why is thy countenance fallen? if Thou doest well shalt thou would not be accepted now1:26:44That's an interesting line because and I've looked at a variety of different translations of this this Seventh verse here like a bunch of them because1:26:55The translation for that that's a critical line and the translation really matters and so I'll tell you what I think the story is but I've been able to figure out and1:27:04I'm sure I haven't got it completely right, but it's So he asks the God says to them if you do well won't you be accepted. What is the hint there, right?1:27:15It's something like well things aren't going so well for you, so The first thing you might think is You're not doing well. What does that mean? You're not doing good does that not mean you're not acting properly means1:27:28It's the hint because God is suggesting that if you were doing properly you would be successFul I1:27:38had a friend at one point who was a very bitter person, and he had a bunch of problems and some of them were self-inflicted and some of them were fate I suppose and1:27:48He had he had become very very destructive Murderously destructive genocide, ly destructive I would say you could see it in his dreams and and1:27:57he lived with me for a while and I Knew him very well he was a friend of mine from the time. I was 12 until the time he committed suicide1:28:06he was spoke 40 and When he lived with me, I was trying to help him get on his feet which was why he had come to live with me because he thought maybe I could help him you know on his feet and1:28:18He could only take Relatively low level jobs. You know like he had some mechanical ability didn't he didn't get educated although. He's a very very smart person He probably had an Iq about 135 or something like that1:28:29He's very smart and so he was bitter too because he hadn't educated himself to the level that his Education select would have demanded so he had to take jobs that were beneath him Intellectually and he had a really had that real intellectual arrogance1:28:40You know because he was smart and really smart people often come to believe that Only Smart Matters and if they're smart and all that and all that matters is smart1:28:51And then the world is sort of laying itself at their feet then they've been terribly betrayed and and then they cling to their Intelligence which is more like a talent or a gift like it's a like. It's an idol. You know a False idol1:29:04which is exactly what it is in a very dangerous one and Get cynical about the stupidity of the world and the fact that their talents weren't properly recognized, and that's just not that helpful1:29:15You know because smart is a good thing, but I'll tell you if you don't use it properly it will devour. You just like all arbitrarily assigned Talent, right So you might have a talent but it's your friend1:29:26If you use it properly, and if you excuse it it will be your enemy And maybe that's how God keeps the cosmic scales adjusted, but anyhow my friend was a very smart person although1:29:36Not as smart as he thought he was unfortunately and and but he hadn't done What would have been necessary with that intelligence to make it manifest itself?1:29:45Properly in the world and that also embittered him because he also knew that There was more that he could have done if he would have done it and perhaps more that he could still do what I was1:29:55Suggesting to him while he was living with us because he was you know two levels from Homeless by that point Was that he should find a job that he could find?1:30:06Working in a in a garage working in a shop something like that cuz he had some mechanical ability and that he should Do he should separate himself from the arrogance that made him presume that such a job would beneath him?1:30:21Because at that point no job was beneath him and but more importantly it's not so obvious that jobs are beneath people you know because even if you're a even if the imagine you have a job as a1:30:35checkout Person in a in a grocery store, you know it's a fairly unskilled job You can be in some miserable resentful horrid bastard doing that job boy1:30:45you know you can come in there just exuding resentment bitterness and making fakes and Making sure that every customer that passes by you has a slightly worse day than they need to right and and you know1:30:58Pilfering time and Perhaps pilfering goods and being resentful about the people who? Who gave you the position because they're above you in the dominance hierarchy and talking you know bad things1:31:11Gossiping behind the back of your co-workers. It's like you can take your menial position Self-described and turn that into a very nice little slice of hell1:31:20That's for sure, and you know you go into places like that I always think of the archetypal diner in that way you know you guys have been in this diner There's a really good opposite diner, and there's a great video on YouTube1:31:33it's Tom waits reading reading a poem by Bukowski, and I think it's called Nirvana and it's about a good diner that he happened to visit Bukowski happened to visit when he was on a bus when he was a1:31:46When he was a kid a diner where everything was going well, and you could listen to that. It's great I think it's great, but this is the opposite diner. I'm thinking wow so you go into a diner, right?1:31:55It's seven o'clock in the morning And you order some bacon and eggs and some toast and then you look around in the diner and you think It was like1:32:051975 when the windows were last washed and there's this kind of thick coating of who gives a damn grease on the on The Walls you know and and the floor too has got that sort of stickiness that you really have to work out to develop over1:32:18Years you know and the waitress is she's not happy to be there and the guy behind the counter isn't happy that that happens to be the waitress that he's working with And then you know you walk down the stairs. Maybe to the washroom, and that's its own little trip1:32:32So you come back and you order your damn eggs? And you order your toast in the order your bacon And then it comes and like the eggs are too cooked on the bottom1:32:44So they're kind of brown, and then they're kind of raw on top and and they're cold in the middle Which is you really have to work the cooking egg like that man But you can master that with like ten years of bitterness you teach how to cook an egg like that1:32:57and then the toast here's what you do with the toast right you put You take you take the white bread you know the pre sliced Stuff that no one should ever eat then you put that in the toaster1:33:08And you overcook it and then you wait and then you pop it out of the toaster and then because it's overcooked you scrape it off and You knock off the crumb1:33:17So it doesn't look too burnt and then you wait till it's cold and then you put Cold Margarine on it because if you put cold first of all not butter but if you put cold margarine or you can also kind of tear holes in it so that then it has1:33:30Lumps of margarine in it and it's really dry except where it's too greasy so that's like your own little work of art man And then you put that on the side with the with. The--1:33:42With the eggs, and then you have the potatoes, and this is how you cook the potatoes properly you know so they're leftover potatoes and1:33:51You keep dumping new Leftover potatoes into the old leftover potatoes over weeks And so some of the potatoes have they're no longer potatoes right they've have returned to mother Earth1:34:03Huh? then you flop them on the grill and you sort of Hide it. Oh you burn them a bit. I guess and then you've slapped them on the plate and jesus you don't eat those man1:34:17That's for sure, and that's the point and then You have the bacon and you want to make sure you buy the lowest possible quality bacon, not such1:34:27Let's how you start and then you throw it on the grill And you don't your grill has to be? Overheated to do this you have to cook the bacon so that it's raw in places and burnt in other places and it has that1:34:40Delightful picked like odor that only really cheap badly cooked bacon can provide or may we use those little breakfast sausages that no one in their bloody right mind would let within 15 feet of anything living you know and1:34:53Then you serve that right, and you serve it with the kind of orange juice that is only orange in color1:35:03and then with coffee, that's ah What would you say? It was started too early in the morning. That's the first thing1:35:13Bad quality coffee started too early in the morning got cold once or twice and has been reheated and then you serve that with1:35:23Whitener Like here's your breakfast. It's like no, man. That's not breakfast. That's hell1:35:38no, and And you created it and Then what you do if you have a diner like that is because you have a miserable life if you have a diner like that1:35:48And you've really worked on achieving that is every night you go home and you curse your wife And you curse your kids And you fucking well cursed God too for producing a universe where a diner like yours is allowed to exist1:36:01And that's your bloody life so Also, that's what God is trying to point out here is1:36:18If thou doest well shalt thou not be accepted and If thou doest not well then sin lies at your door well, so what I looked at lots of translations for this and actually1:36:32The next line is and unto these unto thee shall be his desire Yes What God actually says is something like this is like1:36:42You know things aren't going so well for you But if you were behaving properly they would but instead this is what you've done sin came to your door and sin means to you Know pull your arrow back and to miss the Target sin came to your door1:36:52But he uses a metaphor and the metaphor is something like sin came to your door like this sexually aroused cat Predator thing and1:37:03You invited it in first, and then you let it have its way with you. It's like you entered into a creative1:37:12uses of sexual metaphor he entered into a creative exchange with it and gave birth to something as a consequence and that what you gave birth to you that that's your life and and1:37:24You knew it you're self conscious after all you knew you were doing this and you? conspired with1:37:34this thing To produce the situation that you're in Young said something about this similar about the Eatable mother situation1:37:43Sorry, it was very politically incorrect what he said of course every single thing He wrote was politically incorrect so just how you could tell he was a thinker by the way1:37:56He talked about the unholy alliance between hyper dependent children and their mothers and he said well It's actually because you probably thought about it as a as a maternal thing1:38:07I'm not putting freud down because freud mapped out the oedipal situation brilliantly I'm not putting 4i down, but you know jung was taking the ideas and expanding them Outward1:38:17and you know he said that there was an actually an unholy alliance between a hyper dependent child and a And they need to pull over dependent mother and the alliance was the mother would always offer1:38:29so maybe the kid is supposed to go off and do something that would require a little bit of courage and effort and The mother says well are you sure you're feeling well enough to do it and then the child could say1:38:46Yes Or the child could say no, and then you know be put in bed And maybe didn't all of that and but the thing is the child1:38:56Made the damn decision too, and you might think well, that's pretty harsh, but just because children are little doesn't mean. They're stupid and You don't know children if you don't know how children know how to manipulate1:39:09Because they are staggeringly good at that because they're studying you non-stop trying to figure out what you're up to and be how they can get what they want in the way that they wanted and so they can play a1:39:21Manipulative game no problem especially if they're well schooled in it, and so it's sort of like that. It's like Maybe the mother is a little too a little timid and a little inclined to overprotect and maybe the child is a little1:39:32manipulative and a little willing to not take that courageous step out in the world and to regress into infantile dependency1:39:41Instead and then you get a terrible dynamic building across time that is like a vicious circle you know or like a positive feedback loop that just expands and expands and expands because sometimes in families you see a1:39:52Hyper dependent child and a perfectly independent child in same mother so obviously Same there. I mean mother's very complex and mother for child a and mother for Child B1:40:03Are not the same mother even if they happen to be the same human being that literature is quite clear on that But you get my point, but god's idea was1:40:13not only are you not doing well because You're not doing well But you're not doing well because you've actually really spent a lot of work figuring out how to not do well1:40:23this is like creative effort on your part and if you read about Truly malevolent people and you could start with the Columbine killers because they left some very interesting diaries behind1:40:34So I would recommend them if you there plenty of serial killers you could read about in the people Who've really gone out and done dark things And I've read more than my fair share of that sort of thing and understand it quite well1:40:46If you really want to have your countenance fall and be roth Ten years of brooding on1:40:55your own catastrophe Sort of a loan and Letting your fantasies. Take shape and endi and egging them on and and1:41:05Allowing them to flourish and let's say take possession of you because that's exactly the right way to think of it. That will get you Somewhere like this and there are more people who are like that than you think and you're more like that than you think1:41:25Well so kayne he's obviously not very happy about this whole answer obviously Because the last thing you want to hear if your life is turned into a catastrophe and you1:41:34Take God to task for creating a universe where that sort of thing was allowed is that? It's your own damn fault And you should straighten up and fly right so to speak and you shouldn't be complaining about the nature of being1:41:48But that is the answer he gets and so then what happens well we have to infer that if kane was angry before that he's a lot more angry now and1:41:59Of course that's exactly what the story reveals and cain talked with abel his brother and It came to pass when they were in the field that cain rose up against abel his brother and slew him1:42:15I'm going to read you something else now This is foreshadowing again This is from the same chapter by the way Do what is Meaningful not what is expedient?1:42:25Jesus was Led into the wilderness according to the story to be tempted by the devil Matthew 4:1 prior to his crucifixion This is the story of cain1:42:35Restated abstractly cain is far from happy as we have seen he's working hard or so he thinks but God is not pleased Meanwhile Abel is dancing away in the daisies his crops flourish women love him first of all. He's a pretty good guy1:42:50Everyone oh is it he deserves his good fortune all the more reason to hate him I used to joke when I used to teach at Harvard and now and then my wife would have some of the undergraduates over1:43:00We used to joke afterwards because some of them were many of them were very remarkable kids. You know like they They were super smart they were athletic or they had some dramatic ability or they were musicians, or they done some spectacular1:43:14Charitable work because he basically to get Accepted into harvard you had to be top of your damn school And then you had to have at least two other outstanding things going for you1:43:23You know and what was so annoying about most of these kids This was our joke with you really both liked them and respected them It's like we my joke was do you think they would have had the good graces to be like?1:43:35Dislikeable sons of bitches at least with all the all those other great things going for them. They had to act like Respectability and like ability to it as well, so you thought well, you know it really couldn't happen to a better person1:43:47It's like good. God well, that's that's that's able situation. You know it's like and you know the funny thing, too Is that that's an ideal? That's the ideal right because an ideal person let's say would be1:44:00someone who you would want to be like and and someone who is operating in the world like you would want to operate and Someone whom fortune was smiling on and someone who is making the right sacrifices. It's really what you would want to be and1:44:16So can kill that? Right so it's a psychological story too, and you see this in the cynicism that people have about1:44:26People who have done well in the world. They're always looking for some reason. Why they've done well they must be crooked or they must be they must be conniving or they must be arrogant or they must be1:44:37psychopathic or you know and of course all of those things exist But it's a very bad trick to play on yourself to make the proposition that the person in the world who?1:44:47represents your own ideal is that ideal because of Despicable reasons because what you do is train yourself that the ideal that you should pursue can only exist if it's motivated by1:44:58Despicable reasons, and then what not only is able your brother dad as your brother in the field in reality But you've also slaughtered your own ideal1:45:09Well, then what the hell are you going to work for well? How are you gonna live then? Well bitterly and miserably that's for sure Bitterly miserably and hopelessly that's how you're going to live you know it's so rare that I see1:45:23especially publicly that people Honestly admit with sports figures. They'll do it. That's that's one place where that seems to happen, but it's so uncommon for1:45:35expressions of admiration and gratitude to manifest themselves in any public communication of any Sort newspapers TV1:45:46YouTube Twitter, it's almost always Undermining and backbiting and criticism and very often directed to people who?1:45:59Who have often done little else, but? Bring good things into the world for other people, and that's part of why this is such a profound story1:46:12He's a pretty good guy everyone knows that he deserves his good fortune all the more reason to hate him That's for sure kane broods on his misfortune like a vulture on an egg1:46:22He enters the desert wilderness of his own mind. He Obsesses over his ill fortune and betrayal he nourishes his resentment1:46:34He indulges in ever more elaborate fantasies of revenge His arrogance grows to Luciferian proportions. I'm ill used and oppressed1:46:43He thinks this is a stupid bloody planet it can go to hell And with that he encounters Satan in the wilderness and falls prey to his temptations1:46:55And he does what he can in John Milton's unforgettable words To confound the race of mankind in the first route and mingle and involve Earth with hell1:47:06done all despite the Great creator He turns to evil to obtain what good forbade him, and he does it voluntarily self consciously and with malice.1:47:22Let him who has ears hear. So that's the first two human beings. The resentful, bitter, failure1:47:36taking an axe to the admirable success1:47:45Then the Lord said unto cain. Where is abel thy brother, and he said I know not am I my brother's keeper and1:47:54He said what hast thou done the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground?1:48:03Now art thou cursed from the Earth which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand You know if you want to understand that which I would recommend you could read Dostoyevsky's1:48:19Crime and punishment That's a great It's a great novel. I think it might be the greatest novel ever written because I haven't read every novel1:48:28But in my experience, it's the greatest novel and it is exactly this it It says what happens psychologically if you commit the ultimate crime1:48:39It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing it's it's it's There's There's no psychologist like dostoyevsky1:48:48We now tell us the ground it shall not henceforth Yield unto thee her strength A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the Earth and cain said unto the Lord1:48:57My punishment is greater than I can bear now one of the things that's interesting about this is that you know it I think the punishment that God lays on cain is1:49:08It's like the inevitable consequences of cain's action. It's something like that. It's like well. He killed his brother There's no going back from that man like1:49:19good luck forgiving yourself for That especially if he was an ideal, especially if he was your ideal because he haven't just killed your brother and of course1:49:29tortured your parents and the rest of your family you've deprived the community of someone who is upstanding and You did it for the worst possible motivations. It's like1:49:40There's no up from there right that's That's as close to hell as you could manage on Earth I would say and kane said unto the lord my punishment is greater than I can bear1:49:53Behold thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth and from thy face shall I be hid Doubt to is like there's also no Turning back to God let's say after an error like that because well1:50:07You've done everything you possibly could to spite God Assuming he exists and the probability that you're going to be able to mend that relationship in your now broken state1:50:20When you couldn't mend it to begin with before you did something so terrible starts to move towards zero and It shall come to pass that everyone that findeth me shall slay me and the Lord said unto him there for1:50:34whosoever Slayeth cain Vengeance Shall be taken on Him, Sevenfold And the Lord said a mark upon cain lest any finding him should kill him that's an interesting thing1:50:43I wanted about that for a long time because you might think well Why would God take cain under his wing so to speak given? What's already happened, and I think it has something to do with1:50:52The emergence of the idea that it was necessary to prevent tit-for-tat revenge slayings, it's something like that you know and1:51:01And there's hints of that later in the text because you know it's like Well, I kill your brother and then you kill two of my brothers And then I kill your whole family and then you kill my whole town1:51:11And then I kill your whole country and then we blow up the world. It's like. Yeah, that's probably not a very intelligent solution to the Initial1:51:20Problem even though the initial problem which might be a murder is not an easy thing to solve But I think it's something like that and then the last part of the story is1:51:30God's William Blake so Adam and eve have discovered their dead son, and1:51:40cain Has become cognizant. I would say of what he did and what he is right so it's another entrance into a form of self-consciousness, it's it's1:51:52You know the self-consciousness that Adam and Eve developed was painful enough They become aware of their own vulnerability in their nakedness and perhaps even their capacity for evil, but cain becomes aware of his1:52:07Voluntary engagement with Evil itself and sees that as a crucial Human capability1:52:16And that's something modern people. You know it's no wonder we don't take it seriously like I know in the academy and Among intellectual circles for decades the idea of Evil has been it's like1:52:28What are you? Medieval or something you know the whole idea of evil you don't that's a non-starter as an intellectual Starting place as a as a topic and that's something that I've just been unable to understand because I cannot understand how you could possibly1:52:46Have more than a cursory knowledge of the history of the 20th century much much less a deep knowledge of the history of the 20th century and1:52:55To walk away with any other conclusion, then well good might not exist but evil hey1:53:04the Evidence for that is So overwhelming that That only willful blindness could possibly explain denying in its existence1:53:21and That was actually a useful discovery for me because I also concluded Perhaps that if it was true evil existed then it1:53:33It was true by inference that its opposite existed Because the opposite of evil. Let's say the evil of the concentration camp. Let's say or we could get more specific about it1:53:43We could say there's this one thing that used to happen in our Switz where they would take People off the incoming trains those who lived you know that weren't stacked around the outside of the train1:53:57Train Cars and you know froze to death because it was too cold You know those who only had to be stuck in the middle where it was warm enough So that maybe the old people died because they suffocated1:54:09But at least some of them were alive when they made it to our sweats and then they took those poor people out one of the tricks that the guards used to play on them was to have the1:54:18the Newly arrived prisoners Hoist like hundred pound sacks of wet salt and carried them from one side of the compound1:54:27And these compounds were big this was a city. It wasn't like a gymnasium It was like a city there were tens of thousands of people there they'd have them carry the sack of wet salt from one side of the compound to the other and1:54:38then back right and that was to make a mockery out of the Notion that work would set you free. It's like no. No you work here, but there's nothing productive about it1:54:51The whole point it's exactly the opposite of sacrifice in some sense, it's oh, we're going to make you act out working But all it will do is speed your demise1:55:00and maybe we can decorate it up a little bit because not only will it speed up your demise it will do it in a Very painful way while simultaneously increasing The probability that other people's demises will be painful and sped up. It's a work of arts. That's for sure and1:55:16To to know about that sort of thing and not to not regard it as evil means Well, you can figure out what it means for yourself and1:55:25Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden and cain knew his wife and she conceived you know and one of the critics the criticisms are fairly common criticism of1:55:39These biblical stories is well if cain and Abel were the only two People and from Adam and eve. It's like where did all these other people come from and doesn't that make the story?1:55:50Like simple-Minded it's like no that makes the reader simple-Minded You know I mean really that's the best criticism of this you're going to come up with I mean absolutely1:56:02missed the point that that would be the right response you missed the point and Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bare enoch And he builded the city and so it's cain that builds the cities and starts the civilization and called that's pretty rough too, right?1:56:15so it's the first fratricidal murderer who builds the cities after the name of his son enoch and unto enoch was born around ETc Etc1:56:25Going through the generations and lamech took unto him two wives the name of the one without on the name of the other zillah this is a an attempt to Flesh out the genealogy and to describe how culture started in some sense in these tribal communities and1:56:39Ada bear jebel and he was the father of such as dwell in tents and of such as have cattle and His brother's name was jubal1:56:48and he was the father of all such handle the harp and organ and zilla she also bear tubal-cain an instructor of error every artificer in brass and Iron1:56:57Tubal-cain traditionally is the first person who makes weapons of war and lamech back to Lamech a1:57:09Descendant of cain Said unto his wives adah and Zillah hear my voice he wise of lamech Hearken unto my speech for I have slain a man to my wounding and a young man to my hurt if1:57:20Cain be avenged Sevenfold Truly Lamech seventy and Sevenfold1:57:29Well what I see, and that is this proclivity of this murderous capacity of cain as it manifests itself as society develops to1:57:42To a murderous intent that transcends the mirror killing of a brother You hurt me I hurt you back. No. You heard me. I kill you in six other people and1:57:54The thing that happens after that is to not make it seven people But to make it seventy people, and so there's this idea that once that1:58:03that first Murderous Seed is sown It has this proclivity to Manifest itself exponentially and that's a warning and that's also why I think Tubal cain1:58:17Who's one of cain's descendants was the first person who made? weapons of War1:58:29And that's pretty much the story of cain and Abel and it's a hell of a story as far as I can tell and I think it's worth thinking about pretty much forever because1:58:41there's so many so many it has so many facets you know and I think the most1:58:52usefully revealing of those facets is the The potential for the story once understood to shed light on not1:59:03your own failure not even on your rejection by being let's say but by the but on the1:59:13proclivity to murder the best and the best in you for revenge upon that1:59:24violation because What that means and we know that knowledge of good and evil into the world so to speak with Adam and eve's transgression is1:59:35That now not only does humanity have to contend with Tragedy and suffering and even the1:59:45unharvested fruits of Proper Sacrifice, But with the introduction of real Malevolence into the world, so1:59:56There's the fall into history, and then there's the discovery of Sacrifice as a medication for the fall and then there's a counter position2:00:06which is the emergence of malevolence as the enemy of proper Sacrifice and that's where we're left at the end of2:00:16cain and Abel and That's the end of that lecture. Thank2:00:26Alright ok so you said that one of your moral axioms is that pain is bad and So we should work to eliminate unnecessary suffering2:00:37Isn't this the basis for a secular morality like utilitarianism and can we therefore be Moral without religion?2:00:51Well, I don't think that its first of all probably To the first question, but that's also2:01:04that Derivation is predicated on the idea that that's the only idea You know that I'm putting forward as a ethical idea, and it's not if that was the only idea well2:01:16Then you could derive from that a fairly straightforward brand of utility utilitarianism, but that also I think to2:01:27Push the argument in that direction also Necessitates the reduction of what might constitute pain to something to uni-dimensional2:01:39Because I think suffering is better term than pain although pain in some sense is at the core of suffering Suffering is a multi-dimensional2:01:48phenomena, and I don't think that you can draw a simple utilitarian argument from2:01:57that either the existence of suffering or the observation that it's The reduction of unnecessary suffering might be a good thing2:02:10So I'm also leery of those see it's not reasonable in some sense to reduce a2:02:22complex set of ideas to a single proposition And then say the ideas that I've been putting forward and then to reduce another complex philosophical Set of ideas to a single proposition, and then say aren't those two things the same and they are to reduce them to the two2:02:39simple axioms or you could argue that they're the same but but you but I would say there's a Tremendous amount left out in the telling and that what's left out is relevant it kind of reminds me of those2:02:51Those philosophical games that pSychologists often play. It's like well, if there was I? Think when I what's the one, I don't know if I can2:03:00recall this properly It's the trolley cart problem something like You know if there was a train that was out of control and it was2:03:12going towards Six people on one track when you flip a switch, so it's switched tracks and only killed one person Would you do that and I read a question like that. I think2:03:24that's a stupid question and the reason I think that is because you can't take a situation like that and2:03:33Render it Properly by reducing it to that question and then you also can't assume that The person who answers that question would in fact act in the way they answered you can't presume any of that2:03:46it's like because in a situation like that in a High-stress situation like that the Devil is in the details And I've dealt with situations like that a number of times and know perfectly well that the devils in the detail2:03:59so I think that there's a there's an intellectual reduction to make a philosophical point that doesn't give the complexity of the topic Justice and2:04:09then there's a second part to that which was and Therefore can't we be Moral without religion. Well I2:04:19Would say that question also suffers in some sense from the same Problem of formulation, I I'm very2:04:28Hesitant ever to answer a question of the form is a Merely a manifestation of B When a and B are very complex things because the answer that is it depends on what you mean by Moral2:04:43And what you mean by religious? because You see there's an underlying intellectual2:04:53maneuver in in a question like that and The underlying maneuver is the a priori assumption that something as complex as religion or as complex as morality can be reduced to an2:05:05object with a name and that Then two objects reduced to the name can be assessed simultaneously, and I don't think that that's the case I think2:05:16you can say something like Is a triangle a square, I think you can say that but I don't think you can say2:05:26Is it possible to have morality without religion? I don't think you can have that question because it it has to be expanded out So it's like what do you mean by morality exactly and what do you mean by religion because maybe and maybe not and so?2:05:40And so the answer to that question is to decompose the question I2:06:07Don't want my young children indoctrinated with dangerous ideas and as time marches on I trust public education less and less I Know that you have strong thoughts on the danger of the devouring oedipal mother who harms your child by protecting them2:06:22And that's certainly not what I aspire to I Wonder if in spite of your idea that kids need to become tough and learn to slay dragons if you have anything good to say2:06:32about the idea of homeschooling Well, I don't have anything bad to say about it I do know that the Quebec government has recently taken moves to make it much more difficult for people to homeschool their children2:06:44And it's not like five years. I mean 15 Years Ago I Would have presumed that the vast majority of people who were homeschooling their children were2:06:57To be viewed with skepticism Initially I'm not so sure about that anymore2:07:06You know for example. I was sent a poster today someone sent me this link that they found in the local junior high school and one of the2:07:16Media pieces that were recommended on this poster was a movie called Hedwig and the angry inch now I Thought that was a terrible movie even though. I'm perfectly capable of enjoying bizarre movies, but so it's a bizarre movie2:07:31That's for sure, but I also thought it was a terrible bitter Movie terrible and bitter those are separate a movie can be bitter and be quite great But it was a terrible movie and it was a bitter movie, but I can tell you one bloody thing about that movie2:07:44It's not required viewing for twelve-Year-old kids that's for sure, so I think you have increasing reason to be skeptical of the public education system. I also looked at the2:07:55elementary teachers federation of Ontario's guidelines for education from Kindergarten to Grade 8 and what that is in2:08:05essence, and I think I will do a video about it in the relatively near future is a blueprint for transforming children into social Justice warriors it basically says that2:08:14It's like you don't have to be a conspiracy theory to read that I mean we have social justice tribunals in Ontario and so the idea is well if you're going to get your children if you're going to get people to2:08:26What would you say favor equity? Properly well then you better start teaching them well. They're young it's like2:08:35maybe not So now you you ask that question properly because you say well The terrible education system the wonderful mother homeschooling right? That's the danger2:08:47it's like no because it might not be the wonderful mother homeschooling it might be the pathological mother using the Pathology of the education system as a2:08:57Excuse to get her talons into her children right because that's certainly Equally possible or perhaps even more possible because at least in the public education system. There's some2:09:08Necessity for consensus, so To have something that you have to be very Aware of and work to prevent right and so I would say if you're going to do that2:09:19Probably best not to do it on your own And you need it's like you need a board of advisors or something like that And so maybe it can't just be you and you have to figure out well, what what is the Aim?2:09:30And how are you going to manage that and what makes you think you can do it even if it's being done badly? Publicly, what makes you think you could do it better I mean my general advice is and people have asked me this in fact2:09:41I had a conversation with the guy who was Tyler my Backyard this morning about something his son had said to him that he was taught at school recently Which really made the Tyler who had come from a rather authoritarian country?2:09:55Step back on his heels and think I'm not so sure I should be sending my kid to public school anymore and maybe I shouldn't be living in Toronto even you know but2:10:04my general advice is keep an eye on your kids and discuss with them what they're learning and and help equip them with the tools to2:10:16not only to articulate Their own Viewpoint in Response to what they're being taught now if the problem is you might not have the time nor the ability to do that?2:10:26that's no simple thing and increasingly if you're unwilling to Have your children participate in what is increasingly?2:10:35indoctrination and not education thanks to in no small part to the Ontario institute of studies on education which is an Institution that I particularly despise because I think that all it does is almost all it does now is produce2:10:49indoctrinate Errs of Children It's not an easy. It's not an easily easy problem to solve so2:10:59more more power to you wanting to Put your children in a situation where they're not being indoctrinated2:11:08But the alternative is very very complicated and difficult so Yeah2:11:31likely You know I would say Generally speaking there's a shamanic basis to to almost all the religious traditions because2:11:44That's the milieu out of which the religious traditions Emerge now. I can't say much more than that because I don't know2:11:53And no one does that The particularity mean you might say well is there an allusion to the ingestion of psychoactive?2:12:02chemicals in the Adam and Eve story And people have made that case and there's been powerful cases made so there's a book for example I think it's called Soma by a guy named Gordon Wausau who was the first person an amateur?2:12:14mycologist who was the first person to propose that the soma of the Hindus was we're at Amanita Muscaria mushrooms Which is actually a those are the the red mushrooms with the white dots that you always see on Fairytales, you know the cute ones2:12:29Toadstools Flies like to eat them they're called fly agaric also, and why seem to like getting stoned. I know that's weird2:12:38I know that's weird thing to say But there's I have a good book on animal use of psychedelics and more animals use them than you might think But anyways there is some evidence that2:12:49You know of use of of the injecting of fruits let's say Metaphorically speaking as an aid to the transformation of consciousness that goes back so far that well2:13:01forever as far as human beings are concerned, but to Specifically tie that to the Adam and eve story. I haven't been able to see any evidence. That would definitely link them2:13:13You know there's there's been a lot of interesting books written about that. There's one. That was quite a kind of a weird hit And I think in the early late 60s might have been early 70s sort of got brushed off as a hippie book2:13:25But it really wasn't it's called the sacred mushroom in the cross Absolutely, that's the sort of book you read you think huh I? Don't know2:13:34what to do about that I have no idea what to do about that look so That's all I can say about that Yep2:13:49my questions about martyrdom so um what do you think martyrdom or the willingness to suffer and die for what you believe if anything says of the conviction and2:14:00What do you think is the benefit for the Martyr which is at least traditionally? immaterial and transcendent good compared to the regular sacrifice or practical2:14:11Sacrifice which is ordered to the future material psychological or economic good? Man You guys really come up with some wicked questions. I2:14:26Think it depends to some degree on how you define martyrdom you know because you could you could define it as the2:14:38Tendency to pathologically self aggrandizing self on public display, or you Could say it's the decision to be immovable about a set of principles right so let's go with that one forget about the first one2:14:52well, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone right in some sense it's it's2:15:03That's a really tough one People ask me. I'll make it personal I suppose people asked me when I first got involved in saw this political controversy back in September October2:15:16well They asked me a couple of things they they asked me if this was the hill that I really would choose to die on us like pronouns and the Transgender issue2:15:26Yeah, well it's not what about one I would have picked and but I mean it was about language you know and that that makes it non-trivial I mean bill C 16 was passed this week as you know and one of the things that was quite interesting about that2:15:38I will answer your question was that Brenda Cosman who was the woman that I debated I think it's One of the persons that I debated didn't like to be referred to as a woman, but I don't didn't think it was Brenda2:15:52Anyways, she wrote an op-ed, and I believe it was in the globe and mail But it might have been the national post saying as I knew she would say that bill C. 16 was just the beginning2:16:02That we have plenty of work left to do and yes You can bloody well be sure that we have plenty of work left to do anyways. I was asked during that period of time Whether or not I was being a martyr you know, and I thought well. It's not really one of my ambitions2:16:16You know it's like that's sort of torn to the lions thing doesn't sound like exactly something you might aim for2:16:27But I think Well sometimes you find out in your life. Maybe that there's something you won't do and2:16:36one thing and Then maybe you just don't do it no matter what the consequence is Maybe I don't know because you know I haven't been pushed to that point2:16:45But there have been people who have been pushed to that point in history And they basically said I don't care what you do to me. I'm not doing that and You know maybe some of them were suicidal and some of them were psychotic and some of them had whatever other problems that people might?2:16:59have but yeah, I do have this suspicion now, and then that some of them were just kind of serious about and saying no and There's some utility in being serious about saying no, and it that sort of revealed itself to me2:17:11I suppose to some degree back in September. We and I read a piece of legislation That said I would have to use some words that were legislated by the government, and I thought there's no goddamn way2:17:22I'm going to do that under any conditions that I can imagine now there are conditions And I have a pretty good imagination for unimaginable conditions. I2:17:33Couldn't see it because I thought that if I did that I would break through whatever would be left of me After having done. That would no longer be me and2:17:43I'm not interested in that I know what that would be like I actually do know what that would be like and I'm not interested in that I would rather have whatever else happens2:17:54Happen and people have said to me. Well you're so courageous for taking this stand. It's like yeah, well I'm not going to claim any sort of other world courage I can tell you that but I can tell but one thing I do2:18:05Know the difference between these different forms of hell Let's put it that way, and there's the hell that maybe I might be dragged through if I don't2:18:15Agree Don't act in accordance with this law And there's the hell that I would be dragged through if I did act in accordance with the law and I would vastly2:18:24Prefer the first hell to the second and isn't clear to me that that actually constitutes courage Is it useful because that's also the question about martyrdom2:18:33I think it's very useful for people to see that someone will say there's no way there's no conceivable way that you can get me to do that and2:18:45and I've thought long and hard about such things too because I've taught very many people to negotiate and One of the things I always teach them is you don't negotiate from a position of weakness2:18:56because you lose and So if I say no to something, and I mean no, I mean no I bloody well won't do it2:19:06And I think that if there are people who also agree that such things aren't appropriate To have the example of someone who says no2:19:16And means it actually turns out to be useful and so then I would say well that's an inclination in the potential Direction of Martyrdom and2:19:26but I don't see how to distinguish that that from actually just having the courage of your Convictions, and so sometimes you might say well a person who has sufficient courage in their convictions will sometimes be put to death2:19:38Well, if that's the definition of a martyr then Sometimes but not all of all ways that's a really good thing and one of the things I really liked about solzhenitsyn's book the gulag archipelago2:19:49Which is an I refer to it often it's an absolutely staggering book is that he? Put in many many stories of people who were in the gulag and they were often religious believers2:20:01Which was a shock to him because he was an atheistic Communist when when he first entered the Camp's They were often religious believers, and they were people who said no2:20:11there were things they would not do they would not participate in what the regime was asking them to do and he you have to read it because the devils in the stories write the details in the stories, but2:20:25solzhenitsyn in the Camps grew to have tremendous admiration for such people and actually viewed them as exemplars of2:20:34the mode of being that was necessary for him to escape both the Communist propaganda that had shaped him as an individual and also the terrible bitterness and2:20:45Sorrow and anger that he experienced as a consequence of being flung into the terrible concentration camp conditions of the gulag archipelago so2:20:56Yep Hey, Doc. Thanks for staying alive and potentially saving humanity2:21:10Yeah, that's good stuff. I'm wondering about a couple of things firstly who won that childhood fight. You kind of let that Let that just slide, so I'm thinking it's a big L. Well, I can tell you because he2:21:23Was a tough little kid see I don't remember. What happened but my remembrance of him was that he could eat pound meal pretty pretty effectively so2:21:33Yeah, yeah, his name was Vernon Switchin ik Yeah, he was really the good friend of mine and and I think I think Vernon still lives in Fairview2:21:43so if if he hears of this, then maybe he'll remember that too and and Know you know So probably he would have won. I didn't win that many physical fights when I was a kid, so2:21:56That's not the only question okay Anyway cool. I'm not sure if you if you've actually been asked us before I've missed the last two lectures, but I2:22:07Wondering what your thoughts are on Polkan Jr.. Tolkien and his work, not just lord of the rings, but the similar alien Which is basically like I'm seeing all this and I'm thinking it's like the Modern Bible in a way2:22:19it's got the weird names like to Paul cain and all that stuff and And specifically when we were talking about cain just now and how he was thing just moving2:22:29And he was talking about how he felt like betrayed by God and you any misspent his whole life working It to spite him essentially and he kind of set the path for for the darkness in humanity. Yeah, that's2:22:45almost exactly Melkor which was in the Silmarillion, basically What's what spawned everything evil in Middle Earth and Mordor and what not and I don't even know I won't be welcome talking with a student of mythology and you know the the2:23:00the the story of the Hobbit is a retelling of beowulf in large part, and that's a dragon slaying myth and and2:23:10so the the the reason the tolkien and rolling for that are so popular is because they've done a very good job of making the old myths new and2:23:22And well look what's happened with the marvel series. It's the same thing and with Star wars and all of that Is that you can't not respond to these stories now. You're going to find them in one form or another and sometimes2:23:35well with the biblical stories for example the mythological the meaning of the mythological content has become Invisible that's partly the death of God that Nietzsche was referring to but that doesn't mean that the stories themselves2:23:48Vanish because people have an eternal hunger for them Now the problem with them emerging in let's say more literary or less sophisticated2:23:57Form let's take the Marvel movies as an example. Is that they're not Surrounded by an articulated culture the same way the biblical stories are so for example2:24:07They're not surrounded by something like Paradise lost by John Milton which or or dante's inferno. Which are works of unlimited depth and so you throw away something of great value and2:24:21Reacquire it in a different place With less value perhaps, but more comprehensibility. It's not it's not a great trade. That is not a critique of tolkien2:24:30it's not a critique of anybody who's drawing on mythological stories for their narratives you have to do that to be a good storyteller, but it's nice to go as close to the source as you can as well, so2:24:43Yeah, and the overlaps that you described well Yeah It's exactly what you'd expect because if you deal with great Mythological themes you start to get the archetypes are at the bottom of stories and so2:24:55If the story goes down far enough it runs into the archetypes and that well that was jung's claim and I think he got that exactly right, so2:25:11last one There's a passage in Paradise lost where the Demons are building pandemonium under2:25:23Mammon's Sort of Guidance, and they crack open the it's not really Earth, but hell And they take out the gold and they build pandemonium, which is the most sophisticated2:25:33Architectural wonder of all time in Milton's language and and this this conception of taking material and turning it into a2:25:43temple to oneself was interpreted by humphrey Jennings who was the founder of the mass observation movement if anyone saw the opening to the2:25:53Britons 2012 games The history of the Industrial revolution. He said was encapsulated by this passage in Milton. Where you have2:26:04Demons building a temple for themselves out of matter and that mankind in Milton's language was was taught to do this Or that they learned it first by this example and says let not envy that2:26:19devils have riches in hell And I see things in this one the the gnostic idea that somehow the world itself that we inhabit is hell2:26:28ultimate that matter is not our true places of existence, but somewhere is sort of platonic and Also, the toasty and sort of bargain that people made around2:26:411666 to to get a world of stuff and seeing some possession by losing a soul2:26:50yeah, but existed before that and I wonder if that I play with that a lot in my own thought and I wonder if that's Something that you found in Milton and what you think of that passage in particular well Milton was definitely a prophetic voice2:27:02Right and I think that's that's a perfectly reasonable Retelling of that Section it's also very much akin to the story of the tower of babel. We'll talk about next week2:27:22See the problem with the problem. God it's so complicated see what one of the things that jung said about the transformation of The first millennium of Christianity into let's say the second millennium of Christianity was that Christianity had promised2:27:37something like redemption universal redemption from suffering Maybe in the afterlife, but that was kind of a cop-out let's say because it didn't really solve the problem of suffering here and now and you believe that as2:27:51People had although although it Did many it did many positive things? Let's not let's not forget that it civilized people in a way that they hadn't been before or you could make that case2:28:02But then there was this underground at the same time there's this denial of the utility of material reality that went along with the2:28:11spiritualization of mankind in that in that first in the Christian millennium there was value left in material because it had been ignored and so then jung believed that the2:28:23the collective unconscious broadly speaking Began to be attracted to the to what had been rejected by the hyper spiritualization and started to question whether or not additional value could be extracted from the material may be as a2:28:38adjunct to the spiritual because maybe true redemption was something like a proper meeting of the spiritual in the material which wasn't Something that seemed to be part and parcel of Christian Christian doctrine up to that point2:28:51now Maybe what Milton was warning against was a swing to far, right? And I think Milton's point is well-taken because one of the things that's worth noting is that2:29:03You can be perfectly miserable in a house of gold right I mean I've known very many wealthy people very very wealthy people and The problem see the thing is is that money just doesn't solve that many problems that people have2:29:18people wish it would People who want to be rich think it will and the people who want to? Redistribute money think it will and I know that there's nothing to be said for abject poverty, but the problem is is that2:29:30There are many see arius problems that human beings have that matter material Comfort alone does nothing to address2:29:41or almost nothing you can be perfectly you can have a perfectly miserable family life and twenty million dollars and The buffer that the twenty million dollars puts between you and the misery is it sometimes. It's not even a buffer. It's a magnifier, so2:30:00melding would warn against the creation of even the idea of a material utopia even in principle2:30:09Something dostoevsky also recognized as an error You cannot solve the problem in that Manner and maybe the demonic idea is2:30:19that is propaganda that you could now maybe Maybe there is a balance of some sort because I don't understand if we were going to build the city of God let's say2:30:32well a huge part of the endeavor would have to be spiritual and to me that a huge part of that would be it would have to be something predicated if2:30:41Not on truth at least not at least on the willingness of people not to lie to one another Without that all the material well-being in the world is2:30:53It's a façade. It's like gilding a corpse, right? And I think that's partly what Milton was warning against2:31:02I mean Milton was doing many more things than he knew of course because he was a poetic genius of incalculable2:31:11genius right right right right so well you've obviously thought about such things very much, so that was a very good question, so2:31:21Alright everyone, good night.0:00:00Biblical Series VI: The Psychology of the Flood
0:00:000:00:14So I'm going to launch right into it. I like this - - story as well. This is the story of Noah and the flood and then the tower of babel.0:00:24Which I think are juxtaposed very interestingly. The tower of Babel is one of those stories like cain and Abel that's only a few lines long It's like a fragment in some sense although the story of Noah is quite a well-developed narrative0:00:37um.. But like the other stories that we've covered It is relevant at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously and so0:00:48what I'm going to do to begin with Is to start with some background information so some psychological background information. So that the story makes sense and the first thing that I'd like to I'd like to make a case for is that0:01:04the.. You - you bring to bear on the world an a-priori perceptual structure And that's really an embodied structure0:01:13And it's a consequence of the three and a half billion years that you've spent putting your body together Which is a tremendous amount of time. and- Not only your body, but your mind of course because your mind is part of your body and very much embedded within it0:01:28You know you tend to think that you have your brain in your head And it's sort of floating separate from the rest of your body, but it's not really true you're a tremendous0:01:38massive system of neurons running through your entire body Autonomic small neurons in the autonomic nervous system, then are on the central nervous system0:01:48So that's a lot of neurons and then your central nervous system of course enables you to Exercise voluntary control over your musculature and also to receive information from it your brain is really distributed through your body0:02:00One of the things you may not know is that people who are Paraplegic can walk if you if you suspend them above a treadmill their legs will walk by themselves with no voluntary control0:02:10So your spine is capable of quite complex tivity in fact when you walk mostly It's a controlled fall and mostly your spine is doing it and so0:02:19So anyways the point of all that is that You don't have a blank slate? Consciousness that's interpreting a world that manifests itself as sacred gated objects in some0:02:33Straightforward sense you have a built in interpretive system. That's extraordinarily deeply embedded and Invisible because you might think about it as the implicit structure of your unconscious0:02:45it's it what it's what gives rise to your conscious experience and And it presents you with the world that that's one way of thinking about it, and it's a good way of thinking about it0:02:54the psychoanalytic way of thinking about it as well as the neuroscientific way of Thinking about it because one of the things that's pretty interesting about modern neuroscientists, especially the top-rate ones0:03:04And those are usually the ones that are working on emotions as far as I've been able to tell are are often quite enamored of the pSychoanalyst jacques panksepp was a good example of that because0:03:15They came to understand that the pSychoanalyst insistence on Underlying unconscious personified motivations was actually an accurate reflection of how the brain worked0:03:27so to think of yourself as a loose collection of Autonomous spirits, it's governed by some overarching Identity is a reasonable way of thinking about it0:03:38the Question is or a question arises from that is what is the nature of this a priori? structure that you use to0:03:48Interpret the world and I think the clearest answer to that is that it's a story and you live inside the story, and that's very very interesting to me because I0:04:00Believe I have a couple of videos that lay this out. I believe that Darwinian presuppositions are0:04:10At least as fundamental as newtonian presuppositions. I actually think they're more fundamental and that The fact that we've evolved story-like structures through which to interpret the world0:04:23Indicates to me that there's something deeply true about story like structure. They're true at least insofar as The fact that we've developed them means that here0:04:33We are living and that it's taken three and a half billion years to develop them there. They're highly functional and So we don't have much better definition of truth than highly functional you know that that's about as good as it gets0:04:46Partly because we're limited creatures, and we don't have on the Siient knowledge And so the best we can do with our knowledge Generally speaking is to know its functionality and improve it when it fails to work properly0:04:59I think the scientific method actually does that and so the fact that we've Evolved a story like structure through which to interpret the world that's pretty damn interesting it says something fundamental about stories0:05:11And it's it's strange in the same way that the fact that we have hemispheric specialization for the known and the unknown or for Chaos and order0:05:20order and Chaos, Ori respectively also says something Fundamental about the nature of the world if you assume that you know we've evolved to reflect the structure of the world0:05:30broadly speaking that's obviously not just the physical structure the atoms and the Molecules, but all of the patterned manifestations of the physical Molecules as they build structures of increasing0:05:42Complexity across time that would include human interactions and all of and political interactions and economic act interactions Familia interactions all of those things that are a0:05:52very important part of our reality but perhaps in some sense not as fundamental as the physical attributes that the physicists concentrate on so we live in stories and0:06:04Also, I want to talk to you a little bit about stories and about their structure Because when you understand a little bit about the structure of stories, then a whole array of things about mythology all of a sudden make0:06:17overwhelming Sampson, so useful because what you see is that Many of the things that are standard occurrences in your life0:06:26everyone's like them are portrayed Universally in Mythology and it's very helpful because first of all it d it d isolates you one of the things you learn?0:06:38as a clinical psychologist Contre the Anti psychiatrists. Let's say is that Diagnosis is often a relief to people you know0:06:48There's a problem with being diagnosed because then you might be labeled and then the label can follow you for the rest of your life And once you're labeled as something then strange things happen around you that so often reinforce that label0:07:01Maybe you start acting it out more or you dot it as an identity, but there's a flip side of that which is that the last thing that you ever want to hear when you go see a0:07:10Physician or psychologist is you know I've never seen a case like yours before right that is not a relief man because if0:07:20The message is I've never heard anything like what you're telling me the outcome is either going to be not so good for you or you're not going to get listened to it all right because you're such an anomaly that you're0:07:31You're actually your existence is annoying to the integrated knowledge structure of the medical professional that you're attempting to Receive Advice from well It's definitely the case because they you know0:07:42If you can be put in a box then the box tells the doctor what to do with you? And that's actually a relief to the doctor But also a relief to you right because you want to know so you come and you say look I?0:07:54Can't go out of my house much anymore. I'm afraid on elevators I have heart palpitations as I sometimes they end up in the emergency room increasingly my0:08:05Interactions in the World are restricted I find myself staying at home afraid I'm going to died of a heart attack and the psychologist says well, you have a agoraphobia it's like lots of people have that and0:08:16Here is usually how it develops and here's the treatment course and you know we can probably do something about that, and it's like Well, you're not going to die of a heart attack now. Probably that's a real relief0:08:26You're not crazy in a completely unique way, and you're crazy in a way that might be treatable you know and it's such a relief because people come in there with a pile of snakes of0:08:38Indeterminate magnitude and they walk out with one manageable snake and it's still a snake But you know one manageable snake beats a hydra right so all0:08:49right so so back back to stories, so0:09:03the stories that that we tell and that we live in are Fundamentally ways that we deal with the complexity of the world and the fundamental problem with the world0:09:16As far as I can tell is that not only is it Complex Beyond your comprehension But the complexity shifts in unpredictable ways0:09:25so That's the Darwinian conundrum actually that's why Darwinism seems to be a practical Necessity With regards to the continuation of life because because the complexity changes0:09:39Unpredictably, you can't necessarily tell what's going to work in the future and so the Darwinian process solves that by generating Quasi Random0:09:49variations and Letting whichever one by happenstance happens to work in that environment survive now. It's not random0:09:58precisely because The underlying structure is conserved it's very rare that a child would be born with an extra arm or something like that and like the0:10:07skeletal structure that you inhabit is shared by animals going way way back in evolutionary history There's a lot of conservation and in the evolutionary process, but so there's variation within conservation like music0:10:21It's a good it's a good way of thinking about it so the the Story that we tell have exactly the same structure they have this0:10:35Is core element with variations and so alright? I'll turn to the stories and so The first problem as I mentioned is come a complexity problem0:10:46Things are just too complicated to get a handle on and that actually has serious consequences Because what happens to everyone eventually is that their lives become so complicated that they die?0:10:57So and that and many terrible things can happen you on the way to dying as well that are complex complexity related right you can develop a serious illness that you can't get a handle on you can hit a0:11:10what would you call an impasse in your relationship that you cannot get past and see no way out of That happens to people quite frequently people who are suicidal for example0:11:19They often feel like they've been backed into a corner that know that they have no options They have no good options no matter which way they turn there's something terrible to face and they can't see any way out of it and0:11:31Sometimes that's more true than you'd like to think because we also tend to like to think that people's problems are primarily psyChological But they're not now. That's one thing you learn quite rapidly as a clinician0:11:43is that Most of the time people don't come to you because they have mental illness they come to you because they have a complexity management Problem their lives have got out of hand on them0:11:52And they don't know how to get them back under control and so all sorts of things can do that And then of course that can make you anxious or depressed it can trigger all sorts of illnesses0:12:01But the fundamental problem is still that things have got beyond you and that actually has a psychophysiological Cost that isn't merely psychological you have a limited amount of capacity0:12:14from from from a resource perspective to deal with emergent complexity it just is just not enough of you, you just You'll exhaust your psychophysiological0:12:26Resources if you get into a situation, that's too complex, well, that's what That's what the idea of Chaos represents it represents that underlying complexity that can manifest itself at any time and it can manifest itself for example if you're0:12:41If you wake up in the morning, and you know you feel an ache of some sort and perhaps It's nothing and you ignore it, but it gets worse and you end up going to a hospital and you find out perhaps0:12:52For example that you have pancreatic cancer, and you're going to live for six months, and that's the end of that and so it's It's it's it's at that moment that you break through the thin ice that everyone walks on and you see what's underneath and what's underneath0:13:06Is the in eradicable complexity of life and that's Chaos and that's now it's taken people a long long time to0:13:16Get a grip on this conceptual what would you call Conceptual schema and and human beings have done it mostly with image and story before they've been able to do it in any particulate matter and0:13:31So there are a set of images that represent this underlying Chaos and one of them is the dragon of Chaos That that precisely that and that's the dragon that the hero goes out to confront. That's the symbol of the unknown0:13:44It's the thing that lurks underneath. It's the thing that also guards treasure because I'm me unknown. There's possibility also, the Water that that was there we talked about in the mesopotamian creation myth. The water. That's there at the beginning0:13:59Both the salt and the Fresh water is often a symbol of pre cosmogonic Chaos Often people have dreams for example some of you had this dream0:14:08I suspect you'll dream that you're in a house that you know well And all of a sudden you discover a new room or a set of new rooms or maybe a set of rooms in the basement? and often the rooms are not well organized and they're full of water those are very common things and what that means is that you've0:14:24broken through the constraints of your conscious self understanding to a new domain of0:14:33Possibility, but a new domain that needs a tremendous amount of work It says well here the new part of you, but it's not well developed There's it's flooded. It's flooded with Chaos essentially and it's water0:14:45I think partly because Chaos is not only what you fall into when you're not expecting it But it's also the unknown that you confront forthrightly and generate new things out of and water is a symbol of life0:14:56Especially in the desert and of course water life is dependent on water and so water is a natural symbol to0:15:05Utilize when you're talking about something that's life-giving, but also potentially deadly because a little bit of water Well, that's a drink, but a lot of water. That's a shipwreck right and so and those are the those are the extremes now0:15:19There are accounts that are sort of sub texts in genesis, and they all swear in the old testament of God0:15:29conquering a great Monster Leviathan or or Bama that has these sort of serpent isle0:15:38Elements and Making the world at the consequence of that conflict, so there's this idea that The world creating Force which we've talked about as the logos is the thing that continually confronts?0:15:50Chaos, and that one way of thinking about Chaos is as a predatory Reptilian Monster and often one that lives in the depths are perhaps underwater and part of that0:16:01I think is because we actually use our predator Detection circuit to do this sort of pre cognitive process and so that the notion fundamentally is anything that threatens you instantaneously is something that your predator Detection circuit should be working with0:16:15It's fast its its spout. It's low resolution. It doesn't have a lot of ideas but it's really really fast and that also accounts for0:16:25capability and tendency to very rapidly treat people who upset our Conceptual structures as0:16:34Enemies of the Predatory variety we can fall into that in no time flat? Because it's it's the archetype if something comes along to knock you for a loop. It's a shark0:16:46It's something that lurks under the water. It's something that will pull you down. It's an enemy and And you should get prepared and that's a reasonable defensive strategy even though it also has its dangers and can sometimes be wrong0:17:00so the Landscape Within which We have to erect our stories. It's fundamentally one of an0:17:10Overarching Chaos a Chaos that exceeds our capacity to comprehend in any sense Individually familial socially economically we're always0:17:20threatened by the collapse of the structures that we inhabit Constantly we have to work. Well. It's like you own a house. You know how much times has been maintaining a house0:17:29Well a lot and why is that is because The house falls apart because you're stupid and the house falls apart well because you do repairs wrong or you ignore things, right?0:17:39And I'm saying this actually for technical reasons the house falls apart because you're incompetent But even if you're confident the house falls apart, right? It's just entropy and so things have a proclivity to fall apart on Their own0:17:51So you just have to run like mad Just to keep them doing what they're supposed to be doing and then of course that is conflict by your own Willful blindness and inadequacy as a repair person refusal to attend and all those other things so so that's a very classic0:18:06idea which will return to one of the ideas that Mircea eliade a-- A famous history of religions0:18:15Extracted from a very large corpus of flood Myths was the idea that the earth is periodically flooded for two reasons one is things fall apart0:18:26Just entropy the straight entropy. It's I don't remember which law of thermodynamics that is but it's one of the big laws of thermodynamics It's one of the top three man things fall apart of their own accord0:18:37and that's one of the things that we Have to contend with and then the rate at which things fall apart is sped by the sins of men0:18:46That's the other idea and you know that everyone knows that because you know you know Your car breaks down in the highway you thank God that's so inconvenient0:18:55And then you you know you shake your fist at the sky and then there's part of you in the back your mind That goes God you know I? knew that rattle that I wasn't paying attention to0:19:04Actually signified something you know and I knew I should have paid attention to it And I didn't and now I'm in the situation that I'm in now, and you know I know I0:19:14Bet you this happens to people two or three times a week is They do something stupid that they know they shouldn't have done that they told themselves not to do mere seconds before and they know0:19:24The boy says don't do that. Yeah. Yeah, you do it You can get nailed for it exactly the way that you knew you would get nailed for it, and then you're hurt0:19:33Doubly because not only did it fall apart But you're the idiot that made it fall apart knowing full Well that was going to fall apart and ignoring it and so that's the idea behind the notion that0:19:44There are two reasons that things fall apart thermodynamic entropy and the proclivity of people not to attend to things they know they should attend to and partly we do that because0:19:55If a problem emerges it always announces itself unless it's a really really tiny problem And you're approaching it Voluntary voluntarily It always announces itself with negative emotion0:20:06and that's part of the Predator Detection circuit it announces itself in frustration or disappointment or emotional pain or grief or the Paramount one anxiety and0:20:17and no wonder because it's a problem, right and the Logical one the logical response is it's just sort of freeze in the face of the problem But of course if it's a problem that has to be addressed and solved0:20:28Freezing it and turning away from it is not a good solution because since things tend to fall apart on their own accord If you just leave the thing alone that's problematic, it's just going to get worse not better0:20:39Which is one of the things that's very annoying about life, so for example You know if you get a warning message from the tax department the probability that ignoring that0:20:50Will make it go away is zero right? What will happen instead? Is that the more you ignore it the larger it will grow and if you ignore it long enough Then it will turn into something large enough to eat you and that will be the end of you0:21:03I read in Harper's magazine at one point that People would rather be mugged than audited and so I believe that because the mugging man. That's over. It's like a0:21:13couple of minutes a sheer terror Lost your wallet the way you walk the audit that's like that's like a semi fatal disease, so0:21:25So that's Chaos Now it's the idea here to is that that's the Chaos That's the psychological idea. Is that that's also the Chaos that whatever is being represented in Genesis as the spirit of God0:21:39Extracts order out of at the beginning of time And it's also that which we're constantly contending with as we struggle in the same manner to construct and maintain0:21:48Habitable worlds, so it's brilliant. It's brilliant. You know when I first put together the relationship between what iliad II called the pre cosmogonic Chaos and the Predator predatory landscape that surrounded our ancestors and0:22:03The Manner in which were structured neurologically to respond to all of that. I thought it was it was like an Amazing epiphany because it's self-evidently the case0:22:13That the world is too complicated for us to deal with and that's one of the problems that we face on an ongoing basis, and then the question is well, what do you do about that and if you ignore it it gets worse, so0:22:24Laurene it doesn't work, and so we know what doesn't work and so if ignoring It doesn't work then attending to it might work and then I found out with the egyptians for example that horus was the god of the tension and the same thing happened among the0:22:38Mesopotamians with far duck and his ring of eyes. It's like. What's the way to? Forestall the catastrophe of things falling apart and the answer to that is by attending to them0:22:49voluntarily attending to them and that slots very nicely into the hero mythology that Promotes the idea that if there's a dragon in the whereabouts in0:22:59In the near in the neighborhood let's say that hiding in the basement. Just makes it grow larger it's time to go out and confront the damn thing and the general stories are as well you might get killed because it's a dragon but0:23:14It's only might as opposed to definitely will get killed if it happens to attack you at 3 in the morning At home when you're hungover, and it's been a bad day0:23:23And you don't have your you know art your sword and your shield at the ready Which is generally what happens to people who avoid things so it's not something that should be recommended0:23:33You're screwed both ways that's one of the things that's so nice about Being deeply pessimistic. It's so freeing because one of the things0:23:43Well, it's very frequent it's such a relief and it's really a useful habit to develop is Sometimes no matter what you do you're in trouble, and that's a relief because then you can stop scrabbling around for the way out0:23:56There's no way out man. It's like you can pick murder you know wretched death a or slightly less wretched death be something like that and and I know that's a0:24:07Terrible way of looking at things, but it is extraordinarily useful to understand that many times you get your choice boils down to picking the least bad option0:24:18And if that's all you can do if that's what how life is revealing itself to you It's like well more power to you the least bad option that's the best you can do and and and it's good enough0:24:29especially compared to the alternative which is the most bad option so All right now So the fundamental reality of things is complexity beyond comprehension, and then the question is well0:24:44how is it that you manage that and partly you manage that and this is where the Image of the patriarchal order comes in in the positive Manner. I might point out because in the absence of0:24:56patriarchal structure for lack of a better Lexicon there's nothing but Chaos and I wouldn't recommend Chaos because it's It there's a lot of it and there isn't that much of you and if you think you can handle it without an a priori0:25:10Structure and without a sociological structure surrounding you then you don't know anything at all about human beings Because one of the things I've noticed for example is that0:25:20It's it's unbelievable The degree to which our sanity depends on a functioning sociological structure and here's why? Well first of all0:25:29You kind of need to know what to do every day you have to have a routine because you're an animal you know on you Know if you have a dog or a cat dogs are really good example this dogs like routine0:25:39they like to be walked the number of times a day that they're supposed to be walked and they get quite sick very rapidly if You don't if you don't Routinize they're they're days children are exactly the same way now you can overdo it right, but still you know you need to know0:25:54Approximately when you should get up should be approximately the same every day You need to know approximately you're going when you're going to eat. You need to know what you're going to eat You need to know who you're going to eat with you need to know where to buy your food. It's like 80% of your life0:26:0870% of your life something like that Consists of those things that you do every single day that you repeat And those are often the things that people think about as the trivial elements of their life0:26:19But one of the things I would like to point out to you if you do the mathematics I Did this with a client of mine who was having hard time putting his child to bed?0:26:29They were having a fight every night and I knew by that time the studies indicate that Most parents only spend 20 minutes per day of one-on-one time with their child0:26:40Now the reason for that is that people are busy And it's actually not that easy to parse out 20 minutes of one-on-one time. It's a lot bloody more time than you think0:26:49But that's all there is 20 minutes He is spending like 40 minutes a day fighting with this kid trying to get the kid to go to bed, and that's not very0:26:58Entertaining you know you think was just having a scrap with the Keita both going to bed But it's no no no no if it happens every day. It's a catastrophe. So you do the math0:27:08So we'll say five hours a week for the sake of argument just to keep it simple. It's 20 hours a month. It's 240 hours a year. That's six0:27:1740-hour work weeks that guy was basically spending a month and a half of work weeks doing absolutely nothing, but having a wretched time0:27:26Fighting with his son trying to get him to go to bed Horrible right that's just way too much time to spend doing something like that if you want to actually have a positive0:27:36Relationship with someone because it's just too. It's just too punishing and so well, so you need structure you need predictability and you need more of it than you think just to keep you saying now if you're0:27:49lucky and and maybe a bit odd you can deviate 5% from the norm or 10% from the norm or something like that0:27:58carefully and cautiously as long as the rest of you is all well ordered in a normative manner you might be able to get away with that and You might be able to sustain it across time and people might be able to tolerate you if you do it0:28:09Or maybe you'll get really lucky and you happen to be creative But reasonably well put together and people will actually be happy that there's something Idiosyncratic and unique about you, but even under those circumstances mostly what you want is to?0:28:22Have a routine. It's discipline its predictable and bloody well stick to it. You're going to be way Healthier and happier and saner if you do that0:28:31And then the other thing that you need because this is one of the things the pSychoanalyst thought wrong I think is that they overestimated the degree to which0:28:40Sanity was a consequence of internal Being properly structured internally you know Because from the psychoanalytic point of view you're sort of an ego And that ego is inside you of course it rests on an unconscious structure, but the purpose of pSychoanalysis0:28:54Is to sort out that unconscious structure and the ego on top of it and to make you a fully an autonomous? individual but there's a problem with that because0:29:06The reason that you're saying as a fully Functional and on Thomas human being isn't because you've organized your psyche even though that's important0:29:15The reason that you're saying if you're a wit If you have a well organized unconscious an ego is because other people can tolerate having you around For reasonably extensive periods of time and will cuff you across the back of the head every time you do something so stupid0:29:30That people will dislike you permanently if you continue And so what people are doing to each other all the time just non-stop is0:29:39Broadcasting sanity signals back and forth right? It's like you smile at people if they're well if they're not not only behaving properly But behaving in a way that you would like to see them0:29:49Continue to behave you frown at them if they're not you ignore them if they're not you shun them you you roll your eyes at Them you manifest a disgust face you don't listen to them you interrupt them you won't cooperate with them. You won't compete with them0:30:02it's like you're blasting signals at other people about how to regulate their behavior, so Frequently, well it just makes up all of your social interaction0:30:11That's why we face each other and we have emotional displays on our face and we're looking at each other's eyes And we know exactly we know as much as we can about what's going on with each other0:30:20Given that we don't have immediate access to the contents of their consciousness And so partly what you're doing with your routine is establishing yourself as a credible reliable trustworthy0:30:32Potentially interesting human being who isn't going to do anything too erratic at any moment And everyone else is around there tapping you into shape making sure that that's exactly what you are0:30:42And that's how you stay sane, and so what happens to people, too If they don't have a routine and they get isolated as they start to drift and they drift badly because the world is too0:30:52Complicated for you to keep it organized all by yourself You just cannot do it so a lot of our so we outsource the problem of Sanity0:31:02and it's very intelligent that we outsource the problem of sanity because Sanity is an impossibly complex problem and So the way that we manage the incredibly complex0:31:13We have a very large number of brains working simultaneously on the problem all the time It's like a stock market for sanity, and it's partly I use that I use that definition0:31:26With purpose because the stock market does the same kind of impossible thing right because it tries to price things which is impossible There's how many things are there like a billion how in the world do you decide?0:31:38What the price is you can't decide what the price is that's why you have a stock market? as well in the free market I mean for for consumer goods is everyone's voting on what the price of everything is all the time0:31:49That's the way we figure it out because it's actually it's technically impossible That's partly why the stock market explodes now and then and there's bubbles and all that sort of thing, but anyways the point is0:32:01things are chaotic In Ellis in Wonderland When Ellis goes down the rabbit hole That's the underworld right So now she's gone into the sub structure of being0:32:13And she meets the red queen and the red queen is mother nature and mother nature is running around Yelling off with her heads off with their heads0:32:22Which is of course what mother nature does and she tailed Ellis in? My kingdom you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place0:32:31and that's exactly right, and that's a description of In fact evolutionary biologists I call just picked up on that phrase they call it the red queen problem, and the Red queen problem is0:32:44Everything's after you all the time, and you're not smart enough to do anything about it Ord enough about and so that's a permanent existential problem. So how do you deal with that you've got a biological structure0:32:54so your embodiment is part of the solution to the problem, and then your enculturated and Because you're enculturated you're taught a lot of things that you need to know but mostly what you're taught is how to communicate with other people in an0:33:08acceptable Manner And then once you can communicate with people in an acceptable manner then you can outsource your problems constantly But you're doing constantly and so we're in this0:33:18continual Dynamic exchange of problem-solving, so if you're a socialized person That's what you get access to and that's something to know if you're going to have kids and I mentioned0:33:27I think in a previous lecture The pert the purpose of being a parent for very young children is to make your children Exceptionally socially desirable by the age of four because if you can do that, they're set because everyone0:33:43Wants them around and as soon as everybody wants them around they want to play with them They want to cooperate when they want to compete with them It's like the door is open the door is open And they stay saying because they've got all sorts of people who actually like them that are helping them out and so that's your goal0:33:57Is to make them as socially acceptable as you possibly can socially desirable as you possibly can and that doesn't mean You render them0:34:07obedient without spirit right that's that's a tyrants motive of Enforcing social acceptability it's like never do anything wrong. Well that's not any way to I mean that's a good piece of advice0:34:19you know like but It's missing the other half which is do a bunch of things that are right so that so that people are thrilled to have you around and to and encourage that that's what you want to do as a parent as well as0:34:32Inculcating the order and so you know one in this little diagram I indicated that there's God the father with the sun behind him and he's ruling over this walled City0:34:42So he's like the metis spirit of the walled City It's very very nice very nice image Brilliant image So it is the collective spirit of the city that's another way of thinking about it or the collective spirit of the city0:34:56across time or the collective spirit of the Force that built and maintained the City across time even better and that's associated with the sun because it's a it's it's it's associated with enlightenment and0:35:09illumination and all of those things that we associate with higher consciousness and vision it's a brilliant image and then I overlaid this so now of course the0:35:19patriarchal aspect of existence can become tyrannical It does that quite regularly? It's one of the existential dangers of human civilizations that0:35:30Civilization is a medication for Chaos But it can spin out of control in and of itself and become its own sort of problem Which is like a hyper order problem which then produces a Chaos problem, so every solution carries within it?0:35:46Certain problems right because no solution is perfect and so you have to keep things in balance But it's one of the reasons that I'm really Let's call it irritated about the postmodernists because they keep0:35:59yammering about the patriarchy and it's very very annoying because Because it's self-evident that social structures are tyrannical. It's like that's not news folks0:36:10That's obvious, but that's not all they are and it's it's there. It's the reduction of the entire0:36:19complex Solution let's say to a unit dimensional problem. It's just Thai tyranny. It's like no actually It's not just tyranny if you spent six months somewhere. That was just tyranny0:36:32You'd know the difference very very rapidly and that doesn't mean that everyone Doesn't give up a pound or two or ten or Twenty a flesh to0:36:41Participate even in the society that's as free as at western Society is we all get crushed and molded by the Tyrannical Force of social convention0:36:50but at least in principle The benefit is worth the cost and then it's also up to you to make sure that you don't sacrifice more to the group0:36:59than you should and you can start to tell if you're Sacrificing more to the group than you should because you start to become resentful of other people. That's part of them0:37:08That's part of the psychological mechanism. That's informing you of that, so it's up to you to fight Against you know the overarching pressure for conformity to retain your individual logos. Let's say0:37:20But that's sort of your problem. It's like the group wants you to behave now if you could behave and be Creatively productive so much the better, but that's pretty damn rare0:37:31So the group generally tends to settle just for behave, and there's a tyrannical element of that But what the hell is the alternative?0:37:40it's you know our society is based on consensus and the consensus is based on the sacrifice of a Certain sacrifice of individuality even though individuality is absolutely necessary as a revitalizing force0:37:53The society it's a very tight touch tough thing to manage properly so anyways you have The your physiological structure as your first line of ordering in relationship to Chaos because your body0:38:07Presents you with the world in a certain way and then the second line of defense is something like the sociological structure that you can have it we could call those the competency Hierarchies or something like that and0:38:17Thank God for them because you know maybe you're going to be able to specialize in one or two things in your life or five things But there's 300 things you need to know and if it's just you you know you'll be doing your genius level0:38:29Mathematics while your bath tub is leaking all over your all over your bathroom floor And that's not so good so you can call a plumber and hooray for that? So you know we tend to cooperate to keep Chaos under control?0:38:40And we tend to cooperate to keep order under control and that's the political dialogue right you maintain the culture to keep Chaos under control and we0:38:52Balance the cultural property to keep the culture under control and that way we get to live Reasonably peacefully reasonably productively for a reasonable amount of time0:39:03And that's the best that we can do and we should have some gratitude when that's working because the default condition of0:39:12Things is That not only do they not work very well they work worse and worse over time all by themselves So anytime anything is working. You should just be amazed by it0:39:24All right, so what does the frame look like well? I think it looks something like this, and this is as far as I can tell this is the bare-bones This is the bare bones of a variety of things it's a bear bowling story. It's a bear bowling conceptual framework0:39:37It's a bear bowling design to speak in High Daguerreian terms It's like it's the bare bones world that you live in you're always in one of these worlds There's no getting out of them0:39:47You can move from one to another but you're always in a world like this, and so this is the world that you're in You're somewhere Because you have to be somewhere now you might not know where that is0:39:58which means that somewhere that you are is chaotic in which case you need to go over your past in Great detail and Figure out where you are so you're lost right here. You're lost and the problem with being lost is when you're lost0:40:11You don't know where to go and the problem with not knowing where to go is there's a million places That you could go and a million places is too many places for you to go without dying so being lost is not good0:40:22So you need to know where you are? One of the things that we built online my partners and I have this program called past authoring that helps people lay out the0:40:34narrative of their past to identify to break their life down into six stages epochs we call them and then to identify the Emotionally significant moments in each epoch and to write them out what happened negatively0:40:47What happened positively what the consequences were what do you derive from it perhaps what you could have done differently? Perhaps what you learn from it all of that, so that you can narrow in zero in on0:40:59determining precisely Where it is that you are right now? and people are often loath to do that because they actually don't want to know they'd rather be spread out in a sort of0:41:10half-Blind Manner in the fog Hoping that the place that they're at is better than it really is and deluding themselves by remaining vague than to figure out0:41:20I'm right here right now with these specific problems But it's actually better to do that because if you have a set of specific problems0:41:29And you've really narrowed them down and really specified them then you could probably start fixing them and you can start Fixing them in Mike Microwaves bit by bit, but there's no way you can do that without knowing where you are0:41:41It's impossible, and you can kind of tell if you don't know where you are it's quite straightforward if you are haunted by reveries of the past0:41:52for events that are older than Approximately eighteen months if they continue to come up in your mind over and over and your dreams over and over You haven't extracted the world out from your past0:42:05experiences the Potential is still Trapped in the past and to confront the potential means to confront the dragon of the past and of course that's terrifying0:42:14And it seems seriously be terrifying so for example Maybe your vague And ill-formed and ill-defined because you will be used her dad when you were a child Four years old something like that0:42:23and maybe R abused by a family member because that's generally who does the abusing and so that just makes it works, and then what that means is that you've got a0:42:33implicit you had an implicit encounter with Malevolent evil That know you've had a direct encounter with Malevolent evil, but you have an implicit0:42:42Hypothesis of Malevolent Evil that's plaguing you. It's still there it's trapped in the memories right it's trapped in the representational structure and as an adult you're now faced with the necessity of0:42:54Articulating that fully before you have any chance whatsoever of freeing yourself from it And so that's no joke lots of times people have to go into the past. That's what this I grant lists do and Say and say look here is something came along. Just bloody well knocked me over, and it isn't even that0:43:08I repressed it which which I think was We will talk about freud's errors because freud was a genius. So we'll just leave him alone but but sometimes it's not repression0:43:18It's just the terrible things happen to people at such a young age that there isn't a bloody chance in hell that they can figure out why they happen or what to do with them or what they mean and0:43:27Then you can carry that with you, and you carry it with you. It's like Here your your body encounters the world in two stages, and it happens very rapidly well it can extend over years0:43:38but the initial stage has happened very rapidly so for example if You're walking down the road and you hear a large noise be a loud noise. Behind you go like this0:43:47That's a predator defense response by the way you crouch down And that's to stop something from jumping on your back and getting at your neck too easily That's like a few million two hundred milliseconds0:43:57it's really fast or even faster than that and it better be because Something like a snake like will say it can nail. You just right now. So you better be fast, but it's low resolution0:44:06It's like danger. Snake something like that or danger predatory cap it's that fast and then you can unravel that and0:44:16Categorize it, but that takes time you do that with emotion And then you do it with cognition you can do that with long term thinking you know because maybe you've encountered someone specifically0:44:25Malevolent and predatory at work that happens to people a lot as a as a destructive bully and who seems to have no positive function whatsoever and0:44:36Is only living that out and then you you know you don't know what to do about it? So you're you're in Prey mode, I don't mean this kind of mode although that would help too0:44:45But I mean you're acting like a prey animal and then you have this terribly complex thing to decompose Which is what the hell's up with this person? Why are they making my life miserable?0:44:55What is it about me that allows them to make my life miserable? That's a nasty little road to walk down, and you're stuck with having to you're stuck with having to decompose it. Maybe you can't maybe0:45:07Formulating an explicit philosophy of good and evil to deal with something malevolent in your environment actually just happens to be Beyond you and0:45:16That could easily be it's certainly the case for people who are young and it's the case for plenty of adults as well It's no simple thing to math to manage It's something to that often soldiers who have post-traumatic stress disorder have to do because they've encountered terrible things0:45:30Maybe they're dunham or ran into them They need to update their moral model of the world or if they end up in something close enough closely approximating hell0:45:42Anyway, so you need to know where you are That's this what is where are you so you're navigating your navigator. You're a sailor on an ocean man0:45:51That's what that's what you are you're a mobile creature. You're going from point a to point B All the time you know it's sitting there glued to a rock like some brainless. You know sea creature0:46:01There's a funny little creature called a hydra very simple Little creature in its Juvenile stage It has a brain because it swims around but then when it turns into an adult it latches itself to Iraq and promptly0:46:13digests its brain because if you're just sitting on a rock And you're not moving you don't need a brain so but that's not our issue, right? We're resuming in the world, and so we're navigating agents, so to navigate if there's two things you need to know0:46:27The first is where the hell. Are you exactly precisely right razorsharp? What's good about you and what's bad about you by your own by your own reckoning0:46:37You don't have to you can ask other people, but this is a game you play yourself. It's like as far as I'm concerned I'm taking start. What is it that's okay about me And what needs some work and you go to watch to not be too?0:46:49Self-Critical when you're doing that too because that can just be another kind of flaw and then the next is okay Well, where are you going? What's your destination? Well, and that's what the frame is now0:46:59You know you could do that in a very sophisticated way And you do that by thinking consciously about who it is that you are in an articulated Manner And where you want to go?0:47:08And why and how you're going to get there? And people hardly ever do that that is that's come as such an absolute shock to me as an educator. I Just because one of the other programs I use this in my classes0:47:22What are the other programs in this suite of programs is called the future authoring program? and I Started developing it my maps of meaning class which is where some of this materials from and I got students to write about their past0:47:32It's like okay We're talking about stories, so let's tell your story. Who are you how do you get here? What are you now that?0:47:41Usually helps people put things to rest although, it's quite stressful Well, you're doing it stress goes up when you're doing it and maybe you feel miserable for a couple of weeks0:47:50And then stress goes down and it stays down So that's and that's also why people don't do it because who the hell wants to have their stress go up But if it's temporary it's a sacrifice0:48:00So then the next issue is well. Where are you going and one of the things that and this? I just still I cannot understand is students that have been in education system for 15 years0:48:1014 Years high end students most of them not once in their whole bloody life Did anyone ever get them to sit down for like a day and say alright?0:48:20justify your existence It's like well seriously it's like here. You are in University You're taking a bunch of courses you've got some sort of vague Career plan0:48:30It's like defend the damn thing a bit since you're going to go live it and everything you're staking everything on it it's like what's your damn plan, and why are you so convinced that it's not the plan of a0:48:43Babbling fool because if you haven't thought about it Then it is and if you really want to go out there and live that out You know one of the things carl jung said was that you you're in a story whether you know it or not0:48:56And and then he made two nice comments about that if it's someone else's story, you're probably going to get a bit part and it might not be the one you want and0:49:06If it's a story that you don't know it might be one with a really bad ending or maybe it's just bad Period with a worse ending and if you don't know what the story that you're living out is0:49:16Maybe that's the one you know maybe you got that from your mother you got it from your grandmother you got it from your aunt or God only knows where you picked it up Because you pick up things like mad because that's what human beings are like so maybe you're living a malevolent tragedy0:49:30unconsciously and Then one thing you might ask yourself is well. How wretched and miserable is your life Let's had futile to that. How wretched miserable and futile is your life, and you might say well0:49:42Yeah, seventy percent on each count it's like then you're probably unconsciously living out a malevolent tragedy and Maybe that's not for the best0:49:52it's either that or the whole universe hates you right or 70 percent hates you you know so So anyways, you know we got students to start0:50:03writing in detail about Not what they wanted, it's not a career thing Because that's the closest people usually get is they have a career plan. It's like no, no, it's not a career plan0:50:14That's that's peripheral important, but peripheral it's like all right you got three years man. You're going to live them anyways Devote those three years to setting the world up around you so that it's the best it could possibly be0:50:28For you as if you were taking care of yourself as if you cared for yourself Well, what would that look like you know let's say just for the sake of argument if you figured out where you work that you0:50:39Could have what would be best for you? Well, what is that I bet? You never asked0:50:48People don't ask and so life comes out them Like Random snakes and they sort of fend them off and life goes by and things don't work out the way people expected them to0:50:59But a huge part of that is they didn't know where they were but they wouldn't look or didn't know that they should look ignorant willful blindness right two great catastrophes and0:51:10They never figured out where they wanted to go or why? Now there's a problem with figure out where you want to go And the problem is is that you make your conditions for failure clear to yourself and people?0:51:21Don't like that, so if you keep yourself in the fog Then you can't tell when you screwed up now that isn't so good because you're still screwing up. You're just too0:51:31blind self blind to notice although in The short term not less painful if you make your criteria for success razor-sharp then you know every time you screw up0:51:42But that's great because then you could fix it you could either repair the the Behavioral it adequacy, or the conceptual inadequacy that you're using as a tool in that situation0:51:54Or maybe you could adjust your dam plan either way, you can fix it and so Okay, so you're living in one of these Bloody things and0:52:04You might as well it seems to me you might as well make it the best one you could live in because You don't have anything better to do Now if you don't do that, if you don't do it consciously, and this is what the pSychoanalyst pointed out? Is that you have0:52:19enumerable Quasi Autonomous Subsystems that make you up that will generate Stories impulsively, and you'll just act them out and you know that because you watch yourself over two weeks0:52:32And you think Jesus I did a lot of stupid things in the last two weeks And you think why it's because you're a random. You're a collection of somewhat Random quasi0:52:41Autonomous personality units and Lacking a leader. They're just going to fire off whenever they want you know first you're hungry Then you're thirsty then you want to go to bed with your wife0:52:50You know then you want to sleep in and you want to tell your boss off and you want to curse at the guy that? Cuts you off in traffic. It's like you're kind of like a two-year-old0:52:59You know just it's one emotional frame after another vying for dominance there's no overarching Hierarchy, and there's no king at the top and0:53:10So you know we already talked about pyramids of competence? And what's supposed to be at the top is you want to bring all those things together? We understand this neurologically. I'll show you some of that in a little bit. We understand this neurologically how how0:53:24this maps in some sense right on to the neural structure of your being you want to put something in control and The thing that you should put in control is the bloody thing that pays attention and learns, right?0:53:37Everything else in the hierarchy should be subordinate to the thing that pays attention and learns and you could think well That's that's the message of the idea of logos that's for sure because logos is partly attention and partly communication0:53:51And you learn a lot by communicating with others okay? So you need to know where you are Just like your GPS, which is about the closest thing we have to an intelligent cybernetic system0:54:02Those GPS is in your cars those bloody things are pretty smart because they can they know where you are They know where you're going and if you go off course they recalculate your route. It's like those things are damn near alive0:54:12That's so close to intelligence. It's and you can tell that because they act intelligently they solve problems continually so you need and this is a cybernetic model by the way and0:54:23Cybernetic models for the models on which the GPS systems were based so it's not accidental So you need to know where you are and you need to know where you're going and then the next thing you need to know0:54:32Is how it is that you're going to act? Move your body how you're going to propel yourself through time and space to Transform this into that and0:54:42So ok and then we can we can make that a little bit more complex because it's a bit too simple, so we'll do this So it isn't exactly that you live in one of these0:54:51It's that you live in a nested hierarchy of these and you could think of this as your own internal Patriarchy That's a good way of thinking about it And maybe it could be a tyrant or maybe it could be something that gives you security and functional autonomy0:55:05And hopefully that's the one you go for it, but it's a battle you know because a little bit of Tyranny Exists in everyone and so well so at the very highest level of analysis0:55:18That would be the overarching Story, maybe you think I'd like to be a good person or a successful person or famous person I think goods probably a bit better because you can come up with the definition of good if you want as long as it doesn't0:55:31annoy other people too Badly Because they'll just get in your way, and that won't be helpful. So you have to negotiate it, but let's say you're a good person0:55:42That's sort of the story at the top of the hierarchy and then you could decompose that into your primary roles Maybe you're a good parent. Maybe you're a good employer or maybe you're a good employee0:55:53Maybe you're a good sibling. Maybe you're a good child you know those are major roles that you have in your life And so you'd say that what good person is is what's good about you across all those rules0:56:05So it's a it's a it's a higher-order abstraction from something more concrete and then you can take the you know the role good parent And you can say well0:56:15What is it that constitutes a good parent and you might say well a good parent this isn't exhaustive obviously a good parent has a good job and Takes care of his or her family and then you might say well0:56:27What does it mean to take care of your family and then you might say well? You know you you can cook the odd meal not too Odd hopefully you can cook the odd meal and you can play with play with the baby, and then you might say well0:56:39How do you play with a baby and then you might say well you play Peek-A-boo with the baby or you tickle the baby? Okay, well that's what's a cool. There's a cool shift there because this is all0:56:50Articulated and conceptual right right down to this level and then all of a sudden It's your body because how do you play peekaboo is a baby? You don't like have a chat about how you play Peek-A-boo with a baby right you go like this0:57:01It's great fun. You can even do it with older people they even smile about it, right it's Dad's gone, and the Baby's all shocked to death about that where to go. Oh look. He's back. You know0:57:12it's the baby is playing with the Reliability of the world so it's real intense game for a baby Like oh no, dad. God. No look. He showed up again. Oh, no0:57:23He's gone, and then bad smiling to indicate that those brief flashes into non-existence Aren't existentially terrifying Beyond0:57:32Capacity right and so but the point is is that if you're playing peek-A-boo with the baby? You're not thinking anymore? It's not in the realm of articulation or abstraction. It's actually something that you're doing with your body and so to me0:57:44This is a nice multistage solution to the Mind-body problem because what happens is the highest the higher order of abstraction its articulated and conceptual0:57:53but if you decompose It sufficiently you end up with an actual action and the action involves the movement of musculature It's not something conceptual and one of the things that's really cool about this hierarchy0:58:07Is that it has? Educational lessons so one of the things you want to do if you're trying to teach someone something even yourself is you want to? You want to specify the thing that needs to be doing at the highest resolution possible?0:58:21Level so I'll give you just a brief example, so let's say I may have we may be repeating this but it doesn't matter say you've got a three-Year-old kid And they're in their room is Chaos0:58:31Right this monsters are going to be coming out under the bed in no time flat unless that thing Room gets some order in it and so you you tell the kids clean up the room? You know it's a mess and you leave and you come back and the kids like throwing legos everywhere0:58:43It's they're not cleaning up, and then you think that's a bad kid That's a bad Theory a because you're going right from here to here0:58:52If you want to have a good fight with someone and destroy them then that's what you do You don't bother with the subtleties down here. You just go right from the great for the jugular0:59:01It's like you're a bad stupid kid you've always been that way you're hopeless There's not a chance of teaching you anything, right? and we can that way you can nail the past the present and the future all of the same in so you've always been a0:59:14Terrible person There's no teaching you and your future is going to be exactly the same way Then the only thing the person can do if you do that to them is hit you because that's that's it. There's no0:59:24There's no coming back from that you've boxed them completely in so if you want to have a really unproductive Argument you go right for this past present and future you're not a good person Demolish their entire conceptual structure and0:59:37Expose them completely naked to Chaos. It's like great you won the argument. It's not a good thing to do to your long-term partner let's say unless you want them terrified out of this skull and0:59:51Characterised and their attitude towards you characterized by non-stop extreme resentment It's probably not going to do your love life a hell of a lot of good for example, so with the three year old1:00:02Maybe what you do is you say you pick the level of analysis at which They're actually functioning And you say and this is something you can do if you pay attention to a kid and lots of people won't pay attention to1:00:12Children because they're terrified of them They're terrified that they'll do something wrong with them and or that the kid won't like them or some damn thing it's like All you have to do to get a kid to like you is pay attention to the kid for like two1:00:24seconds and the kid will instantly like you because attention is so It's such a it's it's the ultimate Currency for children right they need adult attention because adults know way more than kids and so they love attention1:00:38All you have to do is pay attention to them. They will like you instantly, so They tell the kid you see that teddy bear Kid goes yes1:00:47Then you've established that the child has mastered the art of perceiving a teddy bear because they can say yes It's this complicated thing man. It's like1:00:56I aged six months old isn't going to do that three months old has got the whole teddy bear Identification subroutine and traumatized so teddy bear yes, can you pick it up? Yes?1:01:08Pat pat pat good work. Do you see the hole on that show yes. Can you put the teddy bear in that hole? Yes, go over do that pat Pat pat?1:01:19Great ok now. We'll do thing number two thing number three So you're building up the micro routines of cleaning up the room from the bottom up, right you?1:01:28you're building it into their body because you're starting with the things they've already automatized and Building upWards towards abstraction and so once the kid has all the micro Routines down and maybe there's I don't know how many1:01:39Micro Routines are there to clean up your room? 200 like A Lot but not an infinite number So you teach them all the micro Routines and then you can say run?1:01:49Set of micro Routines which means clean up room, and then they can do it they know what it means so but you do the building from the bottom up and lots of times when you're1:01:59Arguing with someone that you live with and hypothetically loved although those two things are hard to get together in the same relationship What you want to do is assume is assume stupidity before you assume total in total malevolence1:02:14That's that's that's a good rule of thumb for establishing peace So maybe if your partner won't do something well, maybe it's there's something going on up here1:02:23But you might want to assume to begin with they actually just don't know how to do it and you need to decompose it So maybe there's a way you want to be greeted when you come home Because you're going to come home every day probably and maybe that's a five minute interaction or a 10 minute interaction1:02:37So that's an hour a week, or four hours a month or 50 hours a year or one solid work week of coming home Interactions right all you have to do is get 50 interactions like that right and you've got your relationships sorted out1:02:52That's something that's really worth thinking about so that's it. There's you just don't have that much time right get the meals sorted out That's about five hours a day get your sleeping time1:03:02Arrangements Sorted out get the fundamental interactions that you repeat with your partner Worked out voluntarily and negotiated you're going to cover 80% of your life that way1:03:12And then it can just run as a routine and that's really helpful, and if you don't do that consciously especially because our roles have fragmented and most of the traditional rules have disappeared and so nobody knows who the hell is supposed to do what in the kitchen for1:03:24example So nobody does anything except bitch and fight make wretched meals or or buy Or buy fast food or some something like that, so you know the alternative to that1:03:36catastrophic Failure or continual resentment and fighting is to rebuild the structures from the bottom up using Consensus and negotiation and you can do that so that you can think of that as the patriarchal structure1:03:49That's a good one, and I mean it's partly psychological because these are things you do as a person, but it's also partly political Economic and sociological because while you're doing each of these things you're also doing them in a way1:04:02that's socially hopefully not just socially acceptable, but actually socially desirable and So that's that's the decomposition and the reason that this1:04:13Keeps Chaos at Bay is because it isn't because your belief systems keep Chaos at Bay It's not that abstract It's that if you do things right do these things right then terrible things happen to you with less frequency1:04:25And that's not the psyche like it's partly psychological because maybe you don't fight as much. Maybe not anxious as much Maybe you're not as depressed but a lot of it's just practical if you just if you you know if your kid doesn't leave his skateboard on the1:04:38stairs Then you don't break your neck as often and that's not just psychological That's actually a good thing not to break your neck so often and so this structure isn't merely something that keeps things at Bay1:04:51psychologically okay, so here's a here's another look at A Hierarchy of A1:05:00narrative the structure that keeps Chaos at Bay, and this is maybe The Hierarchy that I engage in when I'm writing and I'm doing all these things at the same time. That's that's what's cool1:05:11You know like that when I ask student. What are you doing when you write an essay? It's like well that's hard question right? It's like well, you're1:05:20Fast and important question, that's the first thing you should do if you're writing an essay Then you're paying attention to the words and the phrases in the sentences and the sentence1:05:30relationship between the sentences within the paragraphs and the paragraph relationships to one another within the essay And then they ask these relevance to the class and the class is relevance to your life and what the essay bleeds out1:05:42Across your entire life and so if I'm writing something well obviously at the most Highest resolution level of analysis, I'm actually moving my fingers on the keyboard and moving my eyes back and forth on the screen1:05:57That's where the mind meets the body But then I'm trying to formulate a sentence and so I try to think up a good sentence That's that's nailing what I am trying to formulate and then I try to pick it apart1:06:08And I do that a bunch of ways take the sentence and I put it on another page and then a rate like 10 different variants of the sentence and see if I can get a better Variant and then I try to1:06:17think of ways that it's a stupid sentence to see if I can you know put a pry bar underneath it and Loosen it up and if I can't do anything if I can't manage that then I keep the sentence that I've got and then I do that with1:06:29ten sentences in a paragraph And I make sure the sentences are all arranged properly in the paragraph the same way by rewriting a bunch of different variants of it And trying to get the word right in a phrase right and the sentence right and the sentence order right and the paragraph order?1:06:43Right and I can tell what it's right enough because I can't make it any better. It doesn't mean it's right it Just means I can't improve it and so I get to the point where if I'm writing a paragraph1:06:53And I write a variant, and I can't tell if the variance is any better, and it might be worse than I'm done I'd hit the limit of my intellectual capacity and it's time to move on but then but you know that it isn't like the1:07:06Essay that I'm writing. Let's say has a boundary It's tightly drawn around the essay because there's a reason I'm writing the damn essay, and that would be well I'm trying to I'm turned write a whole manuscript1:07:17Hopefully, I'm trying to address an important problem because why would I be doing it otherwise? I mean, that'd be kind of pointless, and maybe that's part of my role as a scientist1:07:26And that's a subset of my role as a professor and then that's a subset of my role as a productive citizen and then that's a subset of my role of1:07:35Someone who confronts the unknown see and that's why the logos is The thing that's at the top of the Hierarchy That's how the hierarchy should be structured is that everything else should be see because you have a structure. Do you think well?1:07:50What should the structure be subordinate to and then the answer should be something like? the structure should be subordinate to the process that generates the structure or the1:07:59Structure should be subordinate to the process that generates and maintains the structure well obviously How could it be any other way unless the structure is perfect?1:08:08With the in which case you dispensed with the thing that generates it and improves it, but then you're a totalitarian It's like hey, we got the answer. It's like no, you don't people are still suffering and they're still dying1:08:19You don't have the damn answer And so maybe you have an answer that means that there isn't quite as much suffering and dying as there could be But there's plenty of road to be traveled yet, and so1:08:31It all makes perfect sense that all of this should be should be nested within this highest sigh think of it, sort of as the highest order of1:08:41Moral striving and then that also gives you Moral Hierarchy, that's the most important thing We do that with honor speech you do that with the tension and honest speech. That's how you do that, and1:08:53you don't sacrifice that to any of this because if you do then Then you're hurting your soul It's there's this idea in the new1:09:02Testament that the sin against the holy ghost is the one sin that can't be forgiven no one knows what the hell that means maybe it doesn't mean anything, but I think this is what it means is that because1:09:12this process generates all this if you violate that process then there's no hope for you because1:09:21That's the process by which you improve yourself and everyone else to everything else So if you decide you're not going to engage in that it's like well There's no fixing that because you've blown apart your relationship with the thing that does the fixing and so1:09:39Ok and so that's how you keep Chaos at Bay and so part of that is Structural right because you know how to do these things More or less It's part of your skill set if you happen to be a writer you could build one of these for a plumber1:09:50it doesn't doesn't make any difference really although the outside things should be the same which is I think partly why in in the Judeo-Christian tradition1:09:59there's the Assumption that people are fundamentally equal before God and what that means is that well they should be1:10:09nested everyone regardless of their particularly Particularities as individuals their highest order function is that they do it in whatever Manner they can manage and that's an extraordinarily1:10:21valuable or maybe the most extraordinarily valuable Sociological political and economic function and so that's why people are valuable, it's like we have this faculty to continually generate1:10:33improvements to the structure that We jointly inhabit Great that gives us. It's so cool. Because that gives us a fundamental unity we've got the highest order of1:10:46Analysis with with the room for as much diversity as you can possibly manage right because it actually turns out that the more The sub structures differ the better because then you know you can be doing something different than me1:10:58That would be good because if we were doing the same thing then it's just duplication of labor if we could agree on the higher order principle and then specialize that the lower order levels, it's like that's1:11:08you get to have your cake and eat it too, and that doesn't happen very often so So and so then another rule of thumb is if you're trying to solve a problem solve it at this level1:11:21Highest resolution level possible before you dare move up dare move up the hierarchy Because the as you move up the abstraction Hierarchy the probability that you'll make a catastrophic error while attempting to fix the problem1:11:35radically increases because Abstraction is very very powerful and so you want to be very careful I mean we saw that when you know when the you know when the mortgage market crashed the reason it crashed was because of strange use of1:11:48Derivatives and derivatives are like higher order abstractions in the financial world and derivatives give you Tremendous Financial Leverage and power with huge risk and so the upside is massive absolutely massive because you can multiply your earnings1:12:03But the downside is complete Bloody catastrophe and so Part of what I would say an intelligent conservative. Ethos is is1:12:12Solve the problem at the highest level of resolution the highest level most local level of resolution It's safer, and it's more likely to actually produce a solution1:12:23ok now, so Now you're in your plan now We're simplified again just to one little map right, but all those other things are nested in there1:12:32And so what happens to you as you stroll? Merrily on your way through life. Well, what happens is that as you're moving from point a to point b you?1:12:42encounter things and People think that what they encounter are But that's not the case first of all most of the things that you encounter many of the things are actually other people1:12:52And they're not objects. They're too damn complex and even Apart from the social world the things that you encounter aren't objects they seem to be something more like tools or obstacles1:13:03And I don't mean that we see objects and turn them into tools or obstacles I mean that we see tools and obstacles because what happens is that when you array yourself1:13:12Towards a goal Then the world transforms itself into things that get in the way of that goal and things that Three things things are get in the way of the goal things those are things you don't like things that1:13:24facilitate your movement towards the goal those are things that you like and the irrelevant things and Mostly you want irrelevant things because there's just too damn many things so the category of irrelevant is one you really like so1:13:37most the thing most of everything is irrelevant if you have a good plan a few things are good because they move you forward and some other things are not so good you want to go around the not so1:13:46Good things if you can manage them unless you like to run head forth into like Brick Walls Which is not particularly so learning experience, but I would repeat it too many times1:13:55you want you want the world to array itself as a set of We could say tools now what happens is that you have this perceptual system. That's mediated by dopamine1:14:05it's the same system that cocaine activates or methamphetamine or the drugs that people really like to take and it's the dopaminergic system that1:14:14Responds with positive emotion to indications that you've encountered something that will facilitate your movement towards a goal And that's really important to know because people tend to think that they're happy because they achieve goals, and that's not true1:14:27What's true it because as soon as you achieve a goal, then you have a problem Which is what's the next goal, and that's actually a big problem. You encounter that as soon as you graduate from university for example1:14:36It's right. I made this joke before The graduation day here's like King of the University Hierarchy Undergraduate Hierarchy day after you're unemployed potential Starbucks employee right so it's like1:14:49so obviously the Accomplishment per se as a source of reward is is Problematic because when you accomplish you run the frame to its and then you have the problem of needing a new frame1:15:03So that's a problem, but if what you're encountering instead are things that will move you along your way. It's like. Hey That's great, and that's where you get your positive motivation, and so that's really thinking that's so much1:15:14We're thinking about You can think about that for a year and that wouldn't even be enough to think about it because here's what it means it Means in some sense that the buddhists are right with their claim about Maya1:15:24Mnya which means that people live in an illusion and what they mean by that is well you have goal Whatever your goal is and that goal gives relevance to the world and you could change the relevance of the world in a snap1:15:38Just by changing your goal You can do that, and so then you think well it's sort of an illusion because you can just change it now you don't want to push that line of argumentation too far because1:15:48Even if the specific point can be changed the fact that you're in one of these frames Cannot be changed and so you have to be in a frame although you get to pick the frame1:15:59So there's still an absolute there, which is that you have to be in the frame and that is not a trivial absolute It's a very it's a very major absolute So then you think okay all of your positive emotion is going to be experienced in relationship to the goal1:16:13Well, then we think well, you could use some positive emotion. It's a good thing positive emotion Inhibits anxiety and disappointment and frustration and pain it does all that1:16:26Technically it does that that's why a football player with a broken thumb who wants to score a touchdown can go out there You know play the football game even though. It's a kind of an arbitrary goal, right?1:16:36It's like really you're going to go out there and like Risk your hand to fire a pigskin through some some polls. It's like1:16:46Well, you could say the same sort of cynical thing about most of the things that people do but you can't say the silikal thing about the fact that they have to do things, so1:16:55You have a you have a point you have your aim you have your ambition? And then that's what turns the world into a potentially positive place and here's the kicker. This is so cool1:17:06The higher they aim the more the positive emotion So that's that you think well. Why should I bother you? Why should I bother doing something lofty and difficult it's like1:17:18Because it's worth it That's why? Because the alternative is stupid suffering because really really because what happens is1:17:28Like you don't need a framework in order to suffer You can just lay there day after day1:17:37And suffer right that's the easy that's the default condition If you don't have a lofty ambition Then you suffer miserably and the reason for that is life is really complex short1:17:50Finite full of suffering and beyond you and so you can just lay there and think about that, and it's horrible And so that's not helpful. It's just not useful and so you know people often say life is meaningless1:18:02It's like no it's not That's wrong because it was meaningless that would be easy you could just sit there and do nothing and it would matter right it'd be like you were look like you're like a1:18:11Lobotomized sheep. It's just irrelevant But that isn't what happens when people say that life has no meaning that isn't what they mean what they mean is1:18:20I'm suffering stupidly and intensely, and I don't know what to do about it. Well the suffering is meaningful It's just not the kind of meaning you want so how do you get out of that?1:18:31you adopt you You note the baseline of suffering which is very very very very high and then you say to yourself, okay?1:18:42I need to do something that justifies that and That's not so easy because it's the baseline for suffering is high if you're going to make something of yourself Let's say so that it's worthwhile to1:18:53exist in the world then you have to do is you have to aim at something that's So well structured that you can say yeah1:19:02earthquakes cancer death of my family dissolution of my goals ultimate futility of life and the heat death of the universe Hey, it doesn't matter it's worth it1:19:14Alright So now here's an here's another complicating factor1:19:23So I said well, there's three things that you can run into when you're going about your your goal And I would say if you're going to farm a goal1:19:33It's going to form a plan look about three to five years out in the future because Beyond that you get something called1:19:42Combinatorial explosion and it means that there's so many variables you just can't predict So there's not that much point looking out 20 years because like what the hell You know what's going to happen in 20 years nothing three years. Maybe you've got1:19:55Maybe you can chart a course to three years five years something like that, so that's not a bad segment of time to to consider and then consider1:20:06What your life would have to be like in order for it to be worthwhile for you? Knowing also what you're going to be like if it isn't worthwhile for you And what you're going to be like if it isn't worthwhile for you is Caine1:20:19That's what you're like Because that's what that Story's about because Abel's the guy who? Has a goal and is making the proper sacrifices and cain is the person for whom1:20:28By his own fault at least in part things aren't working out for and so the default For not doing this is something like building resentment bitterness with an underlying1:20:39What would you call it? Flavor Enhancer of Murderous Resentment something like that which you will act out in the world which people act out in the world all the time and it's no1:20:49Wonder because without this without something lofty pulling you along then the baseline is stupid suffering and you know if you take an analog and you just chained in the1:21:01Backyard you know you put a collar on it That's too tight, so it chafes all the time, and it can't even bark and you know there's just dirt around it It's too goddamn hot out in the sun, and maybe don't give it enough water. You know it's not going to be very happy dog1:21:15it's basic conditions misery well the same applies to people, so all right, so you're on your way to1:21:24See you remember the you've all probably watched pinocchio or know about it one of the things that happens It's really cool in pinocchio. Is that when geppetto decides that he wants his puppet to be a genuine?1:21:38Autonomous being He wishes upon a star It's a very strange thing But everybody just swallows it because we don't notice when we're swallowing things that are that are completely preposterous. You know it's this1:21:51animated Puppeteer, which is not a star that is puppet is going to become real and everybody know it's their head and goes Oh you have that big sense. It's like no, it doesn't it doesn't make any sense at all, but it doesn't matter1:22:02It doesn't make this sort of sense that we normally associate with sense It makes a kind of meta sense and everybody understands it so this is what Geppetto is doing is he's elevating his eyes1:22:12above the Horizon so out of the realm of the worldly let's say to the Transcendent and the transcendent will say for all intents and purposes you can see the transcendent spread above you in1:22:25the heaven that arches over us It gets close enough for our purposes and there's a star there and a star of something that's eternal that shines in the darkness and so geppetto makes an agreement with the1:22:37Transcendent he says look I'm willing to do whatever it takes that my creation becomes autonomous Well that's exactly this situation that you want to set up for yourself is like okay. You've got to figure out1:22:47What star you're going to orient yourself by and you have to ask yourself like no one's ever asked you okay? if you have the choice to make your life worth living1:22:59What's your price? What do you need? Just find out first of all you just ask you'll tell yourself like you'll be afraid because if I'll never get that it's like don't1:23:09lower your sights a little bit then you know don't ask for a 80-foot Super yacht in like six months that just means you're stupid you know as it doesn't mean you're not1:23:18You know first of all it's not going to make you happy anyways, you know It's just not it's not it's not wise you're asking you supposed to be asking yourself this question like you're someone you care about1:23:29So you imagine you're talking to some 12 year old kid that you kind of like? Thank God it wouldn't be so bad if this twelve-Year-old kid at a decent life so You - it's like it wouldn't be so bad the universe wouldn't mind if you had a decent life if there is little less suffering1:23:43On your part especially if you didn't you know? Foist it off on other people If there's a little less suffering on your part And you made things a little better everywhere you went it's like the universe would probably1:23:53Okay with that. So you could I think you could get away with it if you're sort of quiet about it and so Ask yourself okay, so then once you've established your your target. You know where you are then you know1:24:06what's good for you because that moves you along and that happens at a perceptual level you don't have to think about it anymore and the experimental literature, and that's already quite clear, so for example if I specify that podium as the target for my1:24:20action you know then I'm happy when I'm walking towards it because there it is and everything cooperating really nicely, but if I specify going to the exit sign that you guys can't see that's the1:24:32That that this is an obstacle in the front of then as soon as I specify that then that's an annoying obstacle And that's precognitive it just happens immediately it happens instantaneously1:24:43And so it really is the case that you you you're you're being Manifests itself inside these frames and so what's so cool about that is you can change the frame1:24:54it doesn't mean you can like juggle planets or anything like that, but it does give you quite a scope of what I'm1:25:03Trammeled action within the world and if the frame isn't working out then you can tweak it or sometimes you have to make a major adjustment in it whatever You don't have to stick to the damn thing like it's the ideology that you're going to die for1:25:14It's a tentative plan it's a work in progress And it's nuts with the future authoring program one of the things I recommend for people is that they should do it badly Because you're not going to get it right anyways, but a reasonable plan is1:25:28way better than no plan plus a reasonable plan is a plan that has built into it the Processes that will enable the plan to get better as you implement it1:25:37So you just start with ab reasonable plan so you don't have to worry about whether it's correct it's not correct Doesn't matter it's better than nothing. That's the issue so okay, so you've got the world parsed up into1:25:50Things that make making you happy when you look at them Things that get in the way that produce negative emotion And then a whole host of irrelevant things because almost everything is irrelevant1:26:01And that's where all the Chaos is hiding the Chaos is hiding in what's irrelevant And so and that's very interesting observation because since the Chaos is virtually infant1:26:12I think surreal questions where the hell, do you put it? Well you put it in what you ignore and you can ignore it as long as it isn't actively interfering with your movement forward you can assume that it's1:26:22That it doesn't matter that it in matter that it doesn't matter same thing Alright, so here's the kicker. There's one more class of things that you can run into along the way1:26:35And this is where the chaos breaks through so let's say1:26:45you're moving from point a to point B and Something that you don't expect oh curves and it gets in the way, so let's1:26:56Say that you're living with someone and maybe you kind of like them. You're not married So you don't like them that much because otherwise you'd ask them to marry you, but anyways1:27:06and so high quarter of youth is looking for something better and 3/4 of view is half satisfied something like that and Then a person because we're ambivalent about such things and then the person1:27:18You discover or the person announces that they'd be having an affair, okay? So then how are you supposed to respond emotionally to that? well the part of you that wasn't all that committed to the relationship is kind of exhilarated by that and then the1:27:313/4 of you that's half satisfied is hurt and and you're going to exploit that part for sure in the ensuing discussions and not mention the oh that's kind of exciting that you you know betrayed me that way, so1:27:43so But the point is is that you that's a whole now What's happened as a whole has? You have this structure that you're walking on like ice like the thin ice that you're skating on and now there's a hole in it1:27:57And the hole we don't even know how deep the hole is but you know there's a hole there And so now you're anxious about it though. Maybe also a little bit excited because God only knows what's down there, but1:28:07But you don't know what to do with that hole because it could spread very badly on you it could be that you know the whole relationship was a facade and1:28:17That all your relationships have been facade facade and that the reason that is is because you're so damn shallow that it's impossible for you to have a relationship that isn't just a1:28:26Facade and that's partly because you don't pay any attention to other people and it's also partly because your malevolent and selfish So that's a nasty thing to discover or maybe that's the sort of person that you're attracting which would make sense1:28:38Actually if that's the sort of person that you are and so So there are certain things that you can encounter that basically unglue you and what happens is that those?1:28:48moments of being unglued travel up that entire Hierarchy of presuppositions It's like because the one of the logical conclusions to being betrayed in a relationship1:28:57Is that you are that you're truly a bad person now another? Equally logical conclusion is that the person that you're with is really a bad person and another logical conclusion is all1:29:10People are truly bad people you know I mean it in Microwaves out in microwaves, you can't trust anyone you can't trust women you can't trust men1:29:19You can't trust human beings you can't trust yourself. The whole place is a catastrophe. It's a nightmare Well, then you can fall through into1:29:28Chaos now the way your body responds to that when some or maybe you know you're supposed to be getting a promotion at work That's good You're all chipper about the promotion at work And you you walk into your boss's office because he or she wants to see you and they say1:29:42wow, you know we've reviewed your performance over the last Few years and your performance has been1:29:51Somewhere between mediocre and decent and we're downsizing and see you later That's not a raise or a promotion. That's for sure1:30:02Not so whole that you fall into and the question is well. What do you make of that right? How do you frame that how do you take that? Emergent Chaos and make habitable order out of you. Don't know is the whole capitalist system rotten to the core1:30:16I mean that's a convenient explanation under those circumstances That's for sure were you working for a pSychopathic son of a bitch? Did you make the wrong choice in University and was that your father's fault because you never did what you want?1:30:29Or was it your fault for not standing up to them or is it a dying? Industry, or is maybe this a wake-up Call that you should go do something else that you've been waiting to do you know that you've actually wanted to do your whole life1:30:40And that's why you're doing such a miserable job at your current Occupation because you're bitter and resentful about the fact that you never did what you want you don't know it's all of those things at once and1:30:50That's very stressful because all of those things at once is too many things and that's the reimburse of Chaos That's the flood1:30:59That's the return to the beginning of the cosmos that's another way that it's been represented mythologically It's that you voyage all the way back to the beginning of the cosmos when there's nothing but undifferentiated Chaos1:31:11And that's what you're confronting and maybe it's too much for you And it's often it is I mean that that can really that can be traumatizing It can hurt your brain you know1:31:21It's just too much for you to bear but it doesn't matter you're stuck with it And so how do you respond to that? Well some of it is? catastrophic negative emotion1:31:30You freeze and that's protective, and maybe you don't even want to move you Don't want to bloody well get out of bed for a week And that's because your body is reacting as if the bedroom1:31:39Floor is covered with snakes and the best thing for you to do is just not move just freeze Not a pleasant situation to be in because it's you're hyper aroused1:31:48Very very physiologically demanding, and there's zero about if it's productive except maybe the snakes won't see you But they've already seen you so that isn't helping very well1:31:57So you've got all this undifferentiated negative emotion anxiety fear Hurt anger Guilt Shame emotional pain the whole plethora of1:32:06Catastrophes, and then maybe on the other side lurking down there is thank God I'm done without you oughta Just bloody well hate it. I dragged myself off to work every day, and there's a little part of my soul1:32:18That's a goddamn. Happy. I finally got fired that I can hardly stand it. You know Maybe you don't even admit that to yourself because well that would mean that all that time you spent at the job was just some1:32:28Cost you're deluding yourself. The whole time. I mean isn't an interesting thing to consider though sometimes if you're in the unpleasant circumstance of having to fire someone1:32:38You know sometimes firing someone is the best thing that can happen to them which? Doesn't mean that. You should go out and like enjoy it Although I have met very disagreeable people who actually enjoyed firing people1:32:50I'll tell you a story about that at some point because it's quite interesting but you know sometimes if someone's just limping along in their job and doing it as1:33:00Miserably and wretchedly as they possibly can imagine the best thing you can do to them for them is to say you know You're failing at this And and that doesn't necessarily mean that you would have to be failing it absolutely everything else in the entire world1:33:14so maybe you should just accept the dam failure and go off and try something new and I mean that's terrifying for people and I know they hate it and all that but1:33:24but but sometimes it's better than the alternative which is just slow torturous death, so1:33:34Here's a funny way of looking at it So let's say you fall right in for that Hole that's underneath any everything and you've hit an anomaly that you don't understand you say, what's that anomaly made out of?1:33:47Exactly, I know that's a strange way of thinking about it. You know because it's not what you could say We'll just go along with that. It's a metaphor. What's that anomaly made out it well1:33:57Here's a way of thinking, but it's made out of spirited matter And here's why? This is something I learned in part from Piaget said1:34:06What's made out of matter because of course that's the world matter and the world is also What matters and so that's kind of a nice? duality there, but it's made out of spirit because1:34:17When you encounter something anomalous and go down the rabbit hole when you go into the underworld that's underneath everything that you've relied on You learn things down there, so what's down there is information1:34:27And that's now it's maybe way more information than you want, but it is information It's information and what can what can you do with the information you can inform yourself with the information1:34:39Right you could put yourself in formation with the information that's helpful too and So and you think well You you're a psyche if you're not a spirit it depends on you know whether you're a materialist or not1:34:52But at least we can say that you're a psyche the question is what's your pSyChe made up? Well, it's obviously go out of material some right, but the matter happens to be arrayed in a particular order1:35:03And that's an information order And so when you fall into the underworld that's underneath everything and you encounter that latent information Then what you can do is enhance your psyche you can grow your spirit because what you do is you take the new?1:35:17information and you Incorporate it. That's like eating the apple that out of an eve it you Incorporate that and that makes more of you, and that's not a metaphorical or a metaphysical proposition1:35:28It's not to say nothing other than well. That's what happens when children learn you think what happens Charles's three has a pretty low resolution representation of the world and is a fairly low resolution1:35:40Human being got all the constituent elements there, but isn't differentiated in any tremendous Manner That's all still to come in the future and so what if the child do explore1:35:50What do they explore things they don't understand that's where the information is because you already understand. What you understand? There's no information there you go where there where you don't understand that's where the information is and out of that information1:36:03You generate a higher resolution world and you generate a higher resolution? Self and so out of the combat with the underlying dragon of Chaos you1:36:13Generate spirit and matter and that's what you do when you go down into the underworld so if it doesn't kill you Or if it doesn't make you wish you were dead which you probably will1:36:23But there's a bunch of you that has to die down there anyway So maybe that's not such a bad thing because if you had this relationship that ended in Betrayal Then there's something that's just not exactly right right there's something that wentz and the reason I'm saying that think well1:36:36That's kind of moralistic. It's like actually I don't mind being moralistic in case you haven't noticed but But that's not it's not a fair comment, because you're playing this stupid game1:36:47It's like you live with someone in fidelity That's the game right you've decided the rules with the game comes a morality the morality are the rules of the game well1:36:58Then the thing collapses into infidelity It's like well you played the game wrong or it was the wrong game one of those two you it's one of those two you pick the damn game and1:37:09Having picked the game you can't Say well, no those aren't the rules it's like yeah. Yeah, if you pick the game you pick the rules and if you fail at1:37:19Complying with the rule then you fail now you could say well, I could pick a different game. It's like I don't care how you solve the problem. You're still stuck with the problem. It's a moral problem fundamentally1:37:31and it might take some major-league retooling to to fix it, so you're at point A1:37:40Trying to get to point B. That's not working out you hit an anomaly You're not getting the point b. That's for sure1:37:49Your medical school student you write your mcAts which is a test you have to write to go to medical school you get 25th Percentile, I don't know who you are1:37:58But you're not a pre-med student and maybe you never were right, and that's the Rub man And so who the hell are you you don't know collapse down here into this1:38:09motivational conflict this place of motivation unemotional uncertainty and Tremendous information, right it's a place of transformation. It's the Phoenix that burns. It's the burning part of the Phoenix that burns1:38:20It's it's the journey to the underworld. It's the journey to hell It can really be a journey to hell because you may find out that the reason That your partner betrayed you or that you didn't get your damn promotions because there's seriously something wrong with you1:38:34And you know it, and I don't just mean that you don't know what you're doing I mean that there's 25 percent of you that is Seriously aiming at things not being good and so you fall into the underworld and you find out that oh1:38:46God, I just got exactly what I was aiming for or I got exactly what the worst part of me was aiming for and that Worst part that's something to clean up1:38:56And that's not going to be easy because it's got it tooks to me like something something ferocious something seriously ferocious And I've been toying with it for a very long time and maybe I can't even detach it anymore1:39:09And so that's not so fun And you see people like that in psychotherapy very frequently or you see them wandering around on the streets like Absolute1:39:18Catastrophic former shells of themselves, you know because they've hit the underworld and they ended up in hell, and there's no getting out So those are the people you tend to give a wide berth to when you walk down the street1:39:30So there you are down in underworld right back where the latent information exists and just too much of it and That's this it's the same thing. It's the same thing and that's why the Adam and eve story is archetypal1:39:45right because We're always Ingesting something new that knocks us into a new state of self-consciousness, and it's always a catastrophic1:39:57demolition of our current of our previous paradise insufficient as that paradise was Something comes along to destroy it and knocks the slats out of our life, and that's a voyage to the underworld1:40:11out of the walled Garden into Chaos And so what is all of that?1:40:22Well, there's lots of ways of construing it it's a it's a frame transformation There's a walled city. It's got a hole in it because all walled cities have holes in them right because everything's imperfect1:40:34And that's where the Chaos comes up And then maybe you go out there like a hero to fight the Chaos and to reestablish the frame That's what you're supposed to do and maybe you free some information while you're doing that1:40:48Or maybe you establish your relationship, and so that's the Journey frame damage Chaos1:40:57Voluntary Confrontation reconstitution of the world and that's That's human existence, and hopefully it's not just a little1:41:06Linear it's it's Stepwise right is that? the you that emerges as a consequence of your latest catastrophe is everything that you were before plus something more and1:41:20That actually constitutes what you might describe as measurable progress right and that's another argument against Moral relativism because1:41:29If you can do everything that you could do before and you can do some more things. We could just define that as better It's not a bad definition, and then we have up. It's like what you're trying to do is to1:41:41differentiate the world and Differentiate yourself and every time you undergo one of these revolutions, then hopefully both of those things happen1:41:50and then there's a moral to that story too, which is Do it voluntarily and maybe do it? Don't wait for it to happen catastrophic. Ly1:42:01Keep your eyes open and when something goes a little bit wrong that you could fix Fix it don't say no that doesn't matter1:42:11Maybe it does matter. Maybe it is matter Maybe it's exactly the matter out of which you should be built Maybe it's the matter out of which the world should be built and if part of you is telling you it matters1:42:23What it means is that that part is telling you that there's something there that you need to Engage with that's what it means for something to matter1:42:32I really get out of the kick a kick out of the word matter because it's got these two weird meanings, right? there's the matter that everything is made out of The materialists think everything is made out of and that's just dead matter and then there's the matter that life is made out of which1:42:45Is what matters and now and then you're moving through life and something matters? It's calling to you And that's the unrevealed world trying to reveal itself to you and all you have to do is1:42:57Allow it to reveal itself to you, and then maybe what happens is that a minor shit? Shifted shape is all that has to happen to you You don't have to burn right down to the bloody egg and and hatch out1:43:09You know as a newborn maybe you can just repair a little bit of something That's gone wrong with you And so you can undergo a sequence of continual micro deaths instead of waiting for the bloody1:43:20catastrophe that might send you so far down that you'll never recover and All you have to do is attend to what matters and your whole nervous system is it's doing this for you. You've got a goal1:43:31Something happens it matters. So what are you supposed to do with that you're supposed to you're supposed to fix it You're supposed to engage with it. That's why it's calling out to you as if it matters. It's saying there's an1:43:42Indeterminate part of the world here that wants to manifest itself into fully Articulated being and it's calling to you to do that and if you ignore it then it accumulates1:43:53And if accumulates it turns into the dragon of Chaos and then it waits until you're not at your best And then it eats you and that's the alternative1:44:02So that seems like a bad plan unless you like being lunch meat so1:44:13So that's a long introduction to Noah1:44:24But you need it. You know because you can't understand the story otherwise and so because That's what the story is about and now we can go through the story relatively rapidly although1:44:35It doesn't look like we'll go through all of it tonight Okay, so we'll start with the next section of genesis And this is immediately after cain and Abel and there's a short story to begin with just a fragment1:44:46I called it giants of the Earth And it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the Earth So this is after cain and Abel that and daughters were born unto them1:44:59That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair and took them wives of all which they chose and1:45:08The Lord said my spirit shall, not always strive with man for that he is also flesh yet his days will be 120 years1:45:19There were giants in the earth in those days and also after that when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men And they bare children to them the same became mighty, men which were of old men of Renown1:45:30Now there's been all sorts of attempts to interpret those few rather jumbled Lines But I see it as a reflection of did a classic development of Hero Mythology1:45:41Which is there and this is sort of Nostalgia for the past one of the things Mircea eliade. A-- pointed out was that What happens to Human memory in Preliterate cultures because nothing is written down is that?1:45:56What needs to be preserved gets amalgamated and so imagine that you have a culture. That's based on fishing Let's say so you have to be a good fisherman. You know and are1:46:07Human beings you use simple tools to fish are unbelievably good fishermen They know every bloody thing you can possibly imagine about fish because otherwise they die so it's really important that they learn everything about fish1:46:17And maybe they've been fishing for like 13,000 years or something like that, so there's a lot of accumulated knowledge, and so then the question is well who taught?1:46:26mankind how to fish and the answer is fragments of individuals across history, but not there, you know remember the damn fragments you put them all together into the amalgam of1:46:37The heroic Fisherman you know the guy who? established the Pattern for proper fishing whatever that pattern happens to be one of the patterns might be don't take all the damn fish because there won't be any for the1:46:48next year or something like that, but all those fragments of discovery get amalgamated into Heroes of the past and then what you do if you're a fisherman is you act out the heroic fishermen of the past and so?1:47:00The idea that there were men of Renown or heroes in the past is Just a fragmentary What would you call? It's just a fragment of that sequence of ideas that back in the past the remove1:47:13mighty human beings who established the proper patterns of being and they were the sons of God who took the daughters of men to1:47:22Life now, and it's interesting too because we do know that the more confident men are disproportionately likely to leave1:47:32Offspring so it's a perfectly reasonable way of formulating the circumstance Onto the flood this is from Virgil a leotta who wrote a book called the history of religious ideas1:47:46Which I would strongly recommend it to three volume set it's quite readable, and it's brilliant. It's brilliant. I I really like it And this is what?1:47:56Ritchie Elias had to say about flood myths as it's been well known since the Compilations made by our Andre h hughes Neurons JG. Fraser who wrote the Golden bough the deluge myth1:48:07The flood minute is almost universally disseminated it is documented on all the continents although very rarely in Africa particularly in the desert for1:48:17unsurprisingly although and on various cultural levels a certain number of variants seem to be the result of dissemination rather than spontaneous regeneration let's say first from Mesopotamia1:48:29And then from India it is equally possible that one or several diluvial catastrophes gave rise to fabulous narratives But it would be risky to explain so widespread a myth by phenomena of which no Geological1:48:41Traces has been found well eliot wrote this quite a while ago. I think he wrote that book perhaps in the 80s Maybe in the 70s, but since then there actually has been quite a bit of evidence1:48:51announced in various circles for the existence of catastrophic floods that occurred within the relative memory of human Relative human civilization memory let's say, so the West coast Indians for example. I suppose1:49:04That's the wrong word the west coast. I don't know what to say I know a Croc Baccala carver who told me a flood story1:49:15And they have a story it's almost identical to the story of Noah except of course it involves giant canoes But it's it's the same story They release if I remember correctly a raven, but Noah releases a raven first1:49:28And then it dove once once the flood comes to an end and and it has a tower of babel issue To the same story, so the canoes are all put together. It's not one giant canoe1:49:37it's a bunch of canoes all together be right out the flood and Then the can you separate it and go all over the world And that's why there are people all over the world so anyways the story is very widely disseminated1:49:48But you know there were floods in North America, not that long ago, so there are floods you can look up the Missoula floods 15,000 to 13,000 years ago1:49:58And the coracle are people have probably been on the west coast for something like thirteen to fourteen thousand years so and you know you can you can maintain an oral tradition for a very very long time you think no, but1:50:09Traditional societies don't change that's where their traditional, and so they have the same stories over generations They remember the same stories, so when the Missoula1:50:19Floods which were a consequence of melting glacial ice Discharged up too. They figure there were 55,000 55 of them between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago1:50:30discharged volumes up to 15 times the volume of the Amazon river, so these are major-league floods and then Sears it all published a paper in 2008 called climate change in post-glacial human disperses in Southeast Asia1:50:43Claiming that there were multiple floods Particularly affecting southeast Asia between 15,000 and 7,000 years ago So there might Elliott it might be a bit wrong about the notion that there were no geological traces of such1:50:57Such catastrophic flooding, but anyways it doesn't matter because we're still looking at this from a psychological perspective, and that's fine The majority of the lugnut seem in some sense to form part of the Cosmic rhythm the old world1:51:10people by a Fallen humanity is submerged under the waters and sometime later a new world Emerges from the aquatic Chaos in large number of variants the flood is the result of the sins or1:51:22Ritual faults of human beings sometimes its results simply from the wish of a divine being to put an end to mankind The chief causes lie at once in the sins of men and the decrepitude of the world1:51:34It's a brilliant analysis Partly because it puts it it draws its lovely parallel between1:51:43Which I mentioned a bit earlier between the fact that things go wrong all by themselves But that you can speed that along by not paying any attention You know so if you're in a relationship, you know relationship takes an awful1:51:55lot of Maintenance And you know what it means? Needs to be maintained because you start developing some distance from the person that you have the relationship with and then that starts to become tinged with a little bit of dislike and hopefully not contempt1:52:07But a little bit of dislike, and maybe some some some emotional distance and you feel that and you think well It's hard to tell what you think but you feel that anyways you know that that's emerged and so then you have a chance at at that point to1:52:21repair Whatever's gone wrong, and that would require some retooling on both of your parts maybe one more one person more than the other but whatever we would require a serious discussion like look I've1:52:34noticed that this has been happening and Maybe it's you, and maybe it's me And we should probably figure it out because if it was you that be convenient and everything, but if it was me1:52:43then I'd like to fix it because Then it would be fixed And so that's why you listen to your partner because they might tell you that there's something Stupid about you that you don't know and then if you could fix that then you wouldn't have to be stupid in that way anymore1:52:55And it's actually one of the real useful It's one of the genuinely useful features of having a partner because you really want to be stupid and then continue to repeat your mistakes1:53:05Ad nauseam for the rest of your life? I know it's more convenient to do that than to have a you know Knockdown drag them out arguments about just exactly why you're stupid and how you could fix it, but still it's better to have the argument1:53:20So the chief causes lye at once and the sins of man in the decrepitude of the world and the sins there are generally either acts of Commission where people do things that they know to be wrong or they fail to do things that they know would be right?1:53:35Doesn't really matter Sins of Commission are usually judged more harshly say within the Judeo-Christian tradition But I think there might be a bit of an error in that because sins of omission can be a real catastrophe1:53:46And so here's the flood idea you tell me what you think about this so you know so there's this idea that a Judgmental being will flood you out if you continue on your wayward ways and that seems like a little bit of you know1:53:59it's one of the examples of Jehova being a little on the harsh side in the old testament not something that modern people really approve of so much because we like our God sort of1:54:10domesticated let's put it that way and unfortunately that isn't how it tends to work, but I've often thought about the reaction in North America to1:54:20the Hurricane end in New Orleans Because there's two ways of reading that right one is mother nature1:54:31has a little fit and sends a hurricane in to new Orleans and wipes everyone out and isn't that a catastrophe and isn't that an example of1:54:41isn't that example of our fragility in the force in the face of natural Power, but it is another way of reading it. Maybe this is unfair, but it'll do for the purpose of illustration1:54:53It's like you know the dutch build dikes right to keep the ocean back And they're actually pretty effective at that because their countries mostly underwater and it turns out that if you go to Holland1:55:02It's actually not underwater and so their dikes are working and so the dutch were very organized people and They better be because their country is supposed to be underwater right so you better be organized if your country is supposed to be underwater1:55:15And so they are very organized and they have a rule for their dikes. Which is they try to estimate the worst possible Oceanic storm that will come in1:55:2610,000 years and make sure that the dikes will withstand that well from my reading the Army Corps of engineers in new Orleans built the dykes for a storm every hundred years and1:55:39That's not so good because we live about 80 years let's say so that means the Probability that one of those storms is going to come lip and buy in a lifespan is pretty damn high and then so that1:55:51Perhaps wasn't The wisest of planning especially because some of new Orleans is actually supposed to be underwater, and then worse you know1:56:00Mississippi is a state That's quite well known for its corruption And so you might also say the tremendous amount of the money and time and resources that could have and should have and was planned to go towards fixing the problem didn't and1:56:15so the hurricane came along and oh my God wasn't it a natural disaster and the Question is what bloody well makes you so sure that it was a natural disaster1:56:25Right because if the infrastructure would have been maintained and built to the specifications that were certainly technically possible and would have actually been less expensive in the long run to build and everyone knew it and1:56:38The Hurricane came along and way build the city. Why do you think that's a natural disaster to me. That's a that's a natural example if you think about it from a metaphorical perspective of a judgmental God1:56:53Deciding to use a flood To teach a moral lesson and you might say well, that's pretty hard. What about all those flood survivors at sea1:57:02I care well the whole flood thing was kind of harsh and so pointing out that there were steps that could have been taken and and Also that I dealt in the aftermath have been taken even though everyone knows now1:57:15exactly what had happened is You might consider it a diagnosis, but it's irrelevant because what I'm what I'm really trying to tell you is how the mythological stories would line up on this because you can tell a story about mother nature1:57:30manifesting her catastrophe and potential for tragedy or you can tell another story of an absolute failure of the Human Social structure and the human individual level1:57:43Because of the corruption to address a problem that everyone knew was there, and so that's a good example of how things1:57:52How the flood comes when you're not behaving properly? You know and one of the things that's quite interesting about the old testament and the people who wrote it Is that they always assume that if the flood comes that meant you weren't prepared?1:58:04If that's the rule right that's it's like the a priori axiom. I think you got flooded out. Hey, you weren't prepared enough How can you tell well you got flooded out right? That's the evidence and you might say well. That's not very fair1:58:17It's like fair isn't the point the point is do you want to get flooded out again or not? Because fair would be well you better figure out why you got flooded out and fix it1:58:27so it doesn't happen again, and that's the moral thing to do when you're thinking about morality as Walking the path. It's most appropriate to get to the destination that you think would be the best possible destination1:58:42By the mere fact that it exists that is It lives and produces the cosmos gradually deteriorate syd ends by falling into decay1:58:51That is the reason why it has to be recreated in other words the flood realizes on the Macro cosmic scale What is symbolically affected during the New Year festival?1:59:00the end of the world and the end of the sinful humanity in order to make a new creation possible Well that's an interesting there's a lot of information packed into those few lines the daily added wrote because he also1:59:12had in that in the mesopotamian rituals the Mesopotamians would act out1:59:23The collapse of the kingdom into Chaos essentially at the New Year's festival. It's kind of what you do when you make resolutions because like it's a degenerate what you'd say is our proclivity to make New Year's resolution is sort of a1:59:36Degenerate ritual and I don't mean that it's bad. I mean that It's the remnants of something much grander so the idea was well the mesopotamians would take their emperor outside the city the walled City and1:59:49Once a year, and they would make a meal and they'd take off all his king clothes And then they'd whack them with if I remember correctly the priest would do that1:59:58And then they make him recount all the ways that he wasn't being a good emperor that year He wasn't being a good marduk because that was who he was supposed to be on Earth And that's the guy with eyes all the way around his head speaks Magic words and transforms Chaos into order2:00:12That's what vampire is supposed to do and so the question would be okay your emperor. It's like Have a little humility here because you're not god incarnate you probably made some mistakes2:00:22Can you think of any ways in the last year that you didn't take every? Advantage of every opportunity you possibly could have to take some spare Chaos and transform it into a bit of habitable order2:00:33That's a good thing to think about well That's what you're thinking about when you make a new Year's resolution even though you don't know it It's like well could you be a better person in the upcoming year well?2:00:48you can imagine the flood and then you can set yourself straight and Then you can prepare for it and that means maybe you can stave it off2:00:59But it also means that maybe even if you don't stave it off, you could write it out And that's actually the story of noah because what happens with Noah is that he can see that2:01:11things are not good and that there's a flood coming and God is maybe letting him know and it says in the story that noah walked with God remember2:01:20And that's what Adam did before he got all self-conscious about the whole thing he walked with God We'll talk about that more next time, but what that would mean. Maybe is because Noah was straight2:01:30and he put himself together and his familial relationships were good because it also says that that his antennae were working and he could see a little farther into the future than someone whose vision was completely obscured by2:01:43by fog and Chaos and he could tell that Things were not going to go well and so he prepared for it and because he prepared for it2:01:55well, then things actually went pretty well for noah even though the flood came, and so that's an interesting thing because that's a that's an indeterminant issue in human existence2:02:06How big a hurricane would it take to wipe out new Orleans everyone was prepared? Well the you're not going to wipe out the dutch. I mean that's going to be a tough one man2:02:15You're going to have to conjure up a pretty damn big storm to take out their dikes well, how Thoroughly defended to new Orleans be if nobody in the municipal museum and state governments was corrupt2:02:30Well end of the hurricane probably because that's something that we could clearly deal with we know how to do it and the same Applies in your own life is that there are floods coming?2:02:39You can bloody well be sure of that that's absolutely 100% Certain some of them are going to be personal some of them are going to be Familial some of they're going to be social and political and economic2:02:49It's like are they going to be catastrophes for you, or are you going to ride them out? Are you going to prepare? Well the first issue might be well. Do you have your act together well enough to see them coming?2:03:01With enough advance warning so that you can take proper measures. Maybe just decide step it Maybe just don't go where the flood is going to be that's a simple thing But maybe you don't have that luxury right and so it is going to be a catastrophe2:03:14Maybe someone in your family is going to get really really sick, right? And maybe maybe there's just a tiny pathway through that that everything doesn't fall apart2:03:25It doesn't end in divorce. It doesn't end in death it doesn't end in Sorrow doesn't end in catastrophe, but the Margin of error is like streaming down to virtually zero and2:03:35Every imperfection that you bring to that situation is going to increase the probability that that tragedy is going to turn into something Indistinguishable from hell, and that's coming. It's coming your way2:03:46Absolutely certainly and so then you might think well since it's coming your way Maybe the best thing to do is to put yourself together, so that when it comes it can be the least amount of awful possible.2:03:57So I'll close with a story. This was a very affecting story for me. My mother-in-law2:04:07had frontal temporal dementia, and she developed it quite young, she was about 55, something like that, and her husband, who was a very extroverted,2:04:17man-about-town guy - I grew up in a small town, everybody knew him - he was charismatic, drank too much, charismatic, good businessman,2:04:27quite a remarkable person, a real character, but not exactly a family man, even though he provided for his family very well.2:04:37But when his wife got sick, he really took care of her, man. It was something to see, because that's no joke, dealing with someone who has Alzheimer's, for all intents and purposes,2:04:47because they get taken away from you piece by piece, and that is not pretty, and then it's also hard, right. Not only is it catastrophic, but it's hard. And Jesus - he just stepped into that, like,2:05:00perfectly, and it was way less awful than it could have been, way le- it was just a tragedy. It wasn't hell.2:05:10And then, I was there when she died, and my wife's family are actually pretty good at dealing with death, as it turns out.2:05:20My wife's sister is a palliative care nurse, and you have to be pretty tough cookie to be a palliative care nurse, but you can do it, which is pretty interesting, because that means that you can go make2:05:30relationships with people at the last stages of their life that are genuine relationships, and people just die on you non-stop, and yet, you know,2:05:39she's a competent, alive, alert, fun person, it's like, two thumbs up for her, man. That's someone you can rely on in a tragedy. And her other sister2:05:53is a pharmacist, and my wife has volunteered in palliative care wards, and is also very good at taking care of people who are genuinely2:06:02not in good health, and so we were there when my mother-in-law died, and of course, you could imagine here's a - here's a deathbed situation for you!2:06:14Your mother-in-law is dying and everyone's at each other's throats! It's like, you think that's uncommon, then your eyes aren't open, 'cause it's plenty bloody common.2:06:23And then it's not just a tragedy, it's hell. And like, maybe you can stand the tragedy, but you can't stand the hell. And in this situation, that isn't what happened.2:06:33Just, everybody pulled together, and what happened was, well, she died. But what was so interesting was the family actually came together more tightly as a consequence, and so2:06:43although there was something taken away on the one hand, there was something gained on the other that wasn't trivial. And I'm not not trying to be all optimistic and, you know, "isn't the universe a wonderful place about all this." Like, someone died, in an ugly way, and it was harsh,2:06:59but, God, it was a hell of a lot better than it could have been, and maybe it was good enough! That's the thing, you know, is that - this is something that I constantly wonder, is that if2:07:08people did what they could to speak the truth and pay attention, then maybe the tragedy that's part of life wouldn't have to deteriorate2:07:20into the unbearable hell that doesn't have to be part of life. And maybe we could actually tolerate the tragedy, or maybe we could even rise above it, or maybe we could even2:07:29mitigate it, you know, because we can, we do that sort of thing all the time and so it's always an open question. And Iliad had put it very well-2:07:39Are the floods the consequence of the fact that things fall apart, or are the floods a consequence of the fact that people2:07:48make mistakes that they know they shouldn't make and make anyways? They sin, right, and that's to miss the mark, right, because that's an archery term, to sin, and that means maybe they don't even2:07:58specify the damn target, which is - really, you're not going to hit it unless you specified - or, having specified it, they just say, "oh, to hell with it. It's not that important."2:08:09It's like, you got to be careful when you say something like "to hell with it, it's not that important," because one of the things that might happen to you if you say "to hell with it,2:08:18it's not that important," is that you might actually end up in hell, for a pretty prolonged period of time, or maybe for the remainder of your miserable existence, because it's certainly the case that people do exist there,2:08:31and I've seen them exist there, and once you're there, it's no trick- it's no simple matter to get the hell out. And so, it might matter that the things that matter get addressed. It might matter that you do what you can to walk with God.2:08:46Like I said, we'll talk more about next time. And it might be that that is how you build an ark and are protected from the flood, even if the damn thing comes.2:08:56And the thing is it will. And this is a funny thing, too, that I've noticed about our education system, and the way we teach students, and their "trigger warnings", and all of that2:09:08absolute rubbish. I think in most of my lectures, I'd have to have a trigger warning every 15 seconds. So, as I tell my students when they're young, it's like, look, don't fool yourself, you know,2:09:22you're going to develop a serious illness, at least one, maybe two or three, and one of them is likely to be chronic. And if it isn't you, it's going to be someone you love. It's going to be your husband, it's going to be your parent,2:09:34it's going to be your kids. That's coming, and so is a lot of death and s- and pain. And so, like, just exactly what sort of person are you going to be when that shows up?2:09:44And that's the right question. It isn't how are you going to be happy in your life? It's like, good luck with that. It's a stupid ambition anyways, as far as I'm concerned, because it's too shallow. You know, happiness,2:09:55you're lucky. That comes - that comes and goes like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. If you're happy, man, more power to you. Enjoy it, enjoy it2:10:04It's a - it's a gift from the cosmos to be happy, but a pursuit? No, no, the pursuit is when the damn flood comes,2:10:13you want to be the person who built the ark. And that's what the story of Noah is about. And the thing is, the flood is always coming. That's another thing2:10:22that's worth commenting on with regards to this story, is- you know, there's an apocalyptic element to the Judaeo-Christian tradition.2:10:31There's an idea that the end of the world is always at hand, and that you should prepare to be judged. And the thing about that is, it's true! And the reason it's true is because2:10:44the end of your world is at hand, and it will certainly come, and when it comes, you will be judged, because it will be up to you to figure out what to do with the fact that your world just collapsed.2:10:56And that'll be a moral problem of ultimate severity, because it will push you right to your limits, and you'll find out exactly where your unaddressed weaknesses lie,2:11:07because that's what happens in a crisis. And so, the reason that that's an archetypal reality, and it lurks underneath the entire Judaeo-Christian structure (the apocalypse, the impending apocalypse) is because we always live in apocalyptic times, and your world is always,2:11:23in small ways, and large ways, coming to an end. And so what do you do? You prepare for it. You prepare for your world to come to an end.2:11:33And then maybe when the end comes, you get another world. That'd be a good deal. So, we're ready for this next week.2:11:55My question was regarding the online university you plan to create and the plans you have for that. We've spoke briefly last week, and I want to ask you. How can a student such as myself get involved with this process2:12:10Yeah, well an online university. That's a group Perhaps a grandiose ambition right but one of the things that so here's my here's my rationale2:12:22you know lots of things have dramatically transformed in the last 20 years and whole swathes of2:12:31Enterprises being wiped out that's happening in a more and more rapid rate as our technology progresses Right now newspapers are in the process of dying I actually think they're in the process of committing suicide, but they're in the process of dying and2:12:46That's going to happen very rapidly I think the globe and mail lost 10% of its readership in the last three months something like that and So what happens is that new?2:12:56Technologies come along to supplant the old technologies, and I've watched a number of businesses fail some large businesses I Knew some people who worked at digital equipment corporation when it was failing, and I've had some inside track into failing businesses2:13:10and I see when they start to fail they tend to the failure process tends to cap and then accelerate can have an Unbelievably good thing and this is what it looks to me2:13:19This is how it looks to me in relationship to the universities, especially in the us although not only especially in the humanities although not only so2:13:31number one So I Recorded three years of my personality lecture say so let's have three years of lectures on freud2:13:45Now what I should do with those I think is added them into one really good lecture on freud and then stop giving that lecture because why would I give that lecture again because I've2:13:54Already given it, and it said it events in good shape and if it's a really good lecture Then why does someone else have to give the lecture or why does 300 other people have to give a lecture on freud? You know what?2:14:03I mean, what's going to happen? Is there's going to be some really good extras on subjects? And that's all that people are going to need or want because the internet tends to move things towards Winner-take-all very very rapidly and2:14:16so it seems to me that we're already at a point technologically where we could identify a hundred things that people really need to know and do a sequence of lectures on those things that we're2:14:29Outstanding and then they could be updated and added to but the den it's like it's a done game, and it's free so I know it started thinking about this last year when I noticed that my2:14:40Psychology lectures had a million views and that was last april And I thought that's amazing a million views it's like what the hell that's I don't know what to make of that That's that's the best2:14:49That's the kind of bestselling book that you never write because no one ever writes a best-selling book So a million views that's something to pay attention to now It's way more than that2:14:58But there's videos and podcasts and that means that people can listen when you're doing other things, too And so that's really cool And maybe people can listen better than they can read that's a real possibility because we've only been really silent lee for about2:15:12Almost of like most of humanity for less than a hundred years and virtually no one could read silently 500 years ago It's a really new skill, and so maybe we're better at listening2:15:22And so all of a sudden is the possibility of disseminating high-quality educational material highly produced highly vetted to millions of people2:15:34for nothing Well, how are you going to compete with that then? Then it's worse because the humanities which have become completely2:15:44Degenerated almost completely degenerate in my estimation have abandoned their valuable intellectual property which is the collective wisdom at least for the west of western Civilization's just sitting there someone might as well steal it back and2:15:58Then there's the student loan debacle in the united states that's pronounced properly debacle debate debacle okay2:16:07Obviously I've read that word more than said it and so you know and so you know I write me today And he asked if you should go to a private college for tWenty-two thousand dollars a year to purdue it pretty2:16:19is to pursue an undergraduate in In psychology so that he could get into clinical graduate school or go to another university of State university for far less2:16:28I told them to go to the state university because it's the wise economic decision But you know it doesn't seem to me that it's reasonable at all to load people up when they're 22 with $100,000 of student debt that they cannot declare bankruptcy for it's indentured servitude and2:16:43The and to load up people when they're 22 or 23 with dead of that magnitude It's like how the hell are they going to be? Entrepreneurs who are going to take a risk with a hundred thousand dollar debt load and who's going to marry you?2:16:55So really jesus you know because another story. I heard recently was well. I just got married to my partner She brought into the marriage one hundred and twenty thousand dollars of student debt. It's like oh my God. It's like2:17:06It's crippling man like once you're once you're making a substantial Amount of money if you're fortunate maybe you're in your 40s You could handle a dead load like that, but in your 20s2:17:16It's just crippling so you know the tuition fees of ratt Ratcheted up like mad in the last 30 years the unity colleges and universities have become unbelievably2:17:26Administrative leeteuk, heavy, they're regulated to death by the by the legislative system. So there's ethics committees Which are so counterproductive that it's just unbelievable. There's this entire. Whole whole new Monstrous2:17:40Hyper accommodation movement that it's big borders on I don't eat. Well. I'll make a video about that soon enough It's absolutely pathological, and there's this whole postmodern2:17:50Neo-Marxist idiocy that's going on in the universities and so like how many mistakes does an institute plus Students aren't being taught how to speak they're not being taught how to debate they're not being taught how to write and they don't read2:18:03Difficult things they read French intellectual Postmodernists right and they probably don't read those either they read Secondarily derived pit they skim secondarily derived papers2:18:15about French intellectual post Marxist post Modernist from the 1970s and the standards have been lowered because there's too many people pursuing higher education and so I think okay2:18:28There's eight dimensions of success And on every single dimension. There's failure the system's done2:18:37The end so the Vision would be why not provide everybody in the world with high quality Education in the humanities for like 150th the cost you can charge for accreditation2:18:49That's a whole separate issue right accreditation, but that what the resources like why not make them available to everyone So that's the plan I mean, I don't know if I can do it or not2:19:00But it's partly what I'm doing with this biblical lecture series It's sort of putting my toe in the water but I have a plan and I have some good programmers who are willing to help and there's lots of people out there that would help God and be2:19:12flooded with offers of help I'd love to take people up on the offers, but it's not that easy to get someone to help you do something you know it so2:19:21That'd be the plan it's like so what would the plan be give people a high quality? education in the classic humanities teach them how to speak and write2:19:30Accredit them for one tenth the current cost and do it with millions of people instead of tens of thousands Some I'm asking what plans Jeff for the accreditation2:19:39Side where people can show something for what's the time these don't watch well one of the things that I would do for example is imagine that you are in a course and So you have taken exam? Let's say it's a multiple-choice exam. Just for the sake of argument because they're simpler2:19:54The writing issue is a separate problem well, so One of the things that you would do if you enrolled in the course is generate multiple-choice questions2:20:03That would be one of your assignments Here's a lecture generate 10 multiple-choice questions now you go to thousand people generating 10 multiple-choice questions Well, then you can do there are statistical procedures that help you figure out, what valid2:20:16multiple choice Questions are could have people vote on them for that matter if you put them on a website Assignment number two here's a hundred multiple choice questions pick the ten that you think are most2:20:27representative of the knowledge that you've acquired get a hundred people to do that so you get crowdsource the test construction And then you can keep making the test better and better as well because you could build that I'd like to build the system2:20:39So that it was self improving with a minimum of administrative interference and so Then what would happen is that as you got accredited?2:20:48So you start writing exams and maybe write more and more of them then you'd start to by voting power with regards to the content? Of the courses and maybe even the right to produce courses to put them up online so it's something like that2:21:00but our strategy would be to build We want to build a system. That's basically autonomous and self-improving right from the beginning, so2:21:09minimum of administrative overhead extremely low cost Widespread availability Crowd-sourced in its structure and an autonomously self-improving. I think we can do that2:21:21I don't know if I can do it but I think we have the technology to do that and then you think well So here's the plan you know because you're are. I'm always thinking of the point point B2:21:32What what's a good thing to do with life? Well, the good good thing to do with your life is the most difficult God damn you thing you can think of that would do the most possible good that'll get you up in the morning2:21:41And so because you think why should I get up in the morning? It's like well, you know I've got 50 million people to educate. Hey that'll do it2:21:50Really you know that's that battle that will overcome a lot of eggs. That's sort of thinking so Well, so it seems to me that it seems to me that it's inevitable2:22:02now Whether or not I can do it That's a whole different story But I can certainly start it and I'm going to start it my partner my business partner the guy who helped me2:22:13develop the self authoring program which thousands of people are using that now and We've helped thousands of thousands of students now stay in the university, so that's really cool. Well, maybe not given the state of the university2:22:26I'm contributing to the problem, but you know, but they're But they're sticking out their plans. That's the point. They're actually making plans and sticking them out, so2:22:37So I think that we can and we know how to start small with because the way to build a big system is to build a small system that works and then scale it and so2:22:46That's I've been talking with my partner His name is Daniel higgins another partner Bob peel he used to be my graduate supervisor at McGill And we've been working on this sort of thing for about 25 years and our goal being right from the beginning to build2:23:00Low-cost high-quality psycho-educational interventions and bring them to as wide a market as possible, so and then my and Daniel in particular has devoted most of his life to doing that it's been about 20 years now, so2:23:14So well that's a sketch of it all outline more of it on the web at some point But that's kind of what's what we've been deciding. What we've been planning to do2:23:23Yep look When you were on the rubin report not too long ago in that discussion you mentioned how use of psilocybin2:23:37straightens people out and Can produce these transcendent? Experiences, which is jarring for a person who may have? Personally wanted lesion that on the rubin which were happy with for someone who became a Christian as a result of their only time doing2:23:51Magic mushrooms was during piece of information I was just wondering if you could expand on what you find intriguing about religious experience And what we can know about the transcendent from them if anything2:24:06That's a tough one, man um the relationship between2:24:16entheogen accuse let's say which is sometimes what those chemicals are described and Religious experience is unspecified2:24:25But it looks like it's profound there was a man named Gordon was saw Who wrote a book I remember correctly called Soma? He was investigating the potential use of hema, Nida Muscaria mushrooms2:24:39Among the people who wrote the hindu, holy scriptures Thousands of Years ago, and he felt that he identified the chemical that they were using the sacred drink2:24:51the use of Ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms and so forth is well-documented particularly in North America and the2:25:00Evidence the empirical evidence that under certain conditions those chemicals can produce religious experiences is absolutely overwhelming That has been good research done recently at Johns Hopkins2:25:12Looking at psilocybin the first research that's been done on hallucinogens really in 30 years because people were so terrified of them in the 60s and for good reason2:25:24indicated that the people that they dosed with psilocybin about 75 percent of them had a mystical experience which they regarded as one of the2:25:33Five three to five most important experiences of their life and a year later Were characterized by a permanent personality transformation which was an increase in trade openness of one standard deviation?2:25:45Which is a lot by the way it moves you from 50th percentile to 85th percentile for example It's a huge move and that looked permanent now whether or not that's a good thing2:25:54That's a whole different issue, but they're very very powerful and they also did some recent research Showing that psilocybin mushrooms were an unbelievably effective smoking cessation2:26:06Intervention so if I remember correctly and I may have this wrong because it's been awhile since I read it an 80% success rate in stopping people from using2:26:16Tobacco with one psilocybin experience and so Well, so those things are very all of that's very interesting to me, and I don't exactly know what make of it2:26:26I don't know what to make of it at all not even a little bit but but the evidence for the relationship between2:26:36met mystical experiences and Hallucinogen use of certain types is incontrovertible, and I don't and I don't think anybody else knows what to derive from that2:26:46I mean one conclusion is something like Religious experiences are a common concomitant of going temporarily insane2:26:58and that it's not a bad hypothesis because you see for example in the prodrome of illnesses like schizophrenia And sometimes manic depressive disorder - on a Mannequin you do see the emergence2:27:10Often of religious type delusions. It's not that common, but it's not uncommon so it's definitely the case that if your Brain2:27:19function has been detrimental e affected one of the consequences can be Experiences that are subjectively experienced as indistinguishable from the religious you also see the same thing in cases of epilepsy2:27:33especially in the prodromus So if you have an epileptic condition sometimes you know that you're going to have a seizure you can feel it mounting and often2:27:42Or at least occasionally those experiences are associated with an elevation of religious sensation deepening meaning2:27:52that increases in its depth and complexity until it's Overwhelming and that's what? Subjectively brings on the seizure now2:28:02God only knows how to disentangle causality in this circumstance like that dostoevsky had seizures like that by the way So so that the the pessimistic Viewpoint is2:28:15Religious phenomenology is a consequence of brain disorder the positive side more positive side is2:28:24no, religious experience is a category of experience that's within the realm of human possibility and there are different modes of2:28:34Eliciting it and we know that there are many modes of eliciting. It's stinkin elicited2:28:44dancing under some circumstances music and elicited music elicits it regularly I mean basically as far as I'm concerned Rock concerts are indistinguishable from religious rituals2:28:54their rituals not like they don't come with Dogmatic overlay, let's say, but the ritualistic structure is there and maybe it's there just listening to music2:29:04What that means for the investigation of hallucinogens? I have no idea and I would also certainly Use the caution that carl jung developed when he was talking about hallucinogens2:29:16And he did that I think only a very brief number of times And I think in relationship to aldous huxley's original work on mescaline experiences. He said2:29:26Beware of wisdom that you didn't earn And that's very very smart, so I would say there's something to be learned about2:29:36There's something There's a lot to be learned about hallucinogens there may be something to be learned from them, but having said that if you play with fire you end up burnt generally speaking, so2:29:50All due caution is in effect. So one more I know you're now the flex lee fan, so I thought I'd ask you this question2:30:02After reading his book doors of perception in which he gives an account of his experience taking the pSyChedelic drug mescaline2:30:11He stated that in the final stages of egolessness there is an obscene knowledge that all isn't all that all was actually each he then went out to say that this is as2:30:23Near I take it as a finite mind can ever get to perceiving Everything that is happening in the universe I was wondering if maybe you could explain what that means because I've been trying to understand it for a monster2:30:42There's the neuroscientist a while back his name. I don't remember who had a stroke and she being a neuroscientist was analyzing the2:30:53Neurological consequences of the stroke as it occurred if I remember correctly the stroke Either temporarily or more permanently took out the function of large portions of her left2:31:05hemisphere And she had exactly that experience it was an experience of ego dissolution something like that that the the felt sense of2:31:18Identity shifting from that sort of Narrow Boundaries, maybe that you would define By the boundary of your physical being into something that was much broader and much2:31:29Like it gets it gets it gets hard to describe this without you know degenerating into hippy poetry from 1967 very very rapidly, but it's something like2:31:41A Sense a sense of of the underlying unity of consciousness that might be one way of thinking about we don't know much about consciousness2:31:50In fact, I don't think we know anything about consciousness and obviously consciousness is something that we all Share, but it's also something that we seem to also experience individually2:32:00But maybe our individual consciousnesses are something like the manifestations of something That's a more unified consciousness underneath. I mean that's hardly an original idea, but it does seem to be the case that under some circumstances2:32:14There are neurological transformations that make that Link more apparent assuming that the link exists now You could say well. No, they're just producing a delusion, but the funny thing about you know funny thing about delusions2:32:29Is that you've got to think well? how do you know something's a delusion and The answer that has to be like something like well hardly anyone else thinks that that would be criterion number one2:32:38But criterion number two would be if you act on the delusion does your ship sink Because if your sip sinks, then it was a delusion, it's some like that, but if you act on your delusion and things get better2:32:53well Then maybe it wasn't a delusion And there's no evidence from the psilocybin studies that have been conducted at johns hopkins that there was detrimental Effects for the participants and the participants certainly don't think the day effects are detrimental2:33:07So and I've been hesitant to talk about any of this for obvious reasons haha. I'll tell you something really funny I think it's funny anyways I had timothy leary's old job at Harvard2:33:18So you know and so leary is a good object lesson and being very careful about this sort of thing because it certainly2:33:28It isn't obvious that his net effect was good And I say that with some caution because leary was a very smart person and he was very creative2:33:37but he got tangled up in that hallucinogenic Madhouse you know that that characterized the say the period from 1965 to about 1970 and it didn't seem to me that that was altogether a good thing2:33:50thing is we have these chemicals now in our culture and people are experimenting with them like mad and making them illegal doesn't seem to be working in large part because2:34:01There I think there were seven known Seven to Twenty known psychoactive substances that were illegal in The year 2000 there's something like 400 now2:34:13Because labs all over the world keep tweaking the molecules right because molecule a is illegal so chemists just shifted a little bit and they have a new hallucinogen and2:34:24Which might be fine and might not be because now and then you can produce a chemical that's unbelievably dangerous Fentanyl sort of like that there was a drug a while back that I could name. I can't remember the name2:34:35It was an acronym. It was a fun drug if you took it once it gave you permanent irreversible Total Parkinson's disease so people would take it and they were frozen and that was it so mpTp2:34:48I think it was called So because it destroyed the same area of the brain that that Parkinson's destroys accepted in it right away, so2:34:57You know designer drugs, right? A Little Caution is in order How we might approach the issue of hallucinogen use in a mature Manner2:35:09Well, that's a topic for an entirely other discussion I'm not even necessarily sure that it can be approached that way although I would say at minimum2:35:21determining what it is that you're up to if you're going to experiment would be a good thing like what is it exactly that you're Serving they're not party drugs and not for fun2:35:31Right whatever. They are that's not what they're for and so, maybe they could be used By people who are carefully orienting themselves towards the good although I wouldn't say that that should be2:35:44Read as a recommendation Thank you. Yep2:35:53The theory next week, thank you0:00:00Biblical Series VII: Walking with God: Noah and the Flood (corrected)
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:17thank you so I look today and these lectures have now been watched by they've been viewed a million times so0:00:28that's pretty amazing freely or they've0:00:37been they've been glanced at a million times that's right that's also possible all right so well let's get right into it so last week I think was mostly0:00:50remarkable for the absolute dearth of content that was actually biblically related so that was I'll just recap what0:01:00I laid out and so that it sets the frame properly for what we're going to discuss tonight and I presented you with an0:01:14elaborated description of of this diagram essentially which I spent quite a lot of time formulating probably about 25 years ago I guess which kind of0:01:25accounts for its graphic primitiveness I suppose I was really pushing the limits of my 486 computer to produce that I can tell you so and it's it's it's a it's a0:01:38description representation of the archetypal circumstances of life and and the archetypical circumstances are the circumstances that are true under all0:01:48conditions for all time and so you can think about them as descriptively characteristic of the nature of human0:01:57experience that's not exactly the same as the nature of reality but because you can you can divide reality into its0:02:08subject of an object of elements and and there's utility in doing that but these sorts of representations don't play that game that they consider human experience as constituted constitutive0:02:22of reality and that's how we experience it and so we'll just go with that the idea basically is is that we always exist inside a damaged structure and0:02:33that structure is partly biological and it's it's partly socio-cultural it's partly what's been handed to us by our by our ancestors both practically in0:02:46terms of infrastructure but also psychologically in terms of the active learned content of our of our psyches0:02:55and so that would include for example our ability to utilize language and the words that we use and the phrases that we use and the mutual understanding that0:03:04we develop as a consequence of interacting with each other architect Lee speaking that structures always it's0:03:13always dead and corrupt and the reason it's dead is because it was made by people who are dead and the reason it's corrupt is because things fall apart of0:03:23their own accord and the fact that people don't aim properly let's say speeds along that process of degeneration and so what that means and0:03:33I think this is something worth knowing maybe I'll try standing back here and see if that problem goes away what that0:03:43means is that young people always have a reason to be upset and cynical about the current state of affairs and and it's0:03:54that way forever and so it's useful I think to consider such considerations sort of such conceptualizations of the pair of the as the patriarchy in that light because it's an archetypal truth0:04:04that the social structure is corrupt and incomplete and and what that means is that it's something that you have to contend with every moment in some sense0:04:15of your life it's a it's a permanent fact of existence and to be upset that the0:04:25structures of social structures or even the biological structures within which we live are incomplete and imperfect is to and to take that personally that0:04:35that's the worst part of it to take that person out personally is a misreading of the existential condition of humankind because it's always the case that what0:04:44you have been given and what you live in is degenerate and corrupt and in need of repair and it's easier just to accept0:04:54that because there's also a positive development and the pause development as well you've been granted something rather than nothing and maybe you0:05:06haven't been granted pure hell because especially in a culture like ours where many things actually function quite well so there's room for gratitude there even if it's a broken machine it's not one0:05:16that's completely devastated and it's not absolutely hell-bent at every second on your misery and destruction and it easily could be because many societies are like that and so the fact that we0:05:26happen to live in one that isn't corrupt beyond imagining is something to be eternally grateful for well so we live0:05:37inside a damaged structure and we also bear responsibility for that damage because we don't do everything we can to constantly repair it and you might say0:05:49well that's actually one of the fundamental you know people say well what's the meaning of life what they really mean is what's the positive meaning of life because as we've already discussed the negative meanings of life0:05:58are more or less self-evident well the positive meaning of life is to be found in noting the state of lack of repair of the of the walled city that you inhabit0:06:08and then sallying forth to do something about that to repair the breaches and to fix up the walls and to make the0:06:17structure that you inhabit as secure and as productive as it possibly can be and0:06:26there's no shortage of opportunities to do that you can do that in your own mind you can do that in your own room you can do that0:06:35in your own household in your local community you and maybe if you get good at doing it at all those levels then you can start to look beyond that and so there's0:06:44challenges that's the thing that's kind of interesting about this insufficient structure is that it has a set of challenges built into it because of its insufficiency and perhaps even because0:06:54of its corrupt nature that calls forth the potential response from you of heroic adventure and the heroic adventure is to man the barricades and0:07:04repair the city and you can always do that it doesn't matter what's what your personal circumstances are there's0:07:13always something that isn't right near you isn't correct isn't laid out properly that you could just fix if you wanted to and one of the things that0:07:22we're going to talk about tonight is the idea that if you adopt the attitude an attitude that's like that that the rule0:07:32that you should play is to make things better wherever you are however you can that what would actually happen would be that things would get better wherever0:07:42you are in all sorts of ways and that we've really as a species you might say or maybe even as singular individuals we we've explored that rarely it isn't0:07:53something that's put forth as a proposition that often and it's quite surprising to me and you know I had an interesting experience the other day I went to the keg I go there because I0:08:04have food allergies and they're very careful with people who have food allergies and the waiter took me to the table and he said that he had been watching my lectures and that's a very0:08:14common experience and he was happy about that and he said that he had two promotions at the keg in the last four months because he'd been watching my0:08:23lectures and like I really found that an affecting experience because you know you might say well he's working as a waiter at the keg and there's nothing particularly heroic about that and and I0:08:34disagree with that actually because I don't care where you're located you can do a hell of a job and I mean that literally at whatever job you have you can you can take whatever job you have0:08:44and you can make it a real nice little piece of absolute misery or you can do you can act like a civilized human being and notice that no matter where you are0:08:54there's a there's a richness and a complexity that's completely inexhaustible right at hand and then you can take that seriously and you can say well I happen to be a waiter at the keg0:09:06and perhaps that's not what I expected and he's a young guy and perhaps that isn't where I want to end up but it's not nothing that's a rich environment and I can make it a lot better if I want0:09:17to I can get along properly with my co-workers and not gossip behind their back and I can treat my customers properly and if an opportunity comes my way I can take it and I can see what0:09:27happens and so he said that's what he had started doing and that things were working out much better for him he was in a much better job than he was three months ago in three months that's0:09:37nothing right I mean that's a nice trajectory it's an uphill trajectory and that's what you want really an uphill trajectory is actually even better than being somewhere good as far as I'm0:09:47concerned because one of the things that really makes your life meaningful is the clear realization that you're headed somewhere better than you are now and then it's even better if you also0:09:56understand that there's a direct causal relationship between the things that you're doing and the steepness of that incline and so I get a lot of letters from people like that and they're Marse0:10:05most frequently young men although not always and they say well you know I've been listening to these lectures and I decided that I'm going to try to take responsibility for my life and so I'm0:10:16I've started to stop doing all the stupid things that I know that that are stupid that I know I shouldn't be doing and I've started doing some of the things that aren't stupid that I know I0:10:25should be doing which seems pretty obvious really if you think about it but it's obvious though it may be that isn't necessarily what people do and then they write and say you can't believe what0:10:35difference that makes and they're thrilled about it and so I'm thrilled about it when I get letters like that because I really don't experience anything as better than a letter like0:10:45that or a message like that because it's so good to see things that aren't so good replaced by something better and I0:10:54really do think it's an open question I truly believe it's an open question to what degree we could make things better if that's what we actually aimed at doing you know in some of the stories0:11:04that we've we've come already the story of Cain and Abel in particular is really an analysis of that problem which so remarkable it occurs so so early in this document it's such a0:11:14such a foundational story and it basically says well there's two modes of being in the world right there's one where you adopt the responsibility for0:11:25living properly for being properly and you make the sacrifices necessary for doing that and then everything will flourish properly and the other one is a0:11:35pathway of resentment and bitterness and rejection and murder and genocide and that just seems exactly right to me and so if the positive path beckons if you0:11:48can actually see what it is if you can if you can lower yourself enough to see what it is young Carl Jung said once that modern people didn't see God because they didn't look low enough so phrase I0:11:58really really like because people denigrate the opportunities that are right in front of them and there's no reason to do that because what's right in front of you is the majesty of being0:12:09that's what's right in front of you it's inexhaustibly complex and full of potential and there's no reason to assume that wherever you happen to be isn't as good a starting place as0:12:19anywhere else now you know I know some people have terrible terrible lives in situations that are absolutely unbearable and but I also do know that even situations like that can be made a0:12:29hell of a lot worse by the bad by by the worst kind of attitude that's for sure so so anyway so that's where you are you're in a damaged structure you're a0:12:38damaged structure you're in a damaged structure but you know at least it's got some walls you know you're not being fed to the Lions on a regular basis so0:12:47that's a good thing and you can you can emerge forward you know heroically magically to confront the chaos that constantly threatens the structure0:12:57within which you live and you can free something as a consequence of that you can learn something you can strengthen yourself that's the other thing because the way what you're actually made of in0:13:08many ways that what informs you what you're made of is what you encounter when you voluntarily encounter the unknown and so the more you voluntarily encounter the unknown the more you get0:13:18may and the more you get made of the more there is to you and then the more you're good at encountering the unknown and restructuring order and and calling forth proper order out of the potential0:13:29of being and God you got to think why wouldn't you do that since you can do that and it's an endless mystery you know I think part of it is that people0:13:38well it's also encapsulated to stump some degree in the story of Adam and Eve because what happens to Adam is when he becomes self conscious right he becomes ashamed of himself and0:13:49regards himself as a lowly sort of creature and there's endless reasons why people would do that because of course we're rife with imperfection and so he hides from God and I think that's0:13:58actually the answer to the conundrum which is that people don't aspire to the highest good because they're deeply ashamed of themselves and their0:14:09weaknesses and their insufficiencies and and so it's it's that's not the only reason I mean there's the desire to avoid responsibility and there's all the negative motivations as well like0:14:20resentment and and and hatred and the desire to make things worse I don't want to you know give us a give us too much of a break but but it's something like0:14:29that but it's okay then to not be in a very good place if what you're trying to do with that not very good place is make it better and one of the things I really0:14:38have learned as a clinical psychologist is that you just cannot believe how powerful incremental progress is you could you can do the calculations like it's like compound interest you know if0:14:48you make your life a tenth of a percent better a week man in two or three years you're in such a better place than you were that it isn't even like the same0:14:58domain and if you keep that up for ten years or twenty years you know especially if you're young and you start early you start to straighten yourself out and and fix the things that you can0:15:07fix you can transform your lives in ways that are completely unimaginable and god only knows what the upper limit of that is in terms of human possibility because0:15:17we are amazing creatures you know when we really get our act together and stop running at 10% of our capacity you know so so so that's what you do you've got0:15:27you know the fact that things aren't exactly the way they should be at least gives you something to do ooh you know and that's that's and and and maybe something great to do because0:15:36there's no shortage of suffering in trouble that'd be sets the world that you could conceivably ameliorate in some way and the utility and meaning the0:15:46utility of that and the intrinsic meaning of that is self-evident so it also makes me curious about nihilism for example and despair because I mean I0:15:56understand those emotions I understand them deeply and the intellectual mindset that goes along with it but they just seem beside the point to me in some sense because there are so many things0:16:06that need doing that all you really have to do is open your eyes and look at them and then decide that you're actually going to do something about them and you might think well what's within my scope0:16:15of influence is so trivial that it's not worth doing it's like it won't stay trivial for long if you do it not at all and I don't think it's0:16:24trivial to begin with I don't think that any I really don't believe that anything done right is trivial and my experience in my life has been that anything I0:16:33actually did paid off it didn't pay off necessarily in the way that I expected it to pay off that's a whole different story but if it was genuine commitment0:16:43to do something even if it went sideways and the outcome was really something other than what I expected the net consequence over time was nothing but good so every new frontier0:16:54that can be conquered is an advance forward and there's no shortage of frontier because we're surrounded by the unknown we're surrounded by our own ignorance and we can continually move0:17:05into that domain into the domain of chaos or we can restructure pathological order and that's that's the secret to proper being and so then you encounter0:17:15chaos that way you know and then you can regard yourself as the sort of entity that despite its insufficiency has the capability to conquer chaos despite the0:17:25danger of that that's the other thing because the fact that you're fragile is actually a precondition for your heroism because if you weren't fragile then there'd be nothing heroic about doing0:17:34something difficult right because if you couldn't be hurt or damaged or defeated or or end up in failure then where's the where's the moral courage in the0:17:43endeavor it has to be that the agility is built into the courage and so it's not it's not a reason not to engage in it at all in fact quite the contrary0:17:53and so well and so then you know what do you do well you put the city back together and maybe the way you want it0:18:02so that it's functional and efficient and beautiful and so the people can flourish there and and and flourish in a manner that makes them like it makes0:18:13them what would you say that makes them feel that the unbearable catastrophe of being is worth it for the experience0:18:22that's what you're aiming at and it's not an impossibility it's not an impossibility and then not only that not only do you repair the city when you do0:18:31that but you make yourself the sort of thing that continually repairs the city and that's even better that's the end goal because it's not the repair of the0:18:40city that's the goal it's the transformation of yourself into the thing that continually repairs the city and so there's just no reason for that0:18:50not to happen and the more it can happen the better well there's a there's an undercurrent to this story and that is0:19:01also the story of the flood and that's the fact that you know the city can become corrupt because people don't engage in heroic endeavor or perhaps because they engage in precisely the0:19:11opposite of that which is outright destructive behavior and this is also something that's worth considering too because if you if you if you consider0:19:20your your own manner of being you know you can say things to people like tell tell the truth and be good and those0:19:30aren't those are cliches obviously and so they lack power because they're cliches but you can take them apart and utilize them in a manner that stops0:19:40being a cliche and you do that by being more humble about them I would say because maybe you can't tell the truth because you don't know what the truth is0:19:49but one thing you can do is you can stop saying things that you know to be untrue and you might say well how do I know that they're untrue and the answer to that is well you need a whole philosophy0:19:59of truth the elaboration of an entire philosophy of truth to answer that question and so we're not going to bother answering that question because in some sense at the moment it's beside the point that isn't0:20:08the issue the issue is there are times in your life where you know that the thing that you're saying is not true it's a deception it's a lie of some sort and you're using it to manipulate0:20:17yourself or another person or the world and you're also possessed fully possessed of the idea that you can get away with it and there's a satanic arrogance about that in fact that is the0:20:27archetypal arrogance that's portrayed in the mythological character of Satan because Satan is precisely the archetype of the element of the mind that believes0:20:37that it can twist and and bend the structure reality without paying the price for that and you can't imagine anything that's more arrogant than not0:20:46because really do you really think that you can twist the structure of a reality and that that's going to work out for you without it snapping back it's so obvious that that can't work that that0:20:56everyone knows it but anyways back to the initial point is that you know by the rules of the game that you yourself are playing that some of the times0:21:07you're violating the rules of the game that you're playing and the first issue with regards to say stating the truth or behaving in a responsible manner would0:21:18be merely stopped cheating at whatever game it is that you've chosen to play that's a good start and that'll straighten that will straighten out your0:21:27life it'll start in the straight and start to straighten out your life and so well the flood what the hell does the0:21:36flood tie into this well you know we live in a corrupt structure we're corrupt as individuals we live in a corrupt structure and part of that corruption has just happenstance it's the way things fall apart but the other0:21:45part of it is that not only are we not aiming up we're actually aiming down and the flood story is a warning and it's a very clear warning and the warning is if0:21:55you aim down enough and then if enough of you aim down at the same time everything will degenerate into0:22:04something that's indistinguishable from the chaos from which things emerged at the beginning of time it's something like that because the0:22:13the cosmos that's presented in mythological representations is chaos versus order right the order is on top you might say and the chaos is always underneath and the chaos can break0:22:23through or the order can crumble and you can fall into the chaos and that chaos is intermingle intermingled potential and the way that you destroy the order0:22:32and let the chaos rise back up which is exactly how its portrayed in the flood story is by well by inhabiting the corpse of your father that's one0:22:42mythological motif and feeding on the remains and with no gratitude and no attempt to replenish what it is that you're taking from and the warning in0:22:53the flood story is don't do that for very long because things will happen that are so awful you cannot possibly imagine it and that will happen to you0:23:02personally and it'll happen to your family and it will happen to your community and it's happened to people over and over throughout history and it's quite interesting you know it's very soon after the story of Cain and0:23:11Abel when you see evil enter the world in the story of Adam and Eve along with self-consciousness and evil there is the ability that's the0:23:20knowledge of good and evil that's the ability to hurt other people self-consciously to know what you're doing and then of course instantly Cain takes that to the absolute extreme and0:23:29he uses that capacity to to destroy really what he loves best he gets as close as a human being can to destroying the divine ideal because of course his0:23:39brother is able and Abel is favored by God and Cain destroys them which Cain tells God at the end of that episode that his punishment is more than he can bear and I think the reason for that is0:23:49where are you once you destroy your own ideal what's left for you there's nowhere to go there's no up and when0:23:58there's no up there's a lot of down and you know there's an idea that was put forth very nicely in Milton's Paradise Lost when he was describing from a0:24:07psychological perspective essentially what hell is and hell is you're in hell to the degree that you're distant from0:24:16the good that that might be a good way of thinking about it and if you destroy your own ideal which you do with jealousy and resentment and and the desire to pull down people who you would0:24:27like to be let's say then you end up in a situation that's indistinguishable from hell and the way the story the biblical story unfolds as well it's it's0:24:36it's Cain and then it's the flood and so Cain adopts this mode of being that's antithetical to being itself at least a positive being itself he does it0:24:45voluntarily does it knowing full well what he's doing and the net consequence of this that as it ripples through the entire social structure is that God0:24:55stands back and says this whole thing is God so bad the only thing we can do is is wipe it to the ground and that is that is no joke that's exactly how things work and one0:25:06of the things that's extraordinarily terrifying about that sequence of stories and I believe this to be true I think I realized this independently of any of the analysis that I was doing of0:25:16mythological stories because I looked at what happened in places like the Soviet Union and Mao's China and in Nazi Germany and the most penetrating observers of those societies the people0:25:27who were most interested in how it was that those absolute catastrophes came about all said the same thing it was rooted in the degeneration of the0:25:36individuals who made up the society you know you hear what people will thought were following orders it's like no that that explanation doesn't hold water or that you'd be punished if you resisted0:25:46well there is some truth in that but nowhere near as much as people might think especially at the beginnings of the process more it was that people decided each and every one of them to0:25:55turn a blind eye to the catastrophes and to participate in the lies and that warped the entire societies and they went as you know they they feared their way downward to something as closely0:26:05approximating hell as you could hope to manage especially in places like Nazi Germany and well in all three of those places and in Mao is China and in the0:26:14Soviet Union and so the thing that's so frightening about one of the things that's so frightening about the stories in Genesis is they say something very clear which is that your moral0:26:24degeneration contributes in no small way to the degeneration of the entire cosmos you say well I would like my life to be0:26:34meaningful people say that really would you really you really would like your life to be meaningful you think maybe people would made a little nihilism to not have to face that particular realization and I0:26:44think people do that all the time it's a terrible way to to to realize but we are networked together in that that's the0:26:54price of or let's say that's the vulnerability that's associated with our intense capacity to communicate and it is certainly possible that the ripples0:27:05of our individual actions have consequences that are far beyond the limits of our immediate consciousness and I also think people know that too0:27:14they know that in the way that people know things when they don't want to know them which means they know them embodied they can feel them they can sense them they have an emotional response to them0:27:24but there's no damn way they're going to let them become articulate because they don't want to know and when you're feeling guilty and ashamed about the things you've done or not done and I0:27:33know that can get out of hand as well it's often because there is a crooked little part of you that's aiming at the worst possible outcome you know one of the things you said about the shadow you0:27:43know that young famous idea that everyone has a dark side and that that dark side needs to be incorporated and made conscious young said the shadow of0:27:53the human being reaches all the way to hell and he actually that's the thing that's so interesting about interesting about reading Carl Jung is he actually means0:28:02what he says it's not a metaphor it's like the part of you that's twisted against being is aligned with the part0:28:11of the cosmos let's say the conscious cosmos that's aiming at making everything as terrible as it can possibly be and you know it's a terrible0:28:20shock to realize that it's partly why people don't realize that it's it's something that people keep at an arm's length it's it's the same as recognizing yourself as a Nazi concentration camp0:28:30camp guard which is a very useful exercise because there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't have been or still could be one so and if you think0:28:40otherwise then all the more reason for assuming that you would be unable to resist the temptation if it was in fact offered to you and if you don't think it's a temptation then the then there's0:28:52so much that you don't know about human beings that you're not even in the game because if it wasn't a temptation then people bloody well wouldn't have done it and plenty of people did it and it's no0:29:01wonder so so things get serious in Genesis very very rapidly and and the0:29:12depth of the seriousness is ultimate archetypal that's it gets as serious as it can get the story of Noah and the0:29:25flood opens in a fragmentary manner and I believe that these passages are part of a longer story that we only have bits and pieces of and an also one that's0:29:35fragmented in its in its it its parts of more than one story and it starts like this it came to pass when men began to0:29:45multiply on the face of the earth and and and daughters were born unto them that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair and they took0:29:54them wives of all which they chose now there's an idea there there's two ways of looking at the past and you can kind0:30:03of see that in the political landscape that we inhabit now on the more conservative end of the spectrum people regard the past as the land of giants right there were the heroes of the past0:30:14who established the current conditions that we exist in and then the people on the left are more concerned perhaps with the what would you call it with a0:30:23lineage of corruption that's come down through the centuries and both of those perspectives are accurate you can say well there were there there were the0:30:32great heroes of the past who established our modes of being you can think of them as composite beings if you want that's fine that's a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it and you can also0:30:41think of the of the accumulation of corruption and evil that's come along the centuries as well and so you see both of those reflected in these initial few lines that the sons of gods so those0:30:52are the hero's saw the daughters of men that they were fair and they took them wives of all of which they chose then this statement comes in0:31:04and somewhat of a non sequitur and the Lord said my spirit shall not always strive with man for that he is also flesh yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years and I looked at a0:31:14variety of interpretations of that line because it doesn't seem to follow so clearly from the previous line and exactly what it means isn't obvious but it seems to be the first line talks0:31:26about the heroes of the past and and the second line says wait a second there's something corrupt about the human mode of being and one of the consequences of0:31:36that as far as God is concerned is that there are conditions under which the divine Spirit will not strive with man0:31:45what that means is there are conditions under which let's say the I don't think there's any other way of putting it is0:31:54the divine impulse towards the good will abandon you because of things that you've done and then the secondary consideration here is that perhaps0:32:04because of the degeneration of people it's not so obvious here that our life spans are limited that the spirit that inhabits us will only do so for a0:32:13limited amount of time and that's tangled in a strange way in with the idea of human moral culpability and that's posed against the notion of the Giants of the past and then it returns0:32:24to the giant idea the narrative returns to the giant idea and reads there were giants in the earth in those days and also after that when the sons of men came in unto the daughters of men and0:32:34they bare children to them and the same became mighty men which were of old men of renown and that's the end of that sequence of fragments it's it's very0:32:45broken but you can see a dual narrative underneath it and and one of the narratives is that there's the kind of0:32:55corruption despite the joy the nature of the Giants of the past there's the kind of corruption lurking that would cause0:33:04God to with hold his grace and allow men to deteriorate and and that sets the stage for Noah and the flood and God saw0:33:15that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that the and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually you know one of the things I0:33:27really didn't like about going to church when I was a kid I went to a pretty moderate church it was the United Church which has hardly even become a church now it's so moderate so to speak one of0:33:39the things I didn't like was the constant harping by the Ministry on the sinful nature of human beings like it didn't speak to me properly partly0:33:49because I really didn't understand what it meant and partly because it seemed well sort of what would you say was0:33:59self-flagellating in an unattractive way I don't know if there is an attractive way to be self-flagellating but it was it was and there was something about it0:34:09there was also wrote and and faked that I didn't like but you know in later years I thought about that more and I started to understand that there was0:34:18some real utility in asking people to keep the evil that they're doing clear and conscious in the forefront of their0:34:28imagination I think I mentioned to you guys last week this little episode from what we know of Mesopotamian culture0:34:37surrounding the emperor the new year's festival they would take the emperor outside of the walled city and strip him of his garb so that he was reduced to0:34:47just an ordinary man and then humiliate him richly and then ask him how it was over the last year that he wasn't a0:34:56spectacular embodiment of Marduk and Marduk was the Mesopotamian deity who made order out of chaos essentially and the emperor was supposed to sit and think okay well you know I'm Emperor and0:35:07everything I should be doing a good job maybe I should even be doing a great job and probably I'm coming up short in a bunch of ways and that actually happens to be important since I'm running the entire show I should be very very0:35:18cognizant of how I'm failing to live up to the ideal and that is what that call that constant clarion call that's0:35:27degenerated I would say an institutional Christianity that was actually the idea was look there's a bunch of ways that you're not being everything you could be and it0:35:36is not supposed to be a whip to knock you down although maybe it's a whip to knock down your pride the pride that stops you from being aware of your insufficiencies it's more like a call to0:35:46the opposite it's like well you should stop doing those things because you could be so much more than you are and that would be so much better for you and everyone else that it's just it's just0:35:56not good that you continue doing these things continue breaking your own rules let's say because we could certainly as I said we can start this game by0:36:05assuming that you should at least play the game that you're playing straight and so and it is the case that if you watch yourself it's a terrifying thing0:36:15to do but if you watch yourself you'll see you lie a lot like when I learned this to begin with I was in my 20s and I0:36:24was I'm a smart person and I was very proud of that because I was also a small person I was moved ahead one year in school and I was a small person to begin0:36:35with and so I was a very small person in my classes and also very mouthy which might not come as much of a surprise and somewhat provocative and so you know and0:36:45I got pushed around a fair bit because P everybody gets pushed around and my weapon was to be mouthy and it was a fairly effective weapon although it tended to backfire because you know if0:36:54you're really effectively mouthy with large obnoxious people then they tend to respond in a relatively negative physical way and so that sort of thing0:37:03was happening to me a fair bit and but I was quite I was quite proud of the fact that I was that I I was I had some intellectual power and that it was then0:37:17in my 20s when I learned about some of the danger of that because I started to read partly Milton's Paradise Lost and I started to understand the the danger of0:37:27the intellect and the danger of the intellect as far as I can tell is that it tends towards pride and arrogance and it also tends to fall in love with its own productions and so that's actually0:37:37Lucifer in Paradise Lost absolu suffer Lucifer is the intellect that falls in love with its own productions and then assumes that there's not outside of what it thinks that's the0:37:47totalitarian mentality right it's like we have a total system and we know how everything works and we're going to implement it and that'll bring about heaven on earth right that's that's a0:37:56that that's the totalitarian mindset and that's associated with intellectual arrogance and another at the same time0:38:06another thing what was happening to me so I was noticing that I started to understand what that meant and I also started to understand that there was more to life than the intellect much0:38:17more if I smoke too much and I drank too much and I weighed like 130 pounds I wasn't in good physical shape and like I had a lot of things to do when I went to graduate school to put myself together0:38:27and at the same time I was trying to understand why things had gone so crazily wrong with the world its encapsulation in the Cold War and what role I might be playing in that if any0:38:37or what role any of us were playing in that at the same time I was working out0:38:46of prison only a little bit I worked with this crazy psychologist he he is to put jokes on his multiple-choice tests0:38:55he was a really eccentric guy but I really liked his courses he and he taught a course on creativity and he was also a prison psychologist and he was an0:39:05eccentric guy and he for some reason like me and maybe because I was eccentric too and he invited me to go out to the Edmonton maximum-security prison with him a couple of times which I did and that was a very interesting0:39:15experience because I was trying to figure out what role each individual's behavior bore to the pathology of the0:39:26group was something like that and I went out there and I met a little guy smaller than me I was a little bigger by then0:39:35and he was a pretty innocuous guy and what had happened was I was out in this gymnasium it looks like a high school the prison which is really quite telling0:39:45in my estimation but and there were all these like monsters in there weightlifting and like they were monsters I remember one guy who was tattooed everywhere and he had like a huge scar running down the middle of his0:39:54chest it looked like someone had to hit him with an axe and you know and and I was in there I had this weird cape that I used to wear that I bought in Portugal and some boots that0:40:03went along with it and yeah I was like an 1890s Sherlock Holmes cape and it was really like it was from the 1890s because this little village was up on a0:40:13hill it was a walled city on a hill and they sold these things and I don't think they changed the style since 1890 and so I thought they were really cool and so I was wearing that which wasn't perhaps0:40:22the most conservative garb to dawn if you're going to wear if you're going to0:40:31go to a maximum-security prison so anyways I was in the gymnasium and the car the psychologist left and god only knows I mean that's what he was like and0:40:40all these guys came or all these guys came around me you know and they were offering to trade their prison clothes for my tape and was it was like I was0:40:52being made an offer I couldn't refuse you know and so I didn't I didn't really know what to do and then this little guy said something like that the psychologist sent me to come and take0:41:01you away or something like that and so I thought well better this little guy banned all these monsters so we went outside the gym through some doors like0:41:13school doors went outside the gym into the exercise yard I guess and we were wandering along and he was talking to me and he seemed like a kind of an innocuous guy and then the psychologist0:41:22showed up at the door and motioned us back and so which was kind of a relief and so I went into his office and he said you know that guy that you walked out in the yard with and I said yeah he0:41:31said he he took two cops one night and he had them kneel down and while they were begging for their lives he shot them both in the back of the head and I0:41:41thought hmm that's see the thing that was so interesting was that he was so innocuous0:41:50right because what you'd hope is that someone like that would be very much unlike you let's say and certainly wouldn't be like someone innocuous that you'd met what you'd want is that the0:42:00guy would be like you know half were wolf and half vampire so you could just tell right away that he was a cold-blooded killer but no he was this sort of ineffectual little guy who0:42:10was certainly not ineffectual if you gave him a revolver in the upper hand and so so that made me think that made me think a lot about the relationship0:42:19between being innocuous and and being dangerous and then another thing happened I met another guy out there and then a week or two later I heard that he0:42:28and a friend of his had held another guy down and pulverized his left leg with a lead pipe like just pulverized it and0:42:37the reason for that was that they thought that he was a snitch and maybe he was and at that time I did something different instead of being shocked and0:42:46horrified by that although I certainly was I thought how in the world could you do that because I didn't think I could do that I didn't think that I thought that there was a qualitative distinction0:42:56between me and those people and so I spent about two weeks trying to see if I could figure out under what conditions I0:43:05could do that like what kind of psychological transformation I would have to undergo to be able to do that and so that was a meditative exercise let's say and it only took about ten0:43:15days for me to realize that not only could I do that it would be a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would be and that's sort of where that wall between me and what being described as0:43:25the shadow started to fall apart and that also was very useful because I started to wreck I started to treat myself as somewhat different entity0:43:34because I hadn't been aware up to that point you know because I thought I was a good guy and there's no reason for me to think that because you're not a good guy unless you've really made a bloody effort to be a good guy0:43:44you're just not it's not easy and so you're probably a moderately bad guy and that's a long ways from being an absolutely horrible guy but it's also a0:43:53long ways from being a good guy and so but I had a little more respect for myself after that because I also understood that there was a monstrous0:44:02element to the human psyche that that you needed to respect and that was part of you that you should regard yourself in some sense as a loaded weapon it's0:44:12very useful around children to regard yourself as a loaded weapon because around children you are a loaded weapon and the terrible experiences that many children have with their parents are0:44:22testament to that anyways about the same time and and I don't exactly know how these things were0:44:31causally related I guess it was because I was trying to figure out who I was and how that could be fixed something like0:44:40that I started to pay very careful attention to what I was saying I don't know if that happened voluntarily or involuntarily but I could feel a sort of0:44:49split developing in my psyche and the split and I've actually had students tell me the same thing that has happened to them after they've listened to some of the material that that I've been0:44:59describing to all of you but it's split into two let's say and one part was the let's say the old me that was talking a0:45:10lot and that liked to argue and that liked ideas and there was another part that was watching that part like just0:45:19with its eyes open and neutrally judging and the part that was neutrally judging was watching the part that was talking and going that isn't your idea you don't0:45:31really believe that you don't really know what you're talking about that isn't true and I thought that's really interesting so now and that was happening to like 95% of what I was0:45:41saying and so then I didn't really know what to do I thought okay this is strange so maybe I've fragmented and that's just not a good thing at all I mean it wasn't like I was hearing voices0:45:50or anything like that I mean it wasn't like that it was it was well people have multiple parts so then I had this weird0:45:59conundrum is like well which of those two things are me is it the part that's listening and saying no that's rubbish that's a lie that's you're doing that to0:46:10impress people you're just trying to win the argument you know without me or was the part that was going about my normal verbal business me and I didn't know but0:46:20I decided I would go with the critic and then what I'd tried to do what I learned to do I think was to stop saying things that made me weak and now that I mean0:46:32I'm still trying to do that because I'm always feeling when I talk whether or not the words that I'm saying are either making me align or making me0:46:41come apart and I think the alignment I really do think the alignment is I think alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it because I think if you say things that are as true as you0:46:51can say them let's say then they come up they come out of the depths inside of you because we don't know where thoughts come from we don't know how far down0:47:01into your sub structure the thoughts emerge we don't know what processes of physiological alignment are necessary for you to speak from the core of your being we don't understand any of that we0:47:11don't even conceptualize that but I believe that you can feel that and I learned some of that from reading Carl Rogers by the way who's a great clinician because he talked about mental0:47:20health in part as a coherence between the spiritual or the or the abstract and the physical that the two things were aligned and and there's a lot of idea of0:47:30alignment in psychoanalytic and clinical thinking but anyways I decided that I would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak and what0:47:40happened was that I had to stop saying almost everything that I was saying I would say 95% of it as a hell of a shark to wake up and I mean this was over a0:47:50few months but the hell of a shark to wake up and realize that you're mostly dead would it's a shock you know and you might think well do you really want all0:47:59of that to burn off well there's nothing left but a little ha sleight of you it's like well if that 5% is solid then maybe0:48:09that's exactly what you want to have happened also I told you that story is an elaboration of this line and God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of0:48:20the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually to question worth asking just exactly what are your motives well you know0:48:29maybe they're purer than mine were and it's certainly possible I don't think that I'm naturally a particularly good person I think I have to work at it very very hard and I don't necessarily think0:48:40that everyone is like that but some people are worse than that and everyone's like that to some degree0:48:49so it's worth thinking about just how much trouble are you trying to cause you know and the other thing you might think about is that if you're not doing something important with your life by0:48:59your own definition because that's the game that we're playing you get to define the terms at least initially maybe you're prone to cause trouble just because you don't have anything better0:49:08to do because at least its trouble is more interesting than boring you know that's something you learn if you read Dostoyevsky does he ask you knew that extraordinarily well and so if you're0:49:19not doing something if you're not pushing yourself to the limits of your capacity then you have plenty of left over what would you say willpower energy and resources to devote to0:49:30causing interesting trouble and so also I would say this is also an archetypal scenario God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that0:49:39every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually that's something to meditate on and it's not0:49:48self-destructive because what it is is an attempt to it's like the diagnosis of an illness it's like if that does happen to be the case for you or to some degree maybe it's only 10% of you or something0:49:58or maybe it's 90% well then coming to terms of that is excellent because then maybe you can stop doing it and what would be the downside to that you'd have0:50:08to give up your resentment obviously in your hatred and all of that and that's really annoying because those emotions are very they're easy to engage in and they're and they're engaging and they0:50:18have this feeling of self-righteousness with them and that goes along with them but you're not doing this in order to put yourself down you're doing this in0:50:27order to separate the wheat from the chaff and to leave everything that you don't have to be behind0:50:39and it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him at his heart and the Lord said I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth both man and beast and0:50:49the creeping thing and the fowls of the air for it repentance me that I've made them what's the idea well the idea is that the cosmos that God created had become0:50:58corrupt and that's a funny thing because you know this is the other thing about Genesis that always hits me is that that's also true I told you that the0:51:08Mesopotamians believe that human beings were made out of the blood of King knew who was the worst monster monster that the dragon of chaos could imagine that's0:51:17a pretty harsh diagnosis but but the reason the Mesopotamians believe that is because they knew as did the authors of genesis that human beings are the only0:51:27creatures in the cosmos let's say the cosmos of being who are actually capable of deceit conscious deceit and0:51:36malevolence and the question is to what degree does the expression of that conscious deceit and malevolence corrupt things so badly that it would be better0:51:46that they didn't exist at all well you see stories there's a story associated with this in the epic of gilgamesh0:51:56associated with the flood that has exactly the same underlying narrative structure in fact some people think the story of Noah was derived from it where the gods who created repented of their0:52:06creation and determined that erasing it would be better than allowing it to propagate and you see the same thing in the Mesopotamian creation myth you knew0:52:15mulisch because the early gods so they're representatives of the Giants of humanity I would say make so much noise0:52:24and are so careless that the original creator God timeout and and her consort time app decides to wipe them from the face of the earth and so when you read0:52:39something like this if you read it from an informed historical perspective it starts to have a depth that makes it transcend this sort of archaic and fairy0:52:50tale like element of the story it's like I've read some very terrible things about what happened in Nazi Germany and and what0:52:59happened when the Japanese invaded China and just what happened generally in the history of mankind and things can get so0:53:08bad that it takes the imagination of a very bad person to conceptualize them and when they get that bad this is the0:53:18only kind of language that works to describe them you know that's another thing that I've discovered working with my clinical clients is that when their lives are really not going well you know0:53:30when they're close to suicide or when they're close to homicide or when there are things going on in the family that are so corrupt and terrible that they0:53:39reach back generations and they're aimed at nothing but misery and destruction the only language that suffices has a religious tone because there's0:53:48nothing else that's available to describe what's happening with the proper level of seriousness and it might be that you've never encountered a situation that required that level of0:53:57seriousness but that doesn't mean that those situations don't exist they exist you generally do everything you can to avoid being ensconced in them but they0:54:08certainly do exist and the probability that you'll encounter a situation like that or two at some point in your life is extraordinarily high you'll tangle with someone who's malevolent right to0:54:18the core and maybe it'll be you that is and that'll be a big shock and then these sorts of things these sorts of poetic descriptors start to become much0:54:28more real but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord these are the generations of Noah Noah was a just man0:54:37and perfect in his generations and Noah walked with God that's an interesting line because if you remember back in the story of Adam and Eve what happens to0:54:47Adam once he eats the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and wakes up the scales fall from his eyes become self-conscious develops the knowledge of good and evil is he won't0:54:57walk with God when God calls him in the garden and so Noah is Adam without the fall essentially and there's something that knows right that motivates God to spare him or0:55:12maybe to show him a pathway through the emergent chaos something like that and that's worth thinking about a lot because there will be situations in your0:55:21life where what you face is the emergent chaos and maybe that'll be some terrible catastrophe inside your family or maybe it'll be something that's occurring on a0:55:30much broader social level but the chaos is coming and what you're going to want to know unless you want to be a denizen of the chaos or even a contributor to it0:55:39and perhaps that is what you want because many people under those circumstances choose that what you want is to know how you build an ark and get0:55:52through it that's what you if you're if you're interested in life if you're interested in proper being and you're0:56:02disinclined to produce any more suffering than necessary then you want to know how to conduct yourself when the catastrophe comes so that you have a0:56:11reasonable possibility of of moving through it and starting anew so when when this old story says well God's not0:56:23happy he's going to wipe everything out it's like well you might want to take that seriously and then when it says but0:56:33there's one person who had a mode of being that protected him from that that's also something you might want to take seriously because you might want to know what that mode of being is because you might need to use it and so these0:56:43sorts of things are practical in the deepest possible sense they're real in the deepest possible sense and practical in the deepest possible sense so Noah0:56:53walked with God now I'm going to switch way ahead here because you know they said at the beginning of0:57:02the lecture series that the Bible is a hyperlinked text and everything refers to everything else and so there's0:57:11utility in reading it in linear order but it's not a linear document it's a document that that you can move through in an infinite number of there's an0:57:21infinite number of pathways that you can use to walk through it and all of the document expands upon and refers to all of the rest of the document and so I'm0:57:33going to switch to the sermon on the mount which i think is probably the key document in the New Testament and I'm going to switch to it because I think it's the closest thing we have to a0:57:44fully articulated description of what it would mean to walk with God so that you're in the ark when the flood comes it's the it's the most fully articulated0:57:56realization of that idea that that leaps out of the metaphorical because if I say well you should conduct yourself like Noah and walk with God and build an ark0:58:05obviously those are poetic and metaphorical suggestions and it's not that easy to bring them into practice right it's the distance there's a big0:58:15distance between you and the archetype it isn't obvious how to manifest it in your own life and what has to happen is the archetype has to be differentiated and articulated so that it becomes0:58:25sufficiently practical and personal so that you can actually implement it so I'm going to take apart some of the Sermon on the Mount it starts in Matthew five and I'm not0:58:34going to talk about Matthew five I'm going to talk about the end of Matthew six and most of Matthew seven consider the lilies of the field how they grow0:58:43they toil not neither do they spin and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one0:58:53of these wherefore if God so clothes the grass of the field which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven shall he not much more clothe you O ye of little0:59:04faith therefore take no Thought saying what shall we eat or what shall we drink or wherewithal shall we be clothed those are famous lines and that's our0:59:13Christ the hippie right it's like hey let it all hang out that's an old phrase do your thing and0:59:23everything will come to you and these lines have been interpreted in that manner many times but that's seriously0:59:32not the proper interpretation because there's a kicker with this injunction and the kicker is this for your heavenly0:59:45Father knows that you have need of all these things but seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you that's a lot different than the hippie0:59:55thing right because there's a very very very interesting idea here it's it's certainly one of the most profound ideas that I've ever encountered and the idea1:00:06is this is that if you configure your life so that what you are genuinely doing is aiming at the highest possible1:00:15good then the things that you need to to survive and to thrive on a day to day1:00:24basis will deliver themselves to you that's a hypothesis and it's not some simple hypothesis right because it what it basically says is if you dare to do1:00:34the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize your life will work out better than it will if you do anything else well how are you going to find out if that's true well it's a Kierkegaard1:00:44ian's leap of faith there's no way you're going to find out whether or not that's true unless you do it so no one no one can tell you either because just because it works for someone else I mean1:00:54that's interesting and all that but it's no proof that it'll work for you you have to be all-in in this game and so the idea is seek ye first the kingdom of1:01:03God and His righteousness it's like that's actually a fairly important caution when you're talking about not having to pay attention to what you're1:01:13going to eat or what you're going to wear it's like what it's essentially saying is that those problems are trivial in comparison and the probability is that if you manifest1:01:22yourself properly in the world that those things will come your way is extraordinarily high and I believe I believe that that's exactly right I mean I've watched people operate in1:01:33the world and I would say that there is no more effective way of operating in the world than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and then1:01:43strive to attain it there's no more practical pathway to the kind of success that you could have if you actually knew1:01:53what success was and so that's what this that's what this sermon is attempting to to posit it's like in in the story of1:02:06Pinocchio you know what happens at the beginning of the story of Pinocchio is that Geppetto wishes on a star we talked about that a little bit and so what you pedo does is align himself with the1:02:17metaphorical manifestation of the highest good he can conceptualize and say he says he makes he makes a commitment let's say he aims at the star1:02:29and for him the star is the possibility that he can take his creation a puppet right whose strings are being pulled by unseen forces and have it transformed1:02:39into something that's economist and real well that's a hell of an ambition you know and we're wise enough to put that in the children's movie but too foolish1:02:50to understand what it means it's such an interesting juxtaposition that that we can both know that and not know it at the same time you can go to the movie you can watch it and it makes sense but1:03:00that doesn't mean that you can go home and think well I know what that meant well people are complicated right we exist at different levels and all the levels don't communicate with one another but but the movie is a1:03:11hypothesis and the hypothesis is there's no better pathway to self-realization and the annulment of being than to posit1:03:20the highest good that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it and then you might also ask yourself and this is definitely worth asking is do you really1:03:29have anything better to do and if you don't well why would you do anything else therefore take no thought for the morrow for the morrow shall take thought1:03:39for the things of itself sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof I spend a long time trying to figure out without man to because it's another one of those lines that can easily be read as program1:03:54offer and anti amped you know you remember the old fable of the grasshopper in the end maybe not I'm not going to tell it but that works in the1:04:04grasshopper fiddles and the ant has a pretty good time in the winter and the grasshopper dies and so this is like a pro grasshopper line but it's not because it says something else it says1:04:14that if you orient yourself properly and then pay attention to what you do every day that works and I actually think that1:04:25that's in accordance with what we have come to understand about human perception because what happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim1:04:34is you're a creature that has a name you have to have a name in order to do something you're an aiming creature you look at a point and you move towards it1:04:43it's built right into you and so you have a name well let's say your aim is the highest possible aim well then so that sets up the world around you it1:04:53organizes all of your perceptions it organizes what you see and you don't see it organizes your emotions and your motivations so you organize yourself around that aim and then what happens is1:05:03the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems and if you solve them properly then you stay on the pathway towards that ape and you can1:05:12concentrate on the on the ate on the day and so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too because you can you can point into the distance the far distance and you can live in the day and1:05:24it seems to me that that's that makes every moment of the day super charged with meaning that that's how because if everything that you're doing every day1:05:33is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize well that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life well then1:05:42the issue is well back to Noah well all hell is about to break loose and chaos is coming it's like when that's happening in your life you might want to be doing something that you regard is truly worthwhile because that's what1:05:53will keep you afloat when when everything is flooded and you don't want to wait until the flood comes to start doing that because if your arks1:06:04half built and you don't know how to captain it the probability is very high that that you'll drown take therefore no1:06:17thought for the morale but for the morale shall take thought for the things of itself sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof that's not a particularly1:06:27optimistic formulation judge not that ye be not judged for with what judgment you1:06:36judge you shall be judged and with what measure you mete it shall be measured to you again it's a sensible piece of it's1:06:47a sensible description I wouldn't call it a piece of advice because I don't think that any of this is advice it's a description of the structure of reality that's not the same as advice and it basically says that you'll be held1:06:58accountable by the rules of the game that you choose to play and that I also think is perfectly in keeping with what we understand about human psychology1:07:07because you you are playing you have to play a game that other people will allow you to play and that will cooperate with you while you're playing and it will compete with you while you're playing it1:07:17but you have a fair bit of flexibility in setting up the parameters of the game but you don't have any choice about whether or not you're going to be in a game you're in a game and you're going1:07:27to be held accountable by the rules of the game because that's how the game works and so you might want to pick a game by whose rules you would be willing1:07:38to be held accountable and why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye or how will you say to1:07:49thy brother let me pull out the mote out of thine eye and behold a beam is in thine own eye well you might be wondering what a beam is and a mote is a1:07:58dust speck and a beam is a very large piece of lumber and so the issue is not so much the1:08:07blindness of others even though there's as much blindness among others as there is as there is for you but that issue1:08:18here the advice here the description here is you should be concerned about what's interfering with your own vision first and you should leave other people1:08:27the hell alone in relationship to that and so if your mode of being in the world is if you would just act better things would improve for me or if you1:08:38identify the evil and the catastrophe is something that's outside that someone else needs to fix or that someone's response someone else is responsible for then then you're not going to fix that1:08:56and you're going to remain blind to the things that you're doing and not doing that make things not go well and so it's just better to think all right I'm1:09:05probably blind in many many ways and maybe there are some ways that I could rectify that because it's highly probable that you're blind in all sorts of ways I mean it's in fact it's1:09:15virtually certain and so it's just more useful to think how is it that I'm wrong in this situation I'll tell you1:09:24something that I learned to do when I was arguing with my wife which happened quite frequently because when you actually communicate with people you1:09:33find out that there's many things that you don't agree on and that's because you're actually different creatures and so if you're actually going to have a truthful conversation then you're going to find out that you don't see things1:09:44the same way and then you can either pretend that that's not the case and gloss over it and then end up in a 30 year silent war or you can or you can1:09:55have the damn fight when you need to have it and see if you could straighten it out so now and then we'd get in a situation where we were at loggerheads we couldn't move and you know it would1:10:06spiral up into hate speech let's say cuz yeah everyone laughs because they know they manifest plenty of hate speech towards those they loved so one of the1:10:16things we learned to do was when we hit an impasse was to separate and to go our own ways and to go sit and think okay look we're at this unpleasant1:10:28situation can't figure out how to move forward I'd always think of course it's her fault obviously it's her fault least1:10:3795 percent but maybe there was something I did that contributed like five percent to it and so I would sit and think and1:10:47ask myself a question which was is there anything I did in the last six months that increased the probability that this impasse would manifest itself and I'll1:10:58tell you you have no idea how fast your mind will generate an answer to a question like that because there's undoubtedly some idiotic thing that you did that you know that you remember that1:11:08increase the probability that you're going to have your hands around the throat of the person that you love and then you can go tell them that and then you can have a conversation especially1:11:17if they do the same thing say look you know here's how I'm an idiot in this situation now the person says well yeah here's how I'm an idiot and then you're1:11:27two idiots and then maybe you can have a conversation so thou hypocrite first cast out the beam of light out of thine own eye and then shalt thou see clearly1:11:36to cast out the mote of thy brother's eye that's a hard argue with that ask and it shall be given you seek and ye1:11:45shall find knock and it shall be opened unto you for every one that asketh receiveth and he that seeketh findeth and to him that knocketh it shall be opened have some pretty optimistic again1:11:55but but again I think it's a description of the structure of the existential reality and and but by by which I mean1:12:06when I'm in my clinical practice and I observe and this is also the case with my students is let's say people's lives aren't what they would like them to be1:12:15and so then you ask why well forget about tragedy in catastrophe because that's self-evident and we're not going to discuss that although the degree to1:12:25which you bring about your own tragedy is always indeterminate but I would never say that every terror thing that is visited on a person is1:12:34something they deserved I think that that's a very dangerous presupposition especially because everyone gets sick and everyone dies but one of the main1:12:48reasons that people don't get what they want is because they don't actually figure out what it is and the probability that you're going to get what would be good for you let's say1:12:57which would even be better than what you want right because you know you might be what wrong about what you want easily but maybe you could get what would really be good for you well why don't1:13:08you well because you don't try you don't think okay here's what I would like if I could have it and I don't mean I don't1:13:18mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it to deliver you goods for status or something like that that isn't what I mean I mean something like1:13:27imagine that you are taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for and then you thought okay I'm caring for this person I would like things to go as well for them as1:13:37possible what would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case what people don't do that they don't sit down and think all right you know let's let's1:13:46figure it out you've got a life that's hard obviously it's like three years from now you can have what you need you've got to be careful about it you1:13:55can't have everything you can have what would be good for you but you have to figure out what it is and then you have to aim at it well my experience with1:14:04people as being is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it then they get it and it's strange because they don't necessarily an idea about what would be1:14:18good for you and then you take ten steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off and so you have to reformulate your goal you know you're kind of going like this as you1:14:27move towards the goal but a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria for success and so since success is a very1:14:37narrow line and very unlikely the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero and so there's a proposition here in proposition is if you actually want1:14:48something you can have it now the question then would be well what do you mean by actually want an answer is that1:14:59you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and1:15:08that's a sacrificial idea right it's like you don't get everything obviously you obviously but maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to1:15:19do to get it is ask but asking isn't a whim or today's wish it's like you have1:15:28to be deadly serious about it you have to think okay like I'm taking stock of myself and if I was going to live properly in the world and I was going to set myself up such that being would1:15:39justify itself in my estimation and I don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that I would aim at well one of1:15:48the things I found is that in in tests of this theory let's say you could try this this is a form of Prayer knocking1:16:00sit on your bed one day and ask yourself ah what's what remarkably stupid things am i doing on a regular basis to1:16:09absolutely screw up my life and if you actually asked that question but you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the question means it doesn't mean just1:16:18mouthing the words it means you have to decide that you want to know you'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl you'll you it's as if you1:16:29thought about this he thought you know he thought that people had two poles of consciousness and one was the individual consciousness that we each identify with in the other was something he called the1:16:38self and the self is the you might think about it as the divine within that's close enough approximation and to the universal part of your consciousness it's your conscience that's another way1:16:49of thinking about it whatever your conscience is but it's something that you can consult it's like the Socratic Damon Socrates said that the thing that made him different than every1:16:59in Greece was that he consulted his Damon his genius he asked himself how it was that he should conduct himself in the world and then he did that1:17:08whatever it was he didn't try to force a solution you know he didn't try to force a solution selfishly he asked I'm going to manifest myself in the best possible1:17:18manner in the world I would like to do that what would that be well you're perfectly capable of thinking god only knows how you're perfectly capable of1:17:29men speeds of imagination and and dream and fantasies god only knows how you do all of that what would happen if you consulted yourself about the best possible outcome for you you might get1:17:40an answer well that's what this proposition is or what man is there of1:17:50you whom if his son asks for bread we'll give him a stone or if he asks for a fish will give him a serpent if ye then being evil know how to give good gifts1:17:59unto your children how much more shall your father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him well this is a question about the fundamental nature1:18:08of being I suppose and one of the hypotheses in the New Testament which is different to different hypotheses in1:18:19some sense than the one that structures the Old Testament is that faith makes being good it's a very interesting1:18:29proposition and so the notion would be and it's an action-oriented issue as well you act out the proposition that if you act properly in the world that being1:18:39will reveal itself to you as benevolent but you will not know you'll never know unless you do it so this is a call to that act out the proposition that if you1:18:50act properly that being itself is benevolent1:19:01no reason to assume the contrary I mean to assume the contrary would be to be as cynical and bitter as possible and it's not like we don't have reason for that it's not like I don't understand why1:19:11that happens to people therefore all things whatsoever you would that men should do to you do you even so to them1:19:21for this is the law and the prophets and that's a reciprocity issue right it's like well imagine what would be this is another thing I learned from1:19:30Jung because as Jung reversed this because this is often read it's it's the golden rule it's often read as be nice to it be nice to other people it's like that is not what this rule means it1:19:40doesn't mean that even a little bit it means something like and we'll reverse it so that will concentrate on you rather than the other person to begin1:19:49with it means something like conceptualize how things could be great if they were great for you if you were1:19:59taking care of yourself and then work to make that the case for everyone else you know you see that in Buddhism because Buddha reached Nirvana right that's the1:20:09theory and then he was tempted with the offer to stay there and he rejected that offer and came back to the profane world because he felt that the attainment of1:20:20Nirvana was insufficient unless everyone attained it simultaneously and so it's something like that but it's treat1:20:30yourself properly that's a hard thing to do because you're a fallen shameful cowardly deceitful malevolent mortal1:20:42creature and so it's not easy and you know it and it's not easy to treat something like that properly and and it isn't obvious that people treat1:20:52themselves better than they treat other people I don't think that's obvious at all but maybe you could start with yourself and think okay I'm going to take care of myself as if I have value what would that look like and then I'm1:21:03going to work to extend that courtesy to everyone else and that's well the hypothesis here is that if you take all of the moral wisdom that mankind has1:21:14generated over its millennia of struggle evolved and then manifested metaphors story and then codified into law1:21:25articulated law and you pick one principle that dominated all of that this would be the principle and it's1:21:36interesting too because it's the law and the prophets and the law is the rules but the prophets are the process by which the rules are being updated right and so the prophets are superordinate in1:21:46some sense to the law and the proposition that's set forth in this particular statement is that this maxim which is optimize your own mode of being1:21:56and then work to do the same for everyone around you is not only the thing that's at the core of the law but it's at the core of the process that generates and updates the law to hell of1:22:09a thing for someone to say enter ye in at the narrow gate because that's what Strait means enter ye and at the straight gate for wide is the gate and1:22:18broad is the way that leadeth to destruction well who in the world could possibly argue with that everyone in the right mind knows that there's a million ways of doing things wrong and one way1:22:27if you're lucky to do things right and so the notion that it's a very very narrow pathway that you tread upon if you're doing things right that's that's1:22:36wisdom that's the line between chaos and order that you're supposed to be on constantly right it's a very very thin line because if you're a little bit too1:22:45far in one direction then it's too much chaos and if you're a little too far in the other direction then it's too much order and both of those aren't good it has did the balance have to be exactly1:22:54right and you can feel that and I truly believe you can feel that and I think it's your deepest instinct it's your deepest instinct and I mean that I mean that biologically I don't mean that1:23:04metaphorically I think that your psyche is arranged to exist in a cosmos that's composed of chaos and order I think that's why you have the hemispheric1:23:13structure that you have this is deeper than metaphor and then when you feel as if you're meaningfully engaged in the world when the terror of your mortality1:23:23strips away and you're engaged and it's timeless that's the deepest instinct you have telling you that you're in the right1:23:33place at the right time and then what you do is practice being there practice being there and that's that that narrow spot is so difficult to find you wander1:23:42around it maybe if you're lucky you can watch you can watch this as an experiment watch yourself for two weeks like you don't know who you are because you don't so watch yourself for two weeks and1:23:51notice there's going to be times when things are proper their raid properly for you yeah it's not easy to notice because when they're arrayed like that you're so engaged you don't exactly1:24:01notice you know but you'll see oh I'm in the right place it's like okay how did I get here what am i doing right you know how is it that this could happen more1:24:10often I'd like this to happen more often how would I have to conduct myself in order for that to happen more often and then you practice that and then maybe instead of ten minutes a month or ten1:24:19minutes a week it's like 15 minutes a day and then it's half an hour a day and then it's an hour a day and then it's four hours a day and maybe if you if you're extraordinarily careful then you1:24:28get to a point where you're like that a good proportion of the time because Strait is the gate and narrow is the way1:24:37which leadeth unto life and few there be that find it beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly they are ravening wolves1:24:47that's particularly good advice for today's political situation I can tell you you shall know them by their fruits1:24:56do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit well1:25:08that's what I learned from studying the history of totalitarianism in the 20th century is that a corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit and that's for sure and1:25:19so funny you know people who think when they're thinking about the relationship with divinity or the relationship with1:25:28God they think it's a primitive and childish way of thinking what if a miracle just manifests why can't a miracle just manifest itself and I would be convinced and the funny thing is is1:25:38first of all actually you wouldn't be if a miracle actually happened you would actually forget about about six months that's I mean you'd think that's not true but it's true you would actually forget about it because1:25:47that's what people are like but there are negative miracles that are happening all the time which actually lend some credence to my supposition and we don't pay any attention to that if we can't1:25:57learn from what happened in the 20th century then we are absolutely incapable of learning because what happened in the 20th century was as bitter a set of lessons as you could possibly imagine1:26:08and its associated precisely with this a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit neither can a corrupt tree bring forth1:26:17good fruit every tree that bringeth forth that bringeth not forth good few1:26:26fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire well that's a flood motif right there it's like we're constantly the archetype of the tree that's the1:26:35archetype of being it's the archetype of the self often what's the warning here1:26:44that if you're mostly deadwood you're going to get you're going to burn up and you can think about that metaphysically you can you can project that into1:26:54eternity and you can think about that as a form of Hell and the funny thing is is that when that's happening to you in real time it is like an eternity in hell1:27:03it's a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it but you can strip the metaphysical elements off and you can say well if you're mostly dead wood then a spark will light you on fire and1:27:14that's also very much worth thinking about wherefore by their fruits shall you know them not everyone that saith unto me Lord shall enter the kingdom of1:27:24heaven but he that doeth the will of my father which is in heaven that's an interesting line I think I mean one of the proper critiques of1:27:35traditional Christianity maybe this is the sort of critique that Nietzsche put forth was that Christianity had degenerated in its moral mission Jung1:27:44was a little bit more sympathetic and I'll tell you why in a minute but Nietzsche's idea was that Christianity had lost its way when it generated the1:27:53presupposition that human nnedi was saved in some final sense by the sacrifice of Christ it meant that1:28:02the work was already done and that and I'm I'm being I'm being harsh in my judgment for the purpose of rhetorical1:28:12simplification but the idea was that if you just professed faith that that had already occurred then you were granted eternal salvation it's like well it's1:28:23not so straightforward and I think that that's what this line actually represents it says how you enter into the kingdom of heaven and and again you1:28:34can think about that under the aspect of eternity or you can think about it as a psychological statement and the answer is quite straightforward is that you do1:28:46what Noah did to make him immune from the flood and that's to walk with God and that's what this sermon is about it's laying out the practical elements1:28:56of that and the practical elements are aimed at the highest possible good and play that out in the world and then you1:29:08may have the opportunity to inhabit the highest possible good that you're positing into existence perhaps not but1:29:17you can't think of any more practical way of going about that I mean if you build a house then maybe you can live in it if you don't build a house you're not going to be able to live in it if you build a good house then you'll be able1:29:26to live in a good house and if you build a perfect house then maybe you can live in a perfect house but if you just say that the house has already been built for you and that you can just say that1:29:36the house is being built for you well then the probability that you're going to be able to live where you need to live is there's no probability that you're going to be able to live where1:29:45you need to live many will say to me in that day that's the Judgment Day Lord have we not prophesied in thy name and in thy name of cast out devils and in thy name done many wonderful works and1:29:55then I will profess unto them I never knew you depart from me you that work iniquity see that's Judgment Day you know that's1:30:08an archetypal idea and partly it's archetypal because everyday is Judgment Day and the part of you that the part of you that's1:30:17equivalent to the logo say the part of you that's your own ideal sits in eternal judgment on your iniquity and1:30:26that's the con that's the source of guilt and shame and and and withdrawal and then resentment and then murderous1:30:36'no sand then genocide it's because you can intuit the ideal and the problem with intuiting the ideal is that an1:30:45ideal is always a judge there's no difference between an ideal and the judge and so you're eternally judged by your own ideal if you have no idea well then you've got no direction and no1:30:55meaning in your life and then of course the more extremely ideal the harsher the judge that's actually why young young was very curious about why the book of1:31:04Revelation was tacked on to the Bible to the book of Revelation that's a very weird book and you know in in in the Gospels Christ is I would say perhaps1:31:14primarily merciful there's a maybe a war in his character between truth and mercy but it's one of the two perhaps mercy and Jung's observation was the gospel1:31:25Christ was too merciful and that's why the book of Revelation was tapped on tacked onto the New Testament because in the book of Revelation Christ who's the ideal who's above the pyramid right the1:31:36transcendent ideal is nothing but a judge and everyone fails and of course the ultimate ideal is the ultimate judge and so that's the archetypal reality1:31:46there and you can say well I don't want to be judged and so I'll dispense with the ideal but then you're Cain because Cain is exactly the person who dispenses with the ideal and so there's no1:31:55escaping from it there's no escaping from eternal judgment that's the archetypal story you know people put a1:32:04lot of work into these representations you know and there's thousands of them they weren't messing around these are serious pieces of work you1:32:13know we don't understand them but that doesn't mean that the people who created them didn't know what they were doing these were geniuses who created these pieces of work it's not like they understood in an articulated manner1:32:23what they were trying to represent but what they were representing were the the metaphor is at the core of our culture to the degree that our culture is functional and good these are the1:32:33metaphors upon which it's founded and they're not for the faint of heart you know you say religion is the opiate of the masses it's like yeah then how do1:32:43you explain this exactly you know because if it was opiates you're after you might just get rid of that panel1:32:53especially when the other thing that's so interesting about the proposition if you look at revelations in Revelation and you look at the judgment almost1:33:02everyone ends up on the right side of this panel so if you are just conjuring up some sort of pathetic wish fulfillment why in the world would you1:33:12tilt the scales in that manner you think that's supposed to make people feel good I don't think so there's almost nothing about this picture that should make people feel1:33:23good it should if you understand it properly it should terrify you to the depths of your soul that's what the picture is for therefore whoever heareth1:33:33these sayings of mine and doeth them I will liken him unto a wise man which built his house upon a rock and the rain descended and the winds blew and the floods came and beat upon the house and1:33:43it fell not for it was founded upon a rock and every one that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not shall1:33:52be likened unto a foolish man which built his house upon the sand and the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew had beat upon that house and it oh I made a mistake and it fell1:34:04for it was founded upon the sand and it came to pass this is a very interesting line I really I really you know now and1:34:14then you run across lines in this particularly happens in biblical settings you run across lines that you cannot believe actually exist you cannot1:34:24imagine how someone could have imagined up and conjured up the line and these two lines are like that as far as I'm concerned and it came to pass when Jesus had ended these sayings that people were1:34:34astonished at his doctrine for he taught them as one having a authority and not as the scribes and that's something so interesting you know because that was another thing that really I didn't really appreciate about1:34:44the churches that I attended to and that would be that the lessons were taught by scribes and the words were mouthed but there was no power in them there was no1:34:55meaning in them it was it was as if well it was like when I was 20 years old and I was saying all these things I didn't mean you know they were words that sounded good they were like like gilded1:35:05cloth I suppose that you can that you can wrap around yourself but there's no substance to them and there's a big difference between listening to something that has substance and1:35:15listening to something that is spoken because it sounds like it should sound good and this line says that whoever spoke the lines that we just described1:35:25was someone who sounded like he knew what he was talking about and not someone who was just repeating something for the sake of sounding good and it1:35:35certainly seems to me that the lines that we just reviewed have the awesome impact of authority back to Noah but1:35:49Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord these are the generations of Noah Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations and Noah walked with God and1:35:58Noah begat three sons Shem ham and Japheth the earth was also corrupt before God and the earth was full of violence filled with violence any of you see the1:36:09new NRA ad you might want to look that up I would say that's the most shocking1:36:18manifestation of political polarization in the United States that I've yet seen most of it I've seen on the left/right the real what shocked me mostly has been1:36:27on the left but the new NRA ad that's a whole new thing so it's this attractive woman and doing a voiceover she kind of looks like Demi Moore well she's kind of1:36:37tough looking I guess Demi Moore could look tough now and then and she has contempt on her face and that's a1:36:46dangerous thing and in the background there's nothing but images of anteye far is and Berkeley riots and fire and protest and she's describing1:37:00that as a conspiracy essentially a conspiracy that involves the intellectual elite including Hollywood which is named by name the accusation is1:37:12is that there's a cabal of corrupt intellectuals let's say who are bringing the country to its knees1:37:21and that it's time to get your goddamn guns and so look up that and see what you think because there's lots of people1:37:33who would be perfectly happy if that was the direction in which you were headed and one of the things that I'm hoping is that we might be able to talk our way through it but we're in a situation1:37:43where every act of idiot individual idiocy will push us one iota closer to1:37:52the brink and that'll make the 15 percent of the population or 30 percent of the population who would love to see everything degenerate into chaos1:38:01perfectly happy because that's their aim the earth also was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with violence and God looked upon the earth and behold1:38:11it was corrupt for all flesh is corrupted his way upon the earth and Noah said and God said unto Noah the end of all flesh has come before me for the earth is filled with violence through1:38:20them and behold I will destroy them with the earth make the an ark of gopher wood rooms shalt thou make in the Ark from1:38:29that shalt pitch it within and without with pitch and this is the fashion which thou shalt make of it the length of the ark shall be 300 cubits the breadth of it 50 cubits in the height of it 301:38:38cubits a window shalt thou make to the ark and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof with lower second and third stories shalt thou make1:38:48it and behold I even I do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh wherein is the breath of life from1:38:57under heaven and everything that is in the earth shall die but with thee I will establish my covenant and thou shalt come into the are thou and thy sons and thy wife and thy1:39:06sons wives with thee that's a fairly optimistic twist on the story because not only is it Noah but he gets to save his whole family and down a couple of1:39:15generations and so that's a good thing to think about it's like as things know I had this client and she had a very1:39:25hard upbringing I would say not a lot of encouragement to say the least let's say a fair bit of discouraged meant and she1:39:34had a son and what was really interesting about her in relationship to her son is that all the things that she could have learned to do to him1:39:44given her extensive experience with being made as miserable as possible by someone who was hell-bent on bringing her to her knees she refused to do to her son right she1:39:54learned the opposite lesson from all her misery and torment which was not to move that forward down the generations and so the idea here is that if you walk1:40:03properly a name properly and act properly if you walk with God in this manner that we've been discussing is that perhaps that isn't only good for1:40:13you perhaps it's also the thing that will save your family and then by implication perhaps saves Society because that's exactly what happens with Noah right first it's him and then it's1:40:22his family but everything else goes and so by saving himself by acting properly and by saving his family he actually saves the world it's interesting you1:40:33know it's like the most profound people that I've read who've meditated deeply on the problem say of totalitarian catastrophe and I would put Alexander1:40:42Solzhenitsyn at the top of that list you know the his entire corpus three volumes 700 pages long each in tiny type1:40:52is a long scream about the absolute necessity of individual the absolute1:41:01necessity of individual honesty and ethical behavior as the only bulwark against totalitarian catastrophe and1:41:10that and I've read many writers who've attempted to diagnose the problems of the 20th century and I think1:41:19elgyn Edson he came to the same conclusions that Viktor Frankl came to as a consequence of his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps and Frankel1:41:29I am also an admirer of Franco but Solzhenitsyn takes it to an entire different level of profundity and makes an extraordinarily strong case that not1:41:39only do societies deteriorate because the people within the societies become individually corrupt but that the only way to stave that off is for the1:41:48individuals within that society to reject that corruption in the in the confines of their own personal lives and he tells endless stories of people that he met in the gulag and in the work1:41:59camps in the death camps in the Soviet Union of people and this is what he learned of people who were so incredibly tough that even under conditions the1:42:08most possible extreme conditions there wasn't a chance that they were going to step off that straight and narrow line there was nothing the authorities could do to move them and just watching that1:42:21was enough to transform Solzhenitsyn because of course one of the things he wondered was after spending a good amount of time in the work camps was well just exactly how did I get here and1:42:32it wasn't well it was Hitler's fault and it was Stalin's fault although it was definitely the fault of both of them for Solzhenitsyn it was well it was also his fault because he was playing the same1:42:42game he just wasn't as good at it and of every living thing of all flesh two of every sort shall thou bring into the ark to keep them alive with thee they shall1:42:51be male and female and so there's another message in this story which is that it isn't only Noah and his family1:43:01and human society that's dependent on Noah's appropriate actions in the world it's the entire living planet and in an1:43:12era of excessive and extreme and genuinely disingenuous environmental catastrophe Singh that's something to1:43:22consider very seriously think perhaps there's nothing better that you1:43:32can do for everything all things considered including those things that are outside the confines of human society than to get your act together1:43:41and align yourself properly along all of the dimensions of your being from from from the tiniest microcosm to the to the1:43:50ultimate macrocosm and that's the way that all of being is redeemed that's what the story suggests and we read it1:44:01you know a cynical modern people we read it as if it was written by primitive people who thought that it was really the case that someone could build a boat and put two of every kind into it and1:44:12thereby saved the world it's embarrassing to see things interpreted in a manner that shallow1:44:21especially by people who don't have ignorant as a justification you know these stories have to appeal to everyone right and there's lots of people in the world who aren't very bright and so they1:44:31tend to take things concretely like a child would take things concretely if you read them a story and this story can be taken concretely but it has to be because these stories have to be for1:44:40everyone but if you're sophisticated that doesn't mean that you should dismiss it as if it's written for a child it's maybe you have the obligation to look a bit deeper and think for a1:44:49moment that it wouldn't been conserved for these many thousands of years if there wasn't something more to it than a casual intellectual dismissal would indicate and take thou on to the of all1:45:00food that is eaten and thou shalt gather it to thee and shall be food for the end for them thus did Noah according to all that God commanded him so did he and the1:45:12Lord said unto Noah come thou and all thy house into the ark for the I have seen righteous before me in this generation of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens the male1:45:22and his female and a beasts that are clean but not clean by two the male and his female of follows also of the air by sevens the male and the female to keep seed alive upon the face of all the1:45:31earth for yet seven days I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights and every living substance that I've made will I destroy from off1:45:40the face of the earth and Noah did according unto all depth lord commanded him and though it was 600 years old when the flood of waters was1:45:49upon the earth and Noah went in and his sons and his wife and his sons wives with him into the ark because of the waters of the flood of clean beasts and the beasts that are not clean enough follows and of1:45:59everything that creepeth upon the earth they went in 2 and 2 unto Noah into the ark the male and the female as God had commanded Noah and it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood1:46:09were upon the earth in the six hundredth year of Noah's life in the second month the seventeenth day of the month the same day were all the Fountains of the1:46:18great deep broken up and the windows of heaven were opened and the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights and the self-same day entered Noah and1:46:27Shem and ham and Japheth sons of Noah and Noah's wife and 3 wives of his sons with them into the ark today1:46:36and every beast after his kind and all of the cattle after their kind and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind and every fowl after his kind every bird of every sort and they went into Noah unto Noah into1:46:46the ark two and two of all flesh wherein is the breath of life that makes know1:46:55where they ultimate Shepherd right Shepherd of all things tender of the1:47:05garden and Shepherd of all things that's a hell of a roll and maybe that's the one that keeps you afloat during the1:47:14flood and they that went in went in male and female of all flesh as God had commanded him and the Lord showed him in and the flood was forty days upon the1:47:23earth and the waters increased and bear up the ark and it was left up above the earth and the waters prevailed and were increased greatly upon the earth 151:47:32cubits upward did the waters prevail and the mountains were covered and all flesh died that moved upon the earth both of1:47:42fallen of cattle and the beasts and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth and every man and all in whose nostrils was the breath of life of all that was in the dry land died and every1:47:54living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the earth both man and cattle and the creeping things in the fall of the heaven and they were destroyed from the earth and1:48:03Noah only remained alive and they that were with him in the ark and the waters prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days and God1:48:12remembered Noah every living thing and all the cattle that was with him in the ark and God made a wind to pass over the earth and the waters receded the1:48:21Fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped in the rain from heaven was restrained and the waters returned from off the earth continually and after the end of a hundred and fifty days the waters were1:48:30abated and the ark rested in the seventh month on the seventeenth day of the month upon the mountains of Ararat and the waters decreased continually until the tenth month in the tenth month on1:48:41the first day of the month were the tops of the mountains seen and it came to pass at the end of 40 days that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made and he sent forth a raven which1:48:51went to and fro until the waters were dried up from off the earth and he also sent forth a dove from him to see if the water's were abated from off the face of the ground but the devil found no rest1:49:00for the sole of her foot and she returned unto him in the ark for the waters were on the face of the whole earth then he put forth his hand and took her and pulled her in unto him into1:49:10the ark and he stayed yet another seven days and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark and the Dove came in to him in the evening and lo in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off so Noah1:49:20knew that the waters were abated from off the earth and he stayed there yet another seven days and sent forth the Dove which returned not again unto him anymore and it came to pass in the six hundredth1:49:30and first year in the first month the first day of the month the waters were dried up from off the earth and Noah removed the covering of the ark had looked up and behold the face of the1:49:41ground was dry and in the second month on the seventh and twentieth day of the month was the earth dried and God spake unto Noah saying go forth of the ark1:49:50thou and thy wife and thy sons and thy sons wives with thee bring forth with the every living thing that is with thee of all flesh both of fowl and of cattle1:50:00and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth that they may breed abundantly in the earth and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth and Noah went forth and his sons and his1:50:09wife and his sons wives with them beast creeping thing every fowl and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth after their kinds went forth out of the ark and Noah builded an altar unto the Lord1:50:20and took of every clean beast and of every clean fowl and offered burnt offerings on the altar immediate returns the sacrificial motif and the Lord1:50:34smelled a sweet savour and that's Noah's proper sacrifice and the Lord said into his heart I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake for the1:50:44imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth neither will I again smite any more every living thing as I have done while the earth remaineth seedtime and1:50:53harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease and God blessed Noah and his sons and said unto them be fruitful and multiply1:51:03and replenish the earth and the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air upon all that moveth1:51:12upon the earth upon all the fishes of the sea into your hand are they delivered1:51:24you know I've heard commentators David Suzuki for example who claimed that the1:51:36substructure of Western culture in lines such as this deliver the earth over to1:51:46human beings and and justify our ravaging of the of being but I don't1:51:55think that that's a very careful reading and it seems to me that given such matters given the importance of such1:52:04matters that a very close reading is actually necessary you know in the story of Adam and Eve when Adam and Eve are thrown out of the garden God tells Eve1:52:14that she's going to be subordinated to her husband he doesn't say that that's what should happened he says that's what's going to happen1:52:23and the same thing as far as I'm concerned is contained in lines like this isn't necessarily that this is something that should happen it's something that did to happen it's quite1:52:33remarkable you know to think about how long ago these lines were penned it wasn't obvious until perhaps the 1960s1:52:42that we had dominated the earth so completely that it's very future existence within our hands and that's a prophetic element of this tale and the1:52:55fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air and upon all that moveth upon the earth and upon all the fishes of the sea into your hand are1:53:04they delivered like that's exactly right every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you even as the green herb I've given you all things have I given you1:53:15all things but flesh with the life thereof which is the blood thereof shall you not eat and surely your blood of your lives will I require at the hand of1:53:25every beast will I require it at the hand of man at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man this is a hard section to interpret but what it means is something like this God1:53:37describes the dominion over the planet that vilified humanity will have and note the power that goes along with that1:53:47and then puts a limitation on it and the limitation is maintain the sanctity of life despite your power and although1:53:56it's not easy to extract from the manner in which this is being translated what God is telling Noah is that if you kill1:54:05yourself if you kill someone else and if any animal kills a human being that there will be a price to pay for that so there's a an opportunity which is that1:54:17the descendants of Noah can dominate the earth but there's a moral limitation placed on that which is nonetheless life1:54:26itself is to be regarded as sanctified and sacred whoever shared if man's blood1:54:35by man shall his blood be shed for in the image of God made he mad and you be you fruitful and multiply bring forth abundantly in the earth and multiply1:54:44therein and God spake unto Noah and to his sons with him saying and I behold I establish my covenant with you and with1:54:53your seed after you and with every living creature that is with you of the fowl and the cattle and of every beast of Earth that is with you for all that go out of the ark to every beast of the1:55:02earth and I will establish my covenant with you neither shall all flesh be cut off anymore by the waters of a flood1:55:11neither shall there be anymore a flood to destroy the earth and God said this is the token of the Covenant which I make between me and you and1:55:20every living creature that is with you for perpetual generations I do set my bow in the cloud and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth and shall come to pass when I1:55:29bring a cloud over the earth that the bow shall be seen in the cloud and I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh and the waters1:55:38shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh there's a negotiated agreement there of sorts and the negotiated agreement is as far as I can tell1:55:50to the degree that humanity agrees to act in the manner of Noah then the threat of catastrophic destruction will1:56:00remain at bay and the bow shall be in1:56:10the cloud and I will look upon it that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth and God said unto Noah this is the token of the1:56:20Covenant which I've established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth this is the token of the Covenant which1:56:31I've established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth so that's a good place to stop and there's no1:56:42lecture next week by the way because the theater was booked so there'll be a one-week break and then when we get back we'll finish the story of Noah there's1:56:51not much left of it we'll talk about the Tower of Babel which is a very short story but a very very interesting one and then we'll move on to the story of Abraham and so thank you very much for1:57:02coming and we'll see you in two weeks [Applause]1:57:22now is the person who has the notification for the meetup after this here and do they have the notification okay because if you give that to me this1:57:31time I'll remember to read it before everyone leaves so do you want to start okay so see it let's see if the mic is1:57:42working because lots of people will listen to this question and so okay okay so you said on a recent livestream that you were to you didn't have enough1:57:51energy to answer this question but you said it was intriguing so I was wondering if you had the energy to answer how someone might help someone1:58:01that has borderline personality disorder by example by example no no no I don't I1:58:16don't mean that precisely I mean that the let's not take borderline personality disorder precisely as the example okay I understand the question1:58:26the question to some degree is how do you help someone that's lost and answer that is if they aren't willing to not be lost you cannot help them and I would1:58:37also say that as a clinician you see I mean it's an it's a statement that's informed I would say by mythological knowledge but also by straight clinical1:58:49wisdom not mine particularly I mean one of the things that Carl Rogers pointed out was that there were necessary preconditions for entering into a therapeutic relationship and that would1:58:59be really any relationship where the mutual flourishing of the two people involved was the Paramount goal and one of the preconditions was that both people had to want that to happen and1:59:09Rogers believed he didn't know how to get the horse to drink when she had brought it to the water and I thought about that a lot because when people are1:59:20really lost sometimes they're so lost that that they can't be found and I think the only thing that you can do in a situation like that1:59:29is get your life together and she and manifest the reality of an alternative mode of being that's what you've got and1:59:39so that's the only way I know of to solve an intractable problem and I would say the reason that I went down that1:59:49direction with regards to borderline personality disorders because it's one of the most serious of the personality sort is very difficult to treat and so I'll generalize from that to situations2:00:01that are very difficult to deal with and you know there's a statement to and this has nothing to do with borderline personality disorder per se there's a statement in the New Testament that's2:00:11really vicious in fact there's a number of them but this is a particularly vicious one and that is don't cast pearls before swine and what that means2:00:20is if you're trying to help and it doesn't work then stop helping it's not helping right it may be just wasting2:00:29your time it might be making things worse no if you're if you're offering something and it's not taken then perhaps you should be offering it somewhere else and2:00:39sometimes if you offer hand and the person won't take it you have to stop offering the hand and then what you do is you go off and you have your life and2:00:50sometimes that means in people's lives for example that they have to leave their family members behind there's a scene in the New Testament this is another very harsh scene where Christ is walking down the road with his disciples2:01:00I hope I've got this story right but I've got it essentially right and his mother calls to him and says I believe that he's supposed to come back to the2:01:10home because his uncle has died and that there's going to be a funeral and he turns to his mother and says something like let the dead bury their dead I'm2:01:20about my father's business it's something like that and you read that you think huh that should have been edited out no but it shouldn't have been2:01:30added it out because it's exactly right because sometimes the thing you do is walk away because there's no other solution and if you are trapped in2:01:41pathologic relationships and you see no way out of them if you if someone who is thinking has their hands around your neck and is pulling you down you're not obligated to drown with them now there's a rule too2:01:52if you're a lifeguard you know some of you have had lifeguard training how do you approach someone who's drowning and panicking in the water feed out right2:02:01like this it's like I'll save you but that doesn't mean you get to drown me while I'm doing it and if it's you drown or both of us drown it's you drown and2:02:12that's wisdom that's not cruelty right so yeah a couple of questions about2:02:28dialog and engaging in dialogue with people so the first issue that I face is I have a very high need for intellectual stimulation and I can't get that with2:02:39most people it's something like you can you can have a dialogue for a time but then titrate openness yeah and then I2:02:49would then they started run out of ideas they can keep up and it sort of falls apart okay this is the problem that intellectuals have quite frequently is2:02:58that they sort of once they start reading difficult and rewarding stuff yeah they stopped wanting to talk to regular people and I think that contributes to the disconnect that you2:03:08see between intellectuals and working-class people and stuff like that and the other question I had was about okay wait I don't know if that's a question I mean I believe there's a2:03:19question in there but I digress tchen is how did we dress that how should I dress it and is that something that can be dressed well part of part of the answer2:03:28to that is that's what the universities were for I mean you know not everybody is equipped to or interested in engaging in high-level discussion of abstract and2:03:38creative ideas you know you hear this idea that everyone's creative that's a lie it's as straightforward as that drew creativity is very very rare and so and2:03:49if you happen to be a creative person or if you happen to be someone who's profoundly interested in ideas you are in a pronounced minority just as you are if you happen to be extremely extroverted2:03:59or extremely agreeable or extremely conscientious these are minority issues and what you do is you find like-minded people who are capable of engaging that2:04:08you know a heavy weight with heavy weight weight lifters compete with heavy weight weight lifters for a reason and everyone thinks that's fine the same2:04:17thing applies to intellectual and creative endeavors so what you do is you try to find a community where that's that's the nature of the community and2:04:28you likely have to find a relationship like that as well you know so I don't think so I think what contributes to the siloing is the arrogance that goes along2:04:37with it because if you're you can be interested in ideas and you can be creative well that's the arrogance of the intellect right that's the thing the2:04:46Catholic Church had warned about for centuries is the arrogance of the intellect so because if you're if you're wise as well as smart and there is no relationship between being smart and2:04:56being wise they are not the same thing there's no quick pathway from smart to wise and many of the people who I've known who were very wise were what some2:05:05of them were intellectually impaired and were still wise you know so it's the arrogance that brings up the block and I see this for example happening in the2:05:14United States in particular because the last time I went down there for example I was I had friends down there and and some of those friends are very very smart people and some of them were2:05:23talking about the Trump voters and they were talking about the Trump voters with contempt and I thought you better watch that because that's 50% of the damn2:05:32population and it might be convenient to think that they're stupid and beneath you but it's not conducive to a civil state and there's no evidence that it's2:05:41true because there isn't a straight line between intelligent and wise and so I think that if you're if your character2:05:50is developed and you're intelligent you can have your siloed creative community but you develop enough wisdom so that you can see all the things that2:05:59people can do that are of high ethical utility that are outside the intellectual domain you know and I think that's why in the New Testament I think that's why Christ is a carpenter2:06:09right because well first of all carpenter is one of those jobs that when you're dishonest it manifests itself2:06:18immediately because what you build falls down and so if you're an honest carpenter you build a good house so that there's a nice metaphor there but it's also it's also a warning in some sense2:06:29against the the equation of intellectual brilliance with moral superiority and so if the intellects would drop their moral2:06:39superiority and fat chance there is of that then that divide between the working class say and the elite would2:06:48would resolve and there's every reason to have respect for decent working class people I mean it's on their labour as2:06:59the left wingers at least hypothetically agree that the entire edifice of the culture is is resting so you can have2:07:09your cake and eat it too but you have to not assume that your niche makes you superior and it's very difficult for2:07:18smart people especially smart there's a scene in leeches it seems thus spake Zarathustra wears arethusa the Prophet comes down from the mountain and he comes into a public square and there's2:07:28this crowd around this little midget who's only about this high who have a gigantic ear and everyone is marveling2:07:37at him well that's what the modern intellect is like it's a midget with a giant well mouth generally not an ear and the the the being is underdeveloped2:07:46but the intellect is hyper activated and and it makes the person extraordinarily unbalanced and his part because they they can't compete outside the2:07:56intellectual realm and that makes them very bitter because they tend to think well God I'm so smart everything should just come to me it's like sorry that's not how the world works and and it also2:08:06that that and that that that attitude is immediately evident to people that they're talking to when they talk in the manner that they talk if they are2:08:15arrogant intellectuals of that sort you see that in the Simpsons did a good job of that with comic book guy right I mean he completely useless in every possible2:08:24dimension with an IQ of about 160 and it's very annoying to people who have an IQ of 160 that they can also be completely useless but it happens a lot2:08:33so yeah hi dr. Peterson long time no see2:08:45how are you doing thanks so I was up first going to ask about your thoughts on a very popular TV show Rick and Marty you know someone just recommended that2:08:54to me and they said they thought I would find it funny and that makes me nervous because I like the Simpsons and I like the Trailer Park Boys for actually like the trailer I really liked the Trailer2:09:04Park Boys and so someone said I know it's so sad you know but they said that I would like Rick and Morty so I'm kind2:09:13of afraid to even watch it it does have a nihilistic theme to it no I would say so that which is quite telling of the young population which they flee they2:09:22fall in love with it everyone's talking about it so uh-huh okay well I'll definitely watch it because I've been looking for something to watch when I'm brain dead at night so but I decide to2:09:32tell them my question from a different angle if I may and it's about the case that governments let's say such as2:09:41Russia and Iran they have any more extreme cases like Isis they do not want to conform to the nihilistic aspects of the West as a result they've taken an2:09:52anti-western approach as someone with a Middle Eastern background I've been trying to figure out where the origins of this hostility more precisely comes2:10:02from and why things are the way they are I recently found out that certain key Iranian philosophers and political activists were partially intuitively2:10:12responsible for the 1979 Iranian Revolution were highly influenced by the anti Western high daguerreian philosophy and this is partially why they believed2:10:23that an Islamic state would and it'd be messy and necessary counter position to the ninth nihilistic Western thought you2:10:32I know that you also come there with Alexander dooking putting those liza yes except Dugan doesn't really seem to have a coherent answer he says that an answer2:10:43like that is necessary and that hypothetically it's something that Russia might be able to offer but the details seem to me somewhat obscure I mean the Russians maybe the Russians are2:10:53doing what Solzhenitsyn suggested and returning to Orthodox Christianity although Russia is corrupt enough so that it's very difficult to tell from the outside if that's mere collusion2:11:03between the corrupt church in a corrupt state or if there's something genuine going on there now you know the I would say there's a question under your question which is tyranny or nihilism2:11:14well that's a good question man that's a good question well lots of people would pick tyranny over nihilism and so if that's the only choice that people are2:11:23offered then and I also think that tyranny is stronger than nihilism because what are you going to do organize nihilists hardly well look at look at what happened to what was that2:11:33thing in Central Park you know against the 1% Jesus I mean what a dismal affair that was we'd like things to be different how well we don't know like so2:11:53you know you can just run over that if you're tyrannical and organized you can just run over that like there's nothing there at all and that I think there is a2:12:02danger and I do think that we're enticing the Islamofascists let's say by our nihilistic weakness and I think more2:12:11than that I think that we're doing something more than that because one of the things that I've been curious about and I'm going way out on a limb here is I've been really interested in the alliance between the neo-marxist2:12:21nihilistic are the neo-marxist postmodernists especially the feminists and the Islamofascists I just don't get that it's like there's something very2:12:30very interesting going on there and I think part of it is that when you when you drift too far into the nihilistic sub structure there's a huge call for2:12:40tyrannical order that manifests itself unconsciously and so that's the dynamic that I see playing out in that peculiar relationship between the2:12:49modern neo-marxist feminists and Islamofascists I don't I don't know2:12:58that's a very that's very interesting that that's a very interesting idea that you brought to mind I had no idea that there was a relationship between Heidegger and what happened in Iran in2:13:08the 1970s if you could send me a citation about that or something to read I'd be very interested in doing that so okay yep yep2:13:17[Applause]2:13:26thank you that's that's that's the closest thing I think I'll experienced it out to arnold schwarzenegger actually delivering that line yeah the purrito2:14:01distribution yeah yeah yeah not Ross but yeah do you have to work oh it's a nasty2:14:16it's a nasty law yeah it was also known as prices law yeah yeah yeah yeah great2:14:34yeah yeah yeah2:14:54hopefully there's fewer of them than that okay two to two things the first is it isn't obvious what the population2:15:06would be that you would compare this population to right because you could say well the boundary is the four hundred people in this room but it isn't necessarily the case the four hundred people in this2:15:15room might be the square root of the broader population we're interested in this sort of thing but with the purrito distribution what you also see is that it's it's self similar and so let's say2:15:29there's four hundred people doing something twenty of them are doing half the work but if you take twenty four of them are doing half the work of the twenty and one of the four is doing half2:15:38the work of the four and so it's so why am I telling you that it's it isn't it2:15:47well first of all it isn't that there isn't useful work to be done at multiple slices of the purrito distribution but the other thing is it's also the case2:15:56that there's not only one purrito distribution right because you might say well if it's just the square root of the number of people in a domain that are doing half the work then you know what2:16:05do you do with the rest of the people and the answer that might be well they're in a prio different preeto distribution as well where they're doing something productive so2:16:21well I think it's a good question like we don't exactly end so so the basic rule is the look the basic rule is for example if you take a hundred scientists2:16:31in a given domain ten of them will have published half the papers and this works with everything it works with with every creative domain the rule applies so now2:16:41the question is why and I think the choir the answer to that seems to be and I've watched people who become spectacular ly successful it what happens is that zero is a really bad2:16:51place to be right it's really hard to get out of zero and that's often why people are trapped in poverty because if you have nothing getting to something is2:17:01virtually impossible once you have something getting to a little more of something is actually quite a bit easier and so what seems to happen this is also2:17:11called the Mathieu principle right it's the same principle so that's a New Testament citation let's say the Mathieu principle is to those who have2:17:22everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything will be taken that's another one of those lines in the New Testament that you'd think that a good editor would have just got2:17:31rid of so but but but I think what it is is that every time you make a step forward the probability that you'll be able to take the next step forward increases and it seems to increase in a2:17:42nonlinear way so the the world that the Mathieu principle describes is nonlinear you know so you might say well what's your trajectory if you're moving upward2:17:51well it's not this it's this what's your trajectory if you're moving downward it's not this it's this right you fall2:18:02you fall you plummet you rise you rise you transcend it's something like that and you might say well that's a hell of a world but whatever it has to be run by2:18:12some principle and that's the principle that it appears to be run by yes2:18:24no no no it doesn't mean that at all what it means is that every truth claim you make including those that are implicit in your actions carries with it2:18:35an ethic that justifies or doesn't justify the action so for example let's say I have a tool and I say it's an axe and I go to the forest and I cut down I2:18:46try to cut down a tree with it and it doesn't work it's not an axe it's something else and so what the what there's a good book on pragmatism called2:18:56the metaphysical Club a history of American ideas it's what I would really recommend and what the pragmatists I can't give you a full answer because this is such a complicated issue but2:19:05what the pragmatists were wrestling with back in the late 1800s the late 1800s this was William James and his crew in in Boston2:19:15including a philosopher named CS purse who was perhaps America's greatest philosopher they were wrestling with the same issue that the postmodernist would2:19:24wrestle with 100 years later which is things are indefinitely complex and we're not very bright so how is it that we can make claims to truth about2:19:34anything and what they were what their their hypothesis essentially was is that with every action and with every truth claim you simultaneously demarcate a2:19:43territory within which that claim is valid and you you determine whether the claim is valid by noting whether your prediction about the outcome of your2:19:53action or your or your belief is commencer is is in keeping with if the outcome is in keeping with the prediction then what you've said or done2:20:04is true or good enough and that's as good as you get and so that's the pragmatic perspective and then when when when the pragmatist encountered charles2:20:14dark charles darwin's works works they immediately recognized that darwin had generated a pragmatic solution to the problem of the impossibility of being2:20:23the impossibility of being is this there's way more cosmos than there is you you are going to die you cannot generate a sufficient solution2:20:34to the problem of your being no one can nothing can it's like the environment is a snake that moves unpredictably across time and you're trying to stay on its2:20:43back well as how how does the Darwinian process deal with that it produces infinite variance roughly speaking almost all of which die and that's how2:20:54it solves the problem across time and the things that exist is the things that stay alive are true enough and that's the best you get that's the argument I2:21:03was trying to have with Sam Harris because Harris doesn't take his evolutionary cycle is a Volusia nary theory seriously enough but we get to kept getting bogged down anyways that's2:21:12that's the best answer oh I'd like to agree with that but it's not true2:21:22yeah yep yep yep you really do like to2:21:41ask hard questions so you I think it depends see this is also why like the pH alien take let's say on on pragmatism because I think that pragmatism as a2:21:52philosophy has the limitation that you just described but only if you think about the games as limited if you have to play the game in an iterative way2:22:01then that issue resolves itself and the game theorists have done a good job of mapping that out it's like you could say let's say pragmatically speaking there's2:22:11no reason I shouldn't deceive you once if I can get what I want it's yeah yeah except that I'm probably not only going to interact with you once I'm going to interact with you a lot and2:22:20even if it isn't you that I interact with it's going to be a bunch of beings that are so much like you that it might as well be you might as well be you it's going to be me if nothing else and so2:22:30the pragmatic game stretched across time would include the necessity of iterability in relationship to the2:22:39validations of the truth claims that's that's how it looks to me I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna stop you2:22:49if we have say that again yes yes thank2:22:59you yes but that's not all I am so this2:23:12is on behalf of somebody dr. Peterson having listened to your expositions on the mythological evolution and amalgamation of religion and keeping in mind your working definitions of belief2:23:21and truth and despite the obvious reasons for somebody of your background to identify most with Christianity my understanding is that you believe Christianity to be the most complete and2:23:31articulated form of many of the metaphysical ideas that preceded it and led up to that keeping that in mind would it also be accurate to therefore say that you're not only a believer in2:23:40Christianity but also if to a lesser degree also believer in in Mourdock in the ancient Egyptian gods and the subsequent gods that you've spoken up2:23:49here that led up and contribute it to the form of Christianity that you're discussing and that you identify with okay I'm going to take that one apart a2:23:58little bit I'm bounded in my judgment with regards to Christianity by my ignorance I'm no student of Hinduism so2:24:10I can't make the claim forthrightly that there's something intrinsically superior to the judeo-christian tradition because2:24:20I don't know enough to make that claim the claim I can make is that there's something that's dreadfully right about this core elements of the judeo-christian tradition and I've seen2:24:30analogues to that like one of the things I'd like to do for example is to do a short series on the Delta H Inc because that is one remarkable document once you2:24:41know especially you might want to read it you can go online and read it's very short out etching ta o teh CH ing and2:24:50it's the fundamental text of Taoism and once you know that the world of being is made of chaos and order and you know that that's represented2:24:59by the yin and the yang all of a sudden you can understand the DAO de Jing and it's just it's brilliantly simple and straightforward in it's exposition but2:25:08it also seems to me to be entirely commensurate with the line of of let's call it logic it's more like a the the mode of description of being that's2:25:17encapsulated in these stories now with regards to being a believer people ask me all the time two things say do you believe in God and are you a Christian and they answered without both of those2:25:27is actually there's two answers one is what the hell makes you think it's any of your business that's the first answer and the second is why do you think that you mean the2:25:36same thing with those questions that I would mean with my answer so you know what because it's such a funny thing because I spent like three and this is2:25:45no accusation with regards to your questions in the least you know I think it's more about trying to detract the development of these ideas and you know the residual truth and so yeah psychological significance of all these2:25:55other traditions I think well you know I did I've been there floored by other mythological structures like when I first understood or thought2:26:06I understood the meaning of the Mesopotamian creation method just I've never recovered from that I would say and the same thing is true of the2:26:15investigations I did into the Egyptian myths of Horus and Isis and Osiris and Seth it's just a and they're they're so2:26:24relevant I mean they're so unbelievably relevant and how do how do see this is a problem that none of us really know how to solve it's like they're our sources2:26:34of wisdom all over the world let's say and they need to be made commensurate with one another which isn't to say that they need to be turned into a fast-food2:26:44mall you know that's that's like multiculturalism right it's like all the food of the world served in the most terrible possible manner all in one2:26:53place and something like that and you don't want to do that with comparative religion it's just water everything down and say well it's all nice it's like no it is not nice yeah or that it's all the2:27:03same because it's not all the same so the the job of communicating between those domains of wisdom is really2:27:12continuing right it's been a problem ever since the beginning of civilization but it's continuing and I would say the psychoanalyst Jung in particular was took to huge huge steps in in the2:27:24direction of doing that an extraordinarily positive way and not a simple minded way at all and not just hand waving that oh well it's everyone has one and all shall have prizes not2:27:35that so yeah last question I choose it2:27:46kind of in the same vein but it's in regards to another kind of mythology so yeah in terms of I guess Carl Jung's own with us sorry I'm extremely tall but a2:27:55lot of the I achieved I found some kind of archetypes like for example in my own life but also I've noticed in European life so for example in regards to Odin2:28:06and Norse mythology yeah with Corleone si I've only been able to actually skim it because I've been like trying to find something like because I felt like2:28:15there's always this kind of psyche that was almost underneath I guess Western civilization and we see it really like embodied in this specific figure this2:28:25deity the wanderer the knowledge gatherer the seeker but he's also a war goddess these all these different aspects that are an accumulation of what2:28:34seems to be something that's distinctly Western mm-hm and I feel this is like almost like this symbol in a way of course it's not2:28:43always followed there seems to be something maybe there seems to be something I do think that the idea of the individual has been articulated most2:28:53fully in the West I don't think that's really a I don't think that's a contentious claim actually that doesn't2:29:02mean that the latent structures from which that idea might emerge weren't also many other places simultaneously and the other thing from let's say from2:29:11a biological perspective is that we're only talking about differences of a few hundred years in terms of the manifestation of these ideas right from from an evolutionary perspective that's2:29:21it's instantaneous it's like well a new idea has to arise somewhere so is going to be somewhere first and but it's spreading I mean Christianity for2:29:30example spread so rapidly that it's absolutely beyond belief and it is actually spreading more rapidly in China now than it did in ancient Rome so well in regards to that it's also2:29:39been seen like almost in the wake of a dying Christianity I've noted that like there's been a tendency to go towards I guess paganism right yes I understand2:29:49the like some people laugh at all yes we have Wicca which was mainly a manifestation of Aleister Crowley in his works which were then ended off to whoever actually made the actual2:29:59ideology and then next thing you know we're finding something almost more stable in I guess Norse mythology and it seems like it's acting almost as a2:30:08pendulum school swing from something that well people are good like the thing is is when one when one mythological structure collapses it's going to2:30:18collapse into another mythological structure or another set of mythological structures and and because you can't get out of the mythological structures2:30:27there's no possible way of doing that what and so I wouldn't say necessarily that the fact that other belief systems emerge in the aftermath of the collapse2:30:36of the overarching belief system I don't think that that's necessarily a bad idea I think that it has its attendant dangers and so I should stop because I'm2:30:46starting to get tired and I'm not going to be able to formulate any clearer answers than that and it's also 10 o'clock so we also do have to stop2:30:57oh yes there is an unofficial Meetup and discussion group at Hemingway's restaurant second floor 142 Cumberland2:31:08Street just say you're with the Jordan Peterson discussion group yes everyone is invited if you say you're with the Jordan Peterson discussion group2:31:17please don't misbehave too badly [Applause]0:00:00Background to Lecture VIII: Abrahamic Stories, with Matthieu & Jonathan Pageau
0:00:00 so it's July 18 Tuesday July 18 2017 and I've been working for the last few days0:00:09on the 8th lecture in my series the psychological significance of the biblical stories and I'm planning to talk about the Abrahamic stories that0:00:19immediately follow the stories of Noah and the Tower of Babel I'm not as familiar with Abrahamic stories as I am with the stories the earlier stories in0:00:28Genesis say from the beginning of the Bible through the stories of Noah and the Tower of Babel and I'm not as familiar with the Abrahamic stories as I am with the stories of Moses that begin0:00:39with Exodus and continue in the succeeding chapters so I've had to do a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and and some conversing as well and as part0:00:48of that process I spoke once again with Jonathan Paola a Carver of stone icons and an Orthodox Christian and student of0:00:57religion and also this time who I did a video with a while back you might remember called the metaphysics of Pepe where we discussed the psychology of the0:01:06stranger and also some of the stories gaybraham ik stories involving lot in Sodom and Gomorrah and I also had the opportunity to meet his brother Matthew pazzo who's been working on a book on0:01:16the Bible for the last three and a half years and so we spent 90 minutes talking about the Abrahamic stories and the conceptual background that's necessary to understand them and that's what I0:01:26wanted to show you today after this introduction so I hope it's useful so I'm going to introduce both of you so0:01:36Jonathan is a carver of icons and I've spoken with Jonathan a number of times already and he now has his own YouTube channel as well where he discusses0:01:45issues that are similar to the ones that we're going to discuss today and Matthew is his brother who I haven't met before this day and Matthew has been working on a book for the last how long you're not0:01:56here three and a half years and do you want to tell everyone very briefly about the book well it's a book about symbolism but it is basically I'm trying0:02:06to rediscover the worldview that was present in the time of the Bible or at least actually not that long ago because0:02:16modern modern interpretations of reality materialist interpretations of reality aren't that old right the worldview that was there when0:02:26traditional societies were still there and so I'm trying to rediscover that worldview and basically there are basic0:02:37patterns have an inner time and space things like things like that so it's like a cosmology that's been completely lost as far as I'm concern people have0:02:47glimpses of it I think a lot of people do but it's very general patterns that we have to re re understand so we can0:02:56understand the Bible for example in other other societies so there are did you get interested in this like what is it that's compelled you to do this oh I0:03:06don't know where to start I mean my whole life has been about that so I mean you read the Bible you can take it literally you can take it figuratively or you can take it both ways and I'm0:03:16trying to take it both ways I'm trying to get rid of that dichotomy the dichotomy of symbolism and factual description I think there is no such0:03:26htech otta me if you understand what the words mean if you have the right perspective there's no more metaphors in the Bible there are none okay but it0:03:36takes a while to get there because you have to adopt a completely different perspective than a materialistic one obviously it can be a materialist and0:03:45and a Christian or it can't be a religious and immaterial that's what I think okay and one of the things we're hoping is that you know we've been getting I've been getting a lot of0:03:54questions and I know you've probably Jordan me getting a lot of questions about this question of metaphor and a lot of people have been asking me how do we reconcile how do i reconcile0:04:04metaphors with what's in the Bible how do i reconcile these metaphors with how I'm supposed to live in the world and I think that what Matthew has been rough with is writing and what I've been I've0:04:13been reading it right I'm reading it right now is that he he's really able to answer that question in a way that I think will be one of the most satisfying answers that we've seen in a while so0:04:24we're pretty excited to see how going to get that out to people so let me start by telling you what I've been thinking about just briefly and then you0:04:33guys can comment and I'd like you to do most of the talking if we can manage that although I'm so damn talkative it's hard to imagine that will happen but so0:04:42I've been reading this book called the disappearance of God and I've been using it as a - by a guy named Richard Friedman and it was published I think in0:04:512005 I think that's right it might have been earlier than that but he makes a couple of interesting points about the0:05:01old abrading in the Old Testament and and they're parallel points and so the first is that the closer you are to the beginning of the Bible the more God is0:05:11present and and as you progress towards the end of the Old Testament God sort of vanishes in stages until he only0:05:22manifests himself if at all in prophetic visions and at the same time the parallel development is that the stories0:05:31of individual human beings become more and more well developed so it's like as the idea of the individual personality emerges or the fact of the individual0:05:40personality emerges to the presence of God as a as a detectable entity like an external entity even seems to decline0:05:51proportionately and so I'm trying to puzzle that out in a variety of different ways partly neurologically because there's some0:06:01evidence that the domain of experience that you might associate it with might associate with the divine is a consequence of suppressed lemmas left0:06:11hemisphere function and augmented right hemisphere function and then I'm trying to also consider that in relationship to the effect of chemicals like psilocybin0:06:22which obviously can produce powerful mystical experiences so experiences of consciousness that are really of a different type than normal waking ego consciousness and I've also been reading0:06:33Jung's mostly commentaries about Jung's red book and his attempts to use active imagination as a as a means0:06:43to explore the contents of different forms of consciousness which is something that modern people just really never do although he did it for years0:06:52and and the consequence of that was the red book also the black books which haven't been published yet but the red book which was a which was I think0:07:01published two or three years ago it was a collection of visionary experiences and his his continuing discussions with figures of his imagination which he0:07:10regarded as the most important work he did in his life so so what's what does that all boil down to it it's definitely0:07:19possible for people to have none can happen to have experiences outside the domain of their normal consciousness that produce the intimation of the0:07:31divine that seems to be factually indisputable those we're not exactly sure how those experiences manifested0:07:41themselves in the periods of time that are associated with the early biblical stories the bit the Bible talks about those sorts of experiences very0:07:51forthrightly in the earliest Abrahamic stories and also in the story of Noah and obviously in Adam and Eve and all of that God's very present and then he disappears over time and one of the0:08:00things that that the guy who wrote the disappearance of God Freedman one of the things he pointed out was that the fact0:08:10of the disappearance of God in the Old Testament the fact that that's an air that's a continual like it has narrative0:08:20continuity that fact he really remarked on both those things because of course the books were written by different people and then they were aggregated but out of that came two elements of0:08:29narrative continuity and one was the gradual disappearance of God and the other was the gradual rise of the increasingly well-defined and powerful individual so anyways associated with0:08:43that is the idea that as God withdraws he also starts to manifest himself more through the idea of a covenant and that the Covenant is something0:08:53that's established with an individual it's all obviously also with the nation in the case of Israel but it's mediated through individuals and so well that's a0:09:02brief wander through the sort of cloud of associations that make up my thinking about the topic at the moment so well0:09:13with what you described it sounds a lot like what would you see in the Bible I'm not so sure about the God is more distant part where in further on and goes from what I understand there are0:09:25two kinds of consciousness in the Bible one of them is it's called inhabiting the land that's when reality fits the0:09:38best of the theory okay so the principles and the facts agree so there are laws and people follow the laws okay or there's an idea and reality fits with0:09:49that idea so that's called inhabiting the land so it's familiar space okay so when you live in that space things make0:09:59sense because your idea is match what's happened free and then you can fall away from that and that's the Covenant okay0:10:08covenant is an agreement between theory and practice that's what a covenant is in the Bible so God gives laws and the0:10:18people have to agree to follow basically so the law is is is an identity it's not just you do this you do that this it0:10:27expresses God's identity in practice so when the facts match that identity that's like a soul and a body that are0:10:39[Music] not agree okay so when you fall away from that you fall into exile that's the other mode yeah and it looks like and0:10:51that's what you were talking about before I'm not so sure until you talk about a covenant but that's when the meaning ends the facts do not match okay0:11:02so let me ask you a couple of questions about that yeah so you know I've been describing the cosmology in the Bible as mapable0:11:12onto the domains of order and chaos and I actually think the best way to define order is order is the place you are when what you're doing matches what's0:11:22happening yes very very very similar to the idea that you just expressed and then that's exactly it okay okay and yeah that's a state there's a state of harmony between0:11:31preconception and actuality and that's also I think this the circumstances under which people's emotions remain regulated and I thought about that0:11:40neurologically too I think that what happens is that under those conditions you're left hemisphere stays in charge and there's some evidence for that kind of thing too especially from the0:11:49writings of this neurologist I think he's a neurologist his name is Rama Chandra he's quite a famous brain scientist and he's oh and another0:12:00another neuropsychologist named Belconnen Goldberg who's also talked about hemispheric function in the same way and so when things are going according to plan0:12:09let's say yes you're in red and then the individual ego consciousness that's that's focused and specific stays in0:12:19charge but that also keeps negative emotions regulated because there's no need for them because everything is working properly and so then you can fall out of that and you called that you0:12:28call that exile not when you follow it for me yeah yeah when you follow it by the XS so that would be a quest all so the flood it's also the slide yeah fine0:12:37okay so the exile is like the wandering in the desert yeah oh it's the idea of exile is it's exactly just what we said0:12:47it's about serving strange things so you're not in charge anymore of relax something else is but you're in you're0:12:57in that you live in in a world where you're not in charge or your identity is not in charge of the facts and they're0:13:06not they don't fit with reality so that means something else is in charge and so you're serving that so the idea of serving strangers in exile0:13:16it simply means absolutely your identity that match reality oh that's really buddy I never thought about that that idea of serving strangers in exile so so okay so I'm0:13:28going to branch off that a couple of different ways so one idea there is that there's an idea from you which is paraphrased something like if you don't0:13:38if you don't act out your own myth and you serve a bit part in the myths of others okay so that will be in keeping with that idea of serving the stranger0:13:48in exile and then the next part would be when you're in a chaotic state and your emotions are dysregulated your personality fraction aids and the0:13:58fractionated personality personality sub personalities fight for control over over over behavioral output so you dissolve from a unity maite think about0:14:08it as a pyramid a pyramid with with a unifying conception at the top that disintegrates that would be like the Tower of Babel to some degree that0:14:17disintegrates and then sub entities you can think about them as spirits or think about them as psychological entities regulate your behavior and that would be0:14:26equivalent I think to a movement from the left hemisphere to the right because I think the right is dominated by subcortical structures rather I think0:14:36that's how the animals exist is it's sequential domination by subcortical structures rather than some overarching conceptualization from the top-down I0:14:45think that what you call the less than the right is exactly the opposite of the traditional left and right I'm not so sure yet but when you say left hemisphere what do you mean well like0:14:56what the left hemisphere governs the right hand okay so the left hemisphere is the one that went when it's in charge and when everything works yes okay it's0:15:07the right oh it's exactly the opposite of the traditional imagery usually it's the right that's well yeah because0:15:16they're using the hands and I talked yeah the brain Rock exactly so the right that it's the right would be mapped onto the left hemisphere okay so that's fine that's fine and the traditional imagery0:15:27I think is associated with the hemispheric specialization as well because the idea of right you know well I want to ask you a question about that you said that they0:15:38the the living what was it you contracted exile with what was the other conceptualization and having the homely0:15:48inhabit inhabiting the homeland sure absolutely working on the home working on the homeland is another way say okay now tell me again how you conceptualize the0:15:59relationship between God and and his people let's say in the homeland so that0:16:08well God like I said at the beginning there's the idea of heaven in earth is is at the basis of everything in the Bible so heaven is meaning and earth is0:16:19fact so in that relationship there's God it's always the name of God by the way if you look if you look in the way it's0:16:29described in the Bible it's it's they're talking about the name of God so that means the meaning of God so God is not just meaning but when they talked about0:16:40in the Bible it's always about the name of God so the name of God is an identity it's like a principal an axiom or something like that and it has to embody0:16:52itself in physical reality flash or in a matter so the the role of the nation of0:17:02Israel is to embody that identity and it's also to embody it in reality not just in themselves so basically they're0:17:12a mediator between heaven and earth right they're trying to make God's identity practical or concrete or that's0:17:26why it's all about laws because you take and that's like mathematics you've taken at an abstract principle that's really extremely simple it doesn't seem like it0:17:36it contains much information right if you take an axiom in mathematics but then you have to derive all the implications here so that's making it practical that's making0:17:45concrete that's bringing heaven into the earth so that's their job yeah it's like a cosmic mediator okay Dean okay follow0:17:56you so far so all right so the the it looks like there's two ways maybe in the0:18:05biblical narrative that that will is instantiated in in reality and one would be as a consequence of individuals0:18:15aligning themselves with the Word of God and the other is the instantiation of the Word of God into the State of Israel okay0:18:24seem seem reasonable okay and that seems to begin that that has its origin in the in the first Abrahamic story so Abraham talks to God and or God talks0:18:35to Abraham and tells him that he's going to be the father of a nation essentially and then it was to inherit the land to do that important it's the same thing0:18:46those two things are the same he's going to inherit the land and he's going to become the principal of great many people so that's like he's fleshing out0:18:57an identity right it gives a nation instead of just an individual right and he's going to be going to be identity of a nation okay and so how do you0:19:08understand the description of that in the in the biblical narrative because one of the very one of the things I find0:19:17very strange about the Abrahamic stories is that immediate presence of God and God shows up to Abraham and tells him this and then Abraham makes an altar if0:19:26I remember correctly once he gets to the land where he's supposed to be he makes an altar and then0:19:37and then God appears to him again yeah not again not again he appears to him the first time he0:19:46doesn't appear I think I'm pretty sure the first time God speaks to him okay he's active that's important okay let's check inside not distinction important well because he's just work he's just0:19:58yeah he's not physical he's not a into practical reality yet it's invisible so God speaks he's not manifest it's0:20:08just an idea of principle a word okay and unmanifest word or it's like the minimum of manifestation is like just language this word and then so what he0:20:19says is go to this place go to this land and you'll inherit the land and then he goes there and then he says God appears0:20:29in our city so okay so there's a there's a progression progressive in there's a progressive appearance of God and it's partly a consequence of Abraham's0:20:39original obedience to the initial idea yeah which was very abstract means go0:20:48here you can't be more simple than that go there so it's it's like it doesn't mean anything but it means everything it's a very everything we do is let's go0:20:59there go there and do something right it's like principle of all things appear to Abraham saying just go there and0:21:09you'll inherit that doesn't really mean anything here but it contains everything humans do yeah okay that that's an interesting observation because you know0:21:19I think of human beings as well they're very directional they're always going from point A to point B they're always aiming there like archers right and it's definitely the case like I had someone0:21:29write to me know I was doing a patreon interview with one of the people who've been supporting me a young guy and we0:21:40were talking about the idea of Christ as Redeemer and judge and he was this young man was unredeemed let's say for0:21:51period of time because he didn't have any direction and have direction you have to know what's good and what isn't because to have direction you have to go to words what's good and so the judge is0:22:02what helps you figure out what's good and if you don't know what's good then you can't be redeemed because to be redeemed is to be is to be moving towards the good and away from let's say0:22:12evil so the judge and the Redeemer have to be the same thing and that fits in with what you're saying because the judge is the thing that makes qualitative distinctions let's say and0:22:22you need to make a qualitative distinction before you can move ahead okay and so your point is that the the principle that Abraham encounters to0:22:32begin with is the principle of directionality itself qualitative directionality it's something like that so that's right yeah it's well it's it's the positive identity of anything like0:22:44it's it's like a seed it's like the seed of a tree that's that's the traditional way to understand it it's just a seed yeah it contains everything in it but in0:22:53itself it's just something like go there something go there okay so that's it okay so one of the things that's been interesting I think for me to learn0:23:02personally as I moved through my life was that if I ever actually did anything it was worthwhile yes you know what I mean is that something would come of it0:23:12it wouldn't necessarily be what I expected to come of it but yet act of going and doing did bear fruit yeah and0:23:21that's pretty much the story of Abraham in a nutshell actually what he just said because God says go here the only hair is the land0:23:30Abraham doesn't inherit the land I mean he could have been right away you could have gone there and it's yours right no sir that's what it says as soon as you0:23:39gets there it says there's already people there that the land is already owned by other people Grady's always a famine yeah exactly and0:23:48that means it means like what I was saying before the facts supports the theory okay and here is going to the land0:23:57that's the theory you'll inherit that's the theory and the facts don't support it that's a--fun okay the earth doesn't supply the earth doesn't give you sustenance to0:24:08make it reality it doesn't give you matter yeah give him a disease of in Egypt and I mean his wife is separated0:24:17on a limb essentially a because he lies about her but then it's so strange because so he tells the Pharaoh and the Pharaohs men that his wife is actually a sister that's Soraya's Sarai0:24:27that how you say that yeah sir or she changes the name yet yes it is actually his sister and that's to protect them and so the Pharaoh takes Sarai and then0:24:39okay going up they can I say something you bet there's a meaning to all those things as a meaning to it okay so the idea is that when fact that fact support0:24:50the theory okay when when the flesh supports the identity or the matters haven't earth support seven things are square okay that's just a traditional0:25:00way of understanding it that basically means that what you see is what you get okay it's it's true things are true0:25:09that's the definition of meaning matches fact yes true okay fine when pragmatic definition yeah when when the other side0:25:18happens then things are round there they're cyclical okay and it essentially it's time its space in time that's what0:25:28it is okay one of them you're falling into time things are not square that means things do not the meaning doesn't match0:25:38the facts that's why it's all out lives okay when they go into exile it's all about lives it's all about screaming okay because they're in that domain0:25:49they're in a domain where meaning in fact doesn't match so everything happens through lies interception and even the whole idea of saying my wife is my0:26:01sister less that represents a cyclical paradox okay it was supposed to happen well why0:26:10cyclical your parent has a son and a daughter and they get married it's like a0:26:22regression okay it's like you're producing different things and then you're joining them back together and I'm supposed to join them back together0:26:31because when you join them back together it's like you're going you're regressing when you rebuild something you start on principle and you develop it take you0:26:41make specializations of that principle when you start to mix them up again it's like a regression you're going back to0:26:51something more primitive than before okay now essentially that how do you see that in relationship to Abraham's insistence that Sarai is his is his0:27:02distant sister yeah because you're not supposed to marry your sister and I'm not saying that as a moralistic thing even though it becomes one but the0:27:12reason you shouldn't marry your sister is because you're undoing the work the specializations that your your your0:27:21father or your mother have created it's like going back it's like regressing so like if you marry your your father or your mother or0:27:32depending at your going back it's a cycle you're not smoking that because it's like you're annihilating something that was specified okay look I'll give0:27:44you an example like it's imagery of that that's pretty important in the sort of the flood there are traditions that the Giants created hybrids okay yeah one of0:27:55the things that Giants like to do is create hybrids that they are either themselves but they created hybrids they took the species and they confuse them0:28:04back into who knows what okay and that's very significant because it actually means that you are regressing in a0:28:15confused manner okay that there is a connection between the flood and what I just said making hybrids and causing the0:28:24flood it's actually considered one of the same thing because I mean that makes some sense yeah it's about returning to confusion0:28:34yep look look I'll say it this way either names the animals Adam Adam name gentleman's gating forgot asked Adams and in Genesis first job in the universe0:28:44so he's asking is just specify different things okay that are all I'll have the same source right the same attitude yep0:28:54differentiate that the idea of incarnated a principle into practice damn please get differentiated okay now0:29:03if you reverse that process you're going back to a more primitive level you're going back to the flood because the flood is the most primitive thing in in0:29:13that cosmology right it starts with a flooded world that means everything's in confusion so what you have to do is specify things out but if you go back0:29:23there says okay so let me let me reformulate that and tell you what popped into mind alright so God gives Abraham the word0:29:34and then Abraham follows it and God manifests himself more completely to Abraham and then what happens to Abraham is twofold he ends up in a barren land0:29:44so nature rebels and he also ends up in a tyranny right because he it's not only not only does the land not produce so0:29:53it's in a famine but Egypt eventually Egypt is generally speaking a symbol for for tyranny throughout the initial parts of the Old Testament I mean you see that0:30:03with the Pharaoh for example and and the symbolism in in the mosaic story of the of Egypt always being associated with stone instead of water and so you could0:30:12say that God gives Abraham the command to move forward but he has to contend with the intransigence II of nature0:30:21which rejects him because there was a famine and then he becomes subjugate some become subject to both tyranny and to deceit and so okay they see him oh0:30:32well this is there any are look okay I'll say it this way it's it's more about deceits and tearing okay0:30:41but the thing is when you're not in charge I mean desert here nice that's it when you're you or whoever you identify with0:30:50is not in charge you're a slave to some other principle right you're embodying some other will that's not you I mean that's theorem you're0:31:00right I mean so right and that said it's really directly related to the idea of hearing you're serving strangers break it says it all well that also motivates0:31:11that also motivates Abraham's deception right because he's terrified that the strangers that he's serving will kill him yet for his wife for his wife and0:31:20that's why he lied and he's afraid that he's going to be treated very badly yes because he doesn't want strangers to have his wife okay his wife is like the0:31:32earth his wife is how he will incarnate himself or express himself yeah in the world he's like the seed and the wife is like0:31:42feet above the earth something like that so she some she is like his earth it's like a miniature version of hadn't an0:31:51earth the male is heaven and the female is the earth in that case that's the whole idea he's not in charge of fact anymore that includes his wife batting0:32:02dreams so he doesn't want other men other principles to control his wife right does that make sense0:32:12yes well it also it also seems to me that because he's the land isn't fruitful for him and because he's serving strangers in a strange land0:32:22he's also correct to be afraid for the loss of his wife yes and how does he get out of it by0:32:31being deceitful because yes he's in the cycle he's in that I mean are you supposed to be truthful with your adversary usually no especially when0:32:43you're adversaries hostile and if you're an enemy territory your morality changes because all of a sudden it's not about being truthful it's about0:32:53surviving it's about it's like the most primitive existence there is right the more primitive state of existence are0:33:03more about species than about truth yeah it's an advance it's an advanced state to talk about truth it's when we all agree you know we all agree on at least0:33:12something but before that is every man or woman for him or herself it's all about the seat it's almost survival okay okay so now0:33:21now the next thing that happens essentially is that the Pharaoh gets plagued and he's wondering why so because so the story indicates that the0:33:32Pharaoh has broken some natural law let's say or some divine law and things go very badly for him and then he discovers I don't remember how he0:33:43discovers that he's taken suraíh sir I think it doesn't say how yeah I think that's right and and he discovers that he's taken Sarah but that Sarah is0:33:53Abraham's wife and so then the Pharaoh gives Abraham all sorts of goods and yeah enzym on his way okay so that's0:34:02also quite confusing so abraham is rewarded for is to see a sense ill-gotten good yeah right ile des good yeah Barto story sorry that0:34:16it's raining because you also see I think did not account some of the complexity that's embedded in the in the Old Testament accounts is that it's not0:34:25a simple morality tale it - stretch of the imagination especially see that in the Abrahamic accounts because it's Jacob who who's so deceitful with Esau I0:34:36mean he thought comes off I mean he has kind of he's kind of unconscious he saw yeah he gives things up too easily he's too easily deceived and he's a bit0:34:46primitive it too primitive in a bit too naive something like that but Jacob places and Rachel plays some really nasty tricks on him and yet they0:34:55come out ahead yeah and so that's also a very difficult thing to contend with well there's there's this idea at least0:35:05in traditional interpretation there's this idea that in Esau is actually supposed to be that the king he should0:35:15be the only reason he isn't is because there's something wrong that pretty much described the whole Bible in its entirety that there's there's the theory0:35:25in the fact the fact is supposed to be king okay do you know what I mean by that like I matter is king that's what it's supposed to be but it's not and the0:35:36whole all the stories are about redeeming redeeming that problem taking care of that problem like the fact don't0:35:46match the theory we have to redeem the facts that's that pretty much all the stories in the Bible are about that and0:35:56that pretty much what's lost represents in the story of Abraham as well okay he represents the material reality he0:36:05represents facts but there's something wrong with it let's go into the large story now so okay so Abraham leaves and I believe he leaves with lot and and law0:36:17it also becomes quite wealthy and they go back to where Abraham had built the altar initially but lot Lots men and0:36:28Abraham's men started to fight yeah so they decide they're going to separate and they basically do that somewhat arbitrarily it could have gone either0:36:37way but lot ends up going to sort them well actually there's something you should be aware of well that's that's0:36:47the thing a lot of the stories in the Bible are based on a really ancient way of thinking that we don't really follow anymore but I mean in the Bible there is0:36:58a reason why the directions of the travels that they're not just random like Egypt represents the earth and0:37:09what's the name of the city what's the name of the place above her amethy the place where he goes to meet Laban eyes in the north okay I'm not0:37:21sure I remember the name of this see I think it's Iran that represents heaven okay and there's a reason it's not just arbitrary it's because Egypt is south0:37:30and South is going down right we still say that when you say that someone's gone south we say that means that they've gone to cedar they've gone down0:37:39yes so so in the Bible and especially in Genesis especially in Genesis the South represents the earth and the North0:37:48represents the heavens okay and like I said it's not arbitrary it corresponds to the geography of the region one of them goes up hills the other one goes0:37:57downhill and the north is mountains like snowy mountains and in the south there's a Egypt which is like the low a low place and summary to North literally is0:38:06up yeah it's not a metaphor yeah it literally is close going getting closer to heaven and the other ones going into the earth so when they go in0:38:15exile into Egypt there it's actually me they're going into the earth it's like a defense in two years so it's like a0:38:24death its death right and they say it a few times in the book of Genesis they talk about your it's like dying going it going to Egypt is like a death okay so0:38:36then now so then we moved to the story of the strangers right wait nothing0:38:47you're going to say why the separation of the land with lot and an Abraham oh yes right the idea is that lot takes the0:38:56the south right and then a ramp oh yeah that was the whole point of that yes a lot there's a reason why he takes the south it's the lowest place on earth0:39:06Sodom and Gomorrah that that place it's the lowest place okay so literally the lowest place on earth0:39:15right I'm not sure I don't know I don't know I think that region actually is the lowest place on earth but in the story that that's how that's what it means it0:39:24means it's the lowest place you can go so it's a place that's farthest away from heaven yeah it's all in order you're like the idea that milton develops with regards0:39:33to satan when he's thrown from heaven because the hell that satan inhabits is the furthest possible away from heaven that's got to find essentially okay0:39:43that's like a journey into fear yes it's the same as it means the same thing as falling asleep exile and sleep are the0:39:54same in the Bible sleep it'll kick this form of Exile okay so it is so so the next thing that happens is that we get0:40:03the first warning about Sodom and Gomorrah yes that's just a very brief sentence it's like a foreshadowing and0:40:14then the next thing that happens is that there's an episode where there is a war among kings and the kings if I remember0:40:23correctly it's the king of Sodom takes lot and Abraham has to go rescue him and he'd actually actually I think it's the0:40:34other way around I think it's Kings from the north that come down and take Sodom and Gomorrah and a lot as part of that and so is the0:40:45king the king of Sodom and Gomorrah they have to flee that's what I remember okay do they flee with do they flee with what no law is taken by these chains from the0:40:58north and the king of Sodom yeah I think hives or something like that please and then Abraham the King the king of Sodom at the end give gifts to Abraham0:41:09to thank him that he today rescued him yes that's right so what happens is that yeah it says it came to pass in the days of amraphel king of shinar etc that0:41:18these made war with bera king of sodom and with persia king of gomorrah etc and these were all joined together in the Vale of Siddim which is in the Salton0:41:28Sea which is the salt sea so I presume that would be the Dead Sea and that would be that identity the low point that you're describing those actual earth is the Dead Sea yes pretty0:41:38interesting yeah and the Vale of Siddim was full of slime pits and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah and fell there and they took away all0:41:47the goods of sodom and gomorrah and all their victuals and they took lot Abrams brothers son who deltas who dwelt in Sodom and his Goods and departed so you0:41:58can really see this whole geography did Matthew talking about when they say that Sodom and Gomorrah they had to flee and fall into slime pits it's almost like they're laying it out for us that they0:42:07had to almost kind of go even further down into the earth to hide from these these these invaders of the north that are coming to take their their land so0:42:17ok so Abram goes in rescues lot and he does that successfully and the and also0:42:26there's Kings that he that he frees as far as I can tell yeah and probably then the Kings want to reward him and Abraham0:42:37says to the king of Sodom that he doesn't want any reward and the reason he doesn't want any reward except for what his men have eaten he doesn't want0:42:46any reward because I will not take anything that is thine lest thou should say I have made abram rich save only that which the young men have eaten and0:42:56the portion of the men which went with me and it looks see God has already promised Abraham everything in some0:43:07sense and it looks like he doesn't want to take anything and Abraham doesn't want to take anything from anyone else because what would it want to do would0:43:16it interfere with the purity of his accomplishments something like that yeah well III don't know for certain because that's just a line I guess but in the in0:43:26the story in it it's not that much of a big part of the story but the way I see it is I think he says I don't want to take even a shoe lash if you latch from0:43:37you ok so the reason why he said that because the shoe is the lowest part is the lowest clothing right it is not on0:43:47the feet so it's all related to the idea that the earth needs to be redeemed needs needs to be rectified and it's in0:43:56that situation it's not like he's not allowed to accept a certain thing is not eating the forbidden fruit there are things in the world that are poisonous to humans we0:44:07can't eat them because they don't agree with our our patterns our mind so if you eat poison you go into that place where0:44:20things don't agree your mind and your body don't agree and if you if you if you take if you drink alcohol that takes0:44:29you into the realm where your mind and your body don't agree the theory doesn't match the fact and then you go into that0:44:38whole confusion and so it could it be that when when you don't have he doesn't want to take from Sodom because Sodom is0:44:47already what we know Sodom to be I mean it already represents kind of the land it can't hold and will be burned off yes it's something he can't he can't0:44:56integrate right something it's like leather I said the forbidden fruit it you don't want to eat you don't want to accept matter that you can't handle that0:45:05you can't integrate so there's something in that place that he doesn't know how to deal with what to do with it and he0:45:14doesn't want his riches to come from that place you didn't write these doesn't want his riches to come from that place yeah that would compromise him because he doesn't know how to deal0:45:24with it yeah maybe someday you will that's correct that's the whole idea and actually here's an interpretation lot represents that place that will one day0:45:36be redeemed okay the reason why they talk about lot so much in the story of Abraham is because he represents King0:45:46David but he is the ancestor of the nation that will give rise to King David okay it's like a secondary story within the story but it's like a it's meant to0:45:57be interpreted in terms of a future redemption of that place that he can't handle that Abraham could not handle at0:46:06that time and that place will be redeemed I'm giving you a lot of tradition here I happen this is what I quit I what I've learned it's King David okay it's the0:46:18future King okay so the whole one area vlog is about King David one and of course Lauda is Abraham's descendants as well because he's his nephew yes and so0:46:28Ibrahim is nephew descends into the lowest place essentially yeah well look it the story just starts out pretty0:46:37clear it starts out there's three sons to Tara one of them is her on the other ones Nahor and the other ones Abraham0:46:47okay Aaron dies that's how the story starts okay that's like the beginning of this story is Aaron dies and he has a0:46:57son called a lot see that's what I was the idea is it's the same idea the son of this Herrin he represents death he0:47:09represents the thing we can't handle he represents the material facts that we can explain with with our theories or0:47:18with our identity is the thing which is the matter we can't handle okay and that's why in story starts with he dies the father of lots tax it means0:47:29lot represents some fact that we cannot correctly integrate into our universe0:47:39this could be interpreted in so many different levels but that's basically what this I don't know if that makes sense but the idea yeah I mean the idea0:47:50is that is the I think we need to see it the idea that an orphan or a widow that's what they always represent the DA represents something that have lost0:47:59their their principle that unifies them they're they're they're kind of various connected from the hierarchy of the family so so so lot losing is the fact that0:48:09losing us father died means that he loses the thing that gives him identity and so he's like this he's like a piece of Earth that his lost attachment or0:48:18lost meaning or well that that reminds me of what happens to Noah's son who sees him naked yeah right yeah and0:48:30and why they just because because to see it seems to me I'm going to talk about this a little bit tonight that to see no0:48:40one gets drunk and then which which Sun is it ham ham yeah really first sees him but doesn't respond0:48:50properly the other sons when they see Noah naked they cover him up and they don't look and so it's like they're not exposing their father's weakness his0:48:59mortality his is his insufficiency right they had attained respect but but ham doesn't do that but there's also more0:49:08what Matthew was talking about before the in that story there's two things that are implied of what Matthew was talking about before this idea of wine that brings you into this cycle where0:49:18causality ceases to be direct and then what Pam told the fashion yeah and the fact that hem sees his father naked he0:49:27discovers his nakedness is also a kind of suggestion of incest as well the same type the same type of inappropriate0:49:36causality that you be in the story of the two of a Abraham's sister marrying this writer right yeah and a lot with0:49:45his two daughters yeah lot lot to daughter right so it's transgression to give some fun transgression against some fundamental boundary yeah I guess the the0:49:55hierarchical relationship and of a family right yes they're not supposed to make loops focus it's a tree you're not0:50:04supposed to make loops in a tree so you can say like that it's really simple and that's supposed to regress and I supposed to you produce things you're0:50:13not supposed to turn back on yourself okay you're not supposed to go back contradict ourselves okay so so maybe that's why Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt to she lay back right0:50:24yeah exactly yeah you have to do is listen experimental and and and and pines for something that that was0:50:34terrible they shouldn't be and so and she's come out not to look back once she once you escape from that catastrophe you don't get to be nostalgic for it the same0:50:43thing happens in the story of Moses because what happens to the Israelites when they're out in the desert is they start to become nostalgic for Egypt for the tyranny yet right and that's also I0:50:54think when God starts to send poisonous snakes among them because right though don't they they start to pine for Egypt and complain about Moses and then they0:51:03start to worship other idols so that's part of that confusion that you were talking about and then God gets irritated and throws a bunch of poisonous snakes in there to give them a good chomping yeah so I call that the0:51:14snakes come as a result of them wanting to go back yeah yeah well right that makes perfect sense so and you see that0:51:25nostalgia for tyranny you know you see that the Soviet nor in Russia right now in regards to Stalin and so the question0:51:34the question is I think this is one of the things that the guy who wrote the disappearance of God mentioned is do you want to be well fed as a slave or hungry0:51:44and freedom something like that and the choice well fed as a slave is not a good choice yeah so okay now so in Jonathan0:51:55you and I had talked to fair bit about the story of Abraham and the strangers and before so so God decides to reward0:52:06Abraham and he tells him that just like he told him before but he repeats it that he's going to be the the founder of0:52:16the nation and he and he tells them that Sarah is going to bear a child and Sarah0:52:26of course is not doesn't believe that let's see let me let me just find this here yeah0:52:38yes okay so that's what happens is the is that God's God God's word comes in to Abraham in a vision so it's the word0:52:47again saying that his reward will be great and that he's going to be the father of Nations but he doesn't have any children and so isn't that when he0:52:57takes you take Farrah's servant Hagar yeah and and that gives rise to Ishmael0:53:06and it isn't until later that Sarah is informed that she's going sorry sir your0:53:16hopes up man turning the key one fancy request this you want fancier quietly I'd be curious to know what she has found yeah you should look guys close0:53:27her down yeah I know it's very strange intermission there so okay so so abraham has to take a kind of a detour in order to have a child and he lays with Hagar0:53:38and Hagar we don't know much about her but she gets haughty right away and starts to despise Sarai and Sarai0:53:50actually beats her as far as I can tell it says Sarah dealt hardly with her and then Hagar flees and she ends up by a0:53:59well where an angel appears to her and the angel tells her that her son her0:54:09child is going to be the father of the nation as well so so the first question0:54:18might be why is it that Abraham at this point in the story why is it necessary0:54:28for the story that Abraham takes a detour and has a child with Hagar what do you think is a signifier it it's0:54:37always the same problem in the Bible it's always it starts with confusion and it has to develop towards something that0:54:48is clear so you're saying it yourself when you say detour yeah it's a detour exactly that's exactly what it is it's a detour0:54:58okay that's not necessary but it happens then they say well isn't there such as these detours or if the others are0:55:08things that are not necessary but happen there's something also in that detour the fact that that he gives birth to Ishmael which has to do with this this turning because God kind of promises0:55:19that Ishmael is going to come back and is going to be a big problem for you he's going to be a father of a great nation but it's going to be a big problem for you later like this going to0:55:28be there's going to be fighting between between your sons basically yeah there's that idea yeah of course here you know I don't know if it's in that story but0:55:37yeah well ASO seems to be associated with an idea that you might think about as successive approximation to an ideal0:55:46you know so one of the things that that I conceptualize sort of visually is this is associated with the idea of Geppetto0:55:56wishing on a star you know so what Geppetto does when he wants to facilitate the transformation of Pinocchio is lift his eyes up to the highest thing that he can conceive up0:56:06and Orient's himself with that but the thing is is that as you move through life let's say you're oriented by the highest thing you can conceive of but as0:56:15you move towards it you transform and then and your conceptualization of what's the highest shifts as you transform so you're aiming at the0:56:24highest thing but but your perhaps your ability to conceptualize what's the highest thing develops as you move towards it and so but what that means in practice is that you do take detours0:56:34because you aim at something but your aim is off and you move towards it and then you get to a point where you can correct your aim and so it's not like you've made a mistake exactly it's0:56:45you're farther ahead than you were and you've corrected your aim but your aim wasn't you weren't aiming at exactly the right thing to begin with and so now go0:56:56ahead well maybe that's what's happening to Abraham is that you know you could almost say I don't know that Ishmael is a practice run something like that well so0:57:09all right so then you were going to Matthew you were going to say something about that oh yeah I was going to say that exile in the Bible there's always a0:57:24reason for it but it's not necessarily a logical reason it's it's just like what you described you think you know something you think you'd know what0:57:33you're aiming at you think you know what you want you think you know what you're doing something happens that you didn't plan and that doesn't look like it's part of what you were aiming it makes0:57:43you take a detour well this this side is all about detours it's all about turning around you don't know where you're going you're lost so but in the end if it0:57:52brings about something that maybe you weren't even aiming at in the first place yeah but might be better than what you were in in the first place so it's0:58:02not all bad so I think that's the idea the idea of the whole idea of exile is that there it renews your plans right0:58:15if you don't die yeah if you don't that ha ha ha ha yeah even if you do die for New York life well yeah ok ok so now ok0:58:27so now the next thing that happens is that the strangers come to visit Abraham and he treats them hospitably and so now0:58:38we might say that that's an indication of his increasing alignment with the good maybe that's one way of thinking about it because he does right by the0:58:49stranger and one of the consequences of that is that the angels I guess we find out that they're angels tell him that Sarah is going to give0:58:58birth to someone and Abraham finds that very difficult to believe it Sarah finds it so difficult to believe that she actually laughs about it she overhears0:59:07it she laughs about it but but he he has the strangers he feeds them and he has them wash their feet if I remember0:59:16correctly and anyways he treats them hospitably it well and there's a blessing as a consequence of that and that's something we talked about a fair bit Jonathan when0:59:26we were talking about Tom the thing doesn't fit in categories yeah the stranger yeah which is that invitation to chaos as well that you were talking0:59:36about Matthew because the stranger is well the thing that you can be subjugated to but also something that will bring something new and potentially0:59:45disruptive but also potentially beneficial and so then the idea there is whether or not the stranger is disruptive or beneficial depends to a0:59:54large degree on how you treat the stranger and that's that strikes me as very very possible I mean that's the one thing that that's one of the things that1:00:03has really entered my imagination as a clinician know if you're approached by someone who's very in chaos the1:00:14consequence of that is very dependent on how you interact with them because it can go any way and they're not really in control because there's so chaotic and1:00:23so if you're careful and awake you can keep things moving in the proper direction and maybe even benefit from it and that's kind of like the idea of Noah1:00:35walking with God because one of the reasons that Noah gets through the flood is because he's oriented properly he's walking with God and so you could say1:00:46that exile can it's something like exile can expand you if you stay properly oriented while you're in exile it can fix it can1:00:56fix your mistakes that's part of it it cleans you it renews you because you make mistakes yeah and they become part of you and if1:01:06you're just stuck with your mistakes you're rigid about your own mistakes you need something outer to something that you don't know something that you don't understand the clean you're like takes1:01:16away yeah well that's like the gold the dragon hordes with a virgin that the dragon hordes right it's it's if the dragon represents that chaotic would say exile state the drag or the gold and the1:01:27and the virgin both represent that which can be assimilated as a consequence of being in that situation the funny thing is is in the hero myths going into exile on1:01:39purpose works way better than going into exile accidentally yeah so that's an interesting thing so okay okay so now1:01:48well can I say something about the part you were describing the whole story of Abraham if you look at the big picture it's really about progressive1:01:57progressively knowing something so it starts with just the voice okay oh god go here doesn't mean much goes there1:02:07then it becomes a little more precise I will give you this land but is more specific and then as the further he goes the more it becomes explicit what's1:02:18going to happen so I'll give you a son when I don't know someday it doesn't say later on it becomes more and more explicit okay and he says like1:02:28in the party were talking about he says three men come these are angels as it becomes clear later so this is God right1:02:38pod sending his message in a clear manner and it's more right specific than before he says this time next year you1:02:49will have it's okay so okay so a couple of things about that so yes one of the things that see one of1:02:58the ways that I've conceptualized the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament and I this is kind of a classic Christian conceptualization I think and it's also it's also1:03:07analogous to what happens to Moses because Moses doesn't get to the promised land so there's this idea Christian idea that the reason that Moses can't get to the promised land is1:03:16because he only represents the law now but then I thought about that I thought well one of the I've got to say about1:03:25four stories at the same time here to man to get the bill as I'm right so the first is it's not so easy to speak the truth but it's fairly easy to stop lying1:03:34and so as you stop lying you get better you get to approximate speaking the truth but the way you start isn't by speaking the truth the way you start is1:03:44by stopping line and then a lot of the rules in the Old Testament are prohibitions here's a bunch of things you shouldn't do that you might be inclined to do and so the idea there1:03:54would be if you stop doing all the things you know you shouldn't do then you can your head clears up enough so you can start to see the things that you should do and so then in the Abrahamic1:04:04story maybe it's something like this you said you implied Matthew that Abraham had originally follows something like a vague and he'll defined whim but1:04:14he has enough faith to move forward despite the fact that it's vague and ill-defined and then as a consequence of moving forward it becomes more and more1:04:23concretize dand and differentiated and clear okay that's right man because that's you know it's funny because the future authoring program we've developed is sort of predicated on that idea the1:04:33first thing you do is wander around in a kind of confused days trying to find a direction of orientation and then you clarify that and partly you do that by1:04:44continuing to think about it but you also clarify it by acting on it okay yeah and that's the idea these three men1:04:53that come visit him there's a reason whether it's three okay it's because it's it's trying to express1:05:02the idea that it's more expressed it's more explicit it's not just the seed anymore it's like it's like a branch okay you've got up here you've got1:05:11something that looks like a branch it's branching out into a more concrete thing and at first it's just a voice then its division then it's actual people okay1:05:22Shay okay okay so here's another idea so let's say if you're beginning to develop1:05:33morality you you behave so that the people who share your morality can get along with you that means you follow the rules but if1:05:44you're dealing with strangers it's a different issue because they aren't part of your morality and so the question then is how do you act properly when you're not in the domain of your1:05:54morality and I always thought about that as a meta moral domain and it seems to me that it's the domain that Christ occupies because he's he's like the mediator between morality1:06:04he's in no man's land and is a mediator between morality Xand and if you're if you're if you've oriented yourself1:06:13properly then you even know how to act with there aren't any rules and that's why Abraham can act properly in relationship to the strangers he's awake enough so that when the strangers show1:06:22up shows up he can pay attention to the way they're acting and can act spontaneously as a consequence of paying attention and things go well and so the1:06:32strangers aren't hostile they don't kill him they don't take his wife they don't do any of the terrible things that strangers could do and he gets a blessing as a consequence of it that1:06:41seemed reasonable it is but we have to understand that these strangers are come from heaven in1:06:54the sense that they've bringing a message they're not just random strangers very they're sent well maybe he would have acted the same way with1:07:03strangers that wasn't sent and that's the whole point he doesn't know that's right we act in a way that allows for that yeah yeah for the one that accent1:07:12okay here is Eve okay so that's very interesting too because one of the things that I think you see happening as a consequence of the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament is1:07:23that part of Christ's message is to act in exactly that way is to act in a manner that allows for the possibility1:07:32of the emergence of the good that's something like that's something like what would you describe as a description of the necessity of faith and you know like let's say you stretch out your hand1:07:41to someone in trust should be naive but it's a precondition for good things happening AG if you're distrustful and you have every reason to be because people are full of snakes if1:07:51you're distrustful you foreclose the opportunity for cooperative progress instantly you might protect yourself against being bitten now net so so there1:08:01is a dramatic relationship between the manner in which you open yourself up to the world and the way the world treats you and one of the things that seems to1:08:10be really emphasized it's more implicit in the Old Testament more explicit the New Testament is that the more you open yourself up to the possibility that good1:08:20things will happen and that's partly by accepting your vulnerability as far as I can tell the higher the probability is that good things will in fact happen1:08:32yeah I mean I would definitely say that in the story of Abraham the like we were kind of flirting around that idea before is that the reason why he was able to to1:08:43receive them as these angels that they were able to manifest themselves as these angels was because he was willing to host them properly eat he like it's as if his family just like Sarah like1:08:54Sarah is is he was the right ground for that manifestation at that time right well yeah I would say that they wouldn't have been angels if he wouldn't have1:09:03treated them properly well he might have been here but they might have done they might have done what they did in Sodom and Gomorrah like that's the whole thing okay so now I want to switch I want to1:09:13flip the head a little bit this is really what I this is I think of all the things I wanted to discuss with you guys I think this is the one that's most crucial because okay so now we're in1:09:27let's say we're in Sodom with the with the angels and we're in the part of the story where the townspeople have Sodom gather around the house and they tell1:09:36law and unless he throws out the strangers so that they can be raped well the townspeople demand that and then law it offers them his daughters1:09:48which seems like a hell of a thing to do it's like the sacrifice of Isaac to some degree what it looks like to me because he's willing to sacrifice his daughters to1:09:58protect the strangers now okay so that's a morally let's call that a morally ambiguous element of the story but then the townspeople reject out and they tell1:10:10they basically tell him that he has no right or power to bargain and that not only are they going to take his daughters but they're also going to take the stranger's so it doesn't work but1:10:20you know to modern sensibility the offering of his daughters is a reprehensible thing but it seems to be that in the context of the story it's an1:10:30indication of how hard Lotte is trying to treat the strangers properly in a place where that's essentially impossible yes that's the whole point of that story that place is impossible1:10:41that's the whole point I think what he just said okay there's no way out of it right Leonard Cohen said something about1:10:50that he said there's he had a line that I remember quite well he said there's no decent place to stand in the massacre and what that seems to mean is that1:10:59something it's something like you can get into a place where that's made of such a compound of errors and deceit and catastrophe that no matter which way you1:11:09turn there is no good yeah I've seen people like that my clinical practice there's there's no good there's no good alternative everything is sin1:11:19that's that's a good way of no matter which way you shake your you're not going to hit the mark because you're not somewhere where the mark can be hit okay now I've been trying to think about the1:11:30story of Sodom and Gomorrah in relationship to modern sexual confusion so this is what I see happening on the1:11:39social justice front let's say on the one hand since the 1960's and probably has a consequence of the birth control pill but other factors as well there's1:11:48been tremendous stress placed on sexual liberation and so there's this idea that I think is associated in large part1:11:57right now with the radical left of total sexual freedom but at the same time there's increasing emphasis from exactly the same sources on restricting sexual1:12:09interaction so you see this in the campuses for example where increasingly particularly heterosexual contact is regulated by a doctrine that says you1:12:18have to get spoken permission for every move in the mating process and so you see and I know I'm not expressing myself1:12:29very well but there seems to be in our current culture there seems to be massive sexual confusion it's it's some weird combination of extreme libertinism and extreme authoritarianism part of1:12:45what's happening happening and is that sex impulse of sexual gratification trumps everything it's something like1:12:55that I mean I know there's more to what's going on inside of the knob but there's certainly that and so well I'm trying to figure out what to say about1:13:04that tonight because well there's there's a lesson in there the lesson is something like don't let sexuality1:13:13don't let impulse and sexuality get the upper hand it's something like that or all hell will break loose which I actually happen to agree with so one of the things that we haven't been able to1:13:22talk about in our culture I think is let's take the idea the phenomenon of AIDS like AIDS mutated to take advantage1:13:31of promiscuous sexuality and that's just nothing you never hear that publicized you know people had associated AIDS with homosexuality and there was a reason for1:13:41that because it's much more easily transmitted as a consequence of homosexual sex than heterosexual sex because the anus is a much more delicate physiological structure it's not as1:13:51robust and it can be eat much more easily damaged and and and with with disease resulting as a consequence but it isn't only the matter of sexual1:14:01action that's the issue it's also the fact that promiscuity provided the evolutionary platform for the AIDS virus to mutate into a very into the form that1:14:10it finally took and it was only through the skin by the skin of our teeth that we escaped a total izing plague you know had that emerged 100 years ago1:14:21god only knows how many people would have died AIDS was unbelievably fatal so I know that's a mishmash of ideas and1:14:31I'm not exactly sure how to see my way clear through it but there is a clear warning in that story about about something about to do with with with1:14:42sexual iniquity in in the Bible that sexuality has two two poles that define it and it's pretty clear one one side is1:14:55reproduction and the other side is we could let's say recreation okay so so those are the two folds of sexuality in1:15:04a normal world so it's not just for reproduction and it's not just for recreation it's both like that was the1:15:13idea I mean I mean actual idea now if you if there's a balance there and you know that should be have if you lose this balance and it becomes just about1:15:23reproduction that's a problem if it becomes just about recreation that's another problem you know okay it's not that complicated really but it's so1:15:32politically incorrect to talk about these things a little bit obvious well that nobody cares you talk about it the thing is is that the most difficult things to talk about are the things that1:15:42are obvious because when they're obvious you don't have to talk about them and so then when people start to question the obvious you don't know what to say yes I1:15:51guess so for example we would I I'm thinking about the slut walks you know and so women go out and they dress very provocatively and and they go out and1:16:01manifest their right to be as provocative as they possibly can be without being interfered with and I have some sympathy for that perspective1:16:10because it seems to me appropriate for women to be the final arbiters in sexual contact but on the other hand it also it's that whole exercise is blind to the1:16:21fact that clothing for example has communicative intent and that people broadcast their invitation to sexual1:16:31congress in a million ways subtle and not-so-subtle and you can't just say I have the right to broadcast myself in any manner1:16:40possible and be completely beat what completely immune from the consequences there's something wrong with that and1:16:49with regards to basic sexual morality you know I've read things about like slut-shaming is that the more radical1:16:58feminist types for example claim that women shouldn't be held responsible for their sexual behavior in some sense shouldn't be held against them how many men they've slept with etc but then I1:17:08think well you never recommend to someone that they lay down naked on the on the side of the street with their legs spread and invite anybody who walks1:17:17by to partake of the opportunity everyone would regard that as inappropriate I think without question and so what that indicates is that some1:17:29degree of sexual propriety is both normative and ethical and then of course you can start asking yourself about what that degree of social sexual propriety1:17:39should be and it does have something to do with getting the balance between reproduction and recreation right okay1:17:49but the thing even in the Bible there's there's the two aspects some stories are about just this aspect and there are the1:17:58most strange stories in the Bible for example the story of Tamar is one of those so I don't know if you're familiar1:18:08with that story but stuff it's in that it's intercut with the story of Joseph okay in Egypt and it's essentially it1:18:19says that Judah has children with some woman and I think it's a stranger it doesn't necessarily say so but it seems1:18:29like that's what it is and then the sons die off and then there's this woman called Tamar and she disguises herself as a prostitute great1:18:39and she has a kid with Judah himself so all the simple jurors heard that shorty1:18:48elements of his clothing yes demonstrate as a as a bribe yes essentially she wants to indicate later that he's the one who slept with her yeah yeah yeah so1:18:58that story is about then is that the need for the recreated part of sexuality it's all about that symbolism it's all1:19:08about the seat it's all about incest it's all about that and the idea is it's to raise the dead okay it's not clear in1:19:19the story but if you understand the imagery that's what it's about it's about regressing back to an error that was made okay and raising the dead so I1:19:30want to get into it but just the idea that in the Bible there's folks - there's reproduction and there's recreation and the recreation is renewal1:19:42there's the original sexuality is about renewal - but that aspect of the symbolism is is pretty I don't want to say obscure because it's actually right1:19:52there if you can see it but it's it's strange I'll say it like that it's a strange okay okay so now another element of this might be the fact that1:20:01in modern identity politics sexual choice is a canonical identifier and that also seems to me to be something wrong about that like one of the things1:20:12I've seen happening in Toronto I'm sure it's the same in Montreal is that and I'm going to do this awkwardly I'm going to put this awkwardly because I haven't1:20:21been able to sort through it properly Pride Week Pride Day has turned into Pride Week and that's turned into Pride Month and I think that seems to me to be1:20:32pushing against some kind of limit because the first question that I have is like I was reading this book the other day by a friend of mine from1:20:41Ottawa who's a gay conservative and he said he had a lot harder time coming out as a conservative than he had as coming out as gay and he talked about the1:20:52degree to which homosexuals were persecuted in Canada before say the 1980s and it's quite it makes quite1:21:02parce reading let's say and so-and-so fair enough to the to the civil rights1:21:13movement let's say it that has brought homosexuality into the norm or that into the mainstream maybe that's one way of thinking about it but that conversation1:21:22still has a tremendous amount of development that's necessary because I don't understand exactly it isn't1:21:33obvious to me what integration into the mainstream precisely means because a lot there's been a lot of talk so far about respecting the rights of gay people but1:21:44very little talk about what the accompanying responsibilities might be that actually seems to me to be a problem and I mean I just had a letter from from gay guy who is being wrestling1:21:56with this because he's not sure how to be gay and to be ethical at the same time you know because he sees part of normative behavior as taking wife and1:22:05having children and not and can see the value in that but that's certainly not the direction of his proclivity and so we wrote wrote to me asking me what he should do and you know I don't have an1:22:17answer for that I don't know what the answer to that is but I know that it might be something that would be worth talking about and then it's part of this current confusion about sexual identity1:22:28and sexual pleasure and and well even gender identity for that matter so all1:22:37right so your idea was well the balance between recreation and reproduction had gone was completely absent in Sodom it was all recreation it was all instant1:22:47gratification and impulse yeah and that's why it's put in contests with the Abraham bit because it's the same Angels1:22:57know in that case he says you'll have a son this time next year so it's the reproduction part is there but when he gets to the bottom it's not there1:23:08anymore it's only the recreation part okay yeah so there goes they're meant to be contested those two swords actually in the story of Abraham it's pretty1:23:19clear he goes um I don't know if this will make sense because it when the angels come it says um he washes their1:23:29feet and then he feasts them okay that's actually the recreation and reproduction part that's not a sense of sexuality but1:23:39it's in terms of meaning the renewal the washing of the feet is the recreation part the renewals or restarting and the1:23:49feeding is the reproduction part that's not the sexual way but when you feed something food and it eats it and integrate it integrates it correctly that's like a reproduction of your1:24:00identity or you're staying yourself you're reproducing yourself so when you eat food that's what you're doing not like I said not in a sexual way but it has exactly the same meaning if you eat1:24:10something that you can integrate correctly you're like reproducing your pattern it's like the correct version of yourself and then the other side the washing is1:24:20that like is that mental flood yeah look it's a mini flood right it also isn't accessible right it's a controlled one1:24:29you're washing the dust off your the roads dust off your feet it means that you're you're passing from one mode of being into another because you're you're1:24:39cleaning off the debris of the past it's something like that and then it's about renewal next yeah okay so you have to see that when when when Matthew is talking about the idea of recreation you1:24:49have to understand that recreation and rest are basically the same thing right let's basically have the same meaning it's sleeping resting recreation are all guides that bring you into renewal okay1:25:01all right dying even dying that's what dying is it's this passing into another state letting something else have a1:25:10chance that's what time is it I mean0:00:00Biblical Series VIII: The Phenomenology of the Divine
0:00:00 oh0:00:18Hello, everyone. Thank you again for showing up, so tonight We're going to finish off the story of Noah and also0:00:31the story of the Tower of Babel and I don't think that'll take very long and then we're going to0:00:42turn to the abrahamic Stories and They're a very complex set of stories. They sit between0:00:51the Earliest stories in Genesis that I would say end with the tower of babel And then the stories of moses which are extraordinarily well-developed0:01:02Abrahamic stories, there's a whole sequence of them multiple stories conjoined together and There I found them very daunting0:01:11they're very difficult to understand and so I'm going to stumble through them the best that I can I would say that's that's probably the best way to think about this because0:01:21they Have a narrative content. That's quite strange I0:01:30was reading a book while doing this called the disappearance of God that I found quite helpful, and0:01:39the author of that book argues that one of the things that happens in the old testament is that God is very manifest at the beginning0:01:51in terms of personal appearances even and then that proclivity fades away as the old testament develops, and there's a0:02:02parallel development That it's maybe maybe causally linked. I'm not exactly sure how to conceptualize it, but that appears to be causally linked is that?0:02:12the Stories about individuals become more and more well-developed so it says in it's as if as God fades away, so to speak0:02:22the individual becomes more and more manifest and There's a statement in the old testament the location of which. I don't recall0:02:32But I'll tell you about it in future lectures where God essentially tells Whoever he's speaking with and I don't remember who that is that he's going to disappear and let man essentially go his own way0:02:45And see what happens not a complete disappearance, but maybe a transformations is something that Modern people regard more as a psychological phenomena rather than the sort of objective entity that God seems to be in0:03:00the beginning of the biblical stories and so I've been wrestling with that a lot because the notion that God, I got appears to Abraham multiple times and0:03:13that's not a concept that's easy for modern people to to grasp in for us generally speaking apart from say issues of Faith0:03:24God is it some? thing someone who makes himself personally manifest in our lives He doesn't appear to us0:03:36That's I suppose why the question of belief is so paramount for modern people I presume that if God had within the habit of appearing to you you likely wouldn't have a problem with belief0:03:46I mean it might be more complicated than that, but that's how it seems to me, and so when we read stories about0:03:55God making himself manifest either to a nation say in the case of israel or to individuals It's not easy to understand0:04:04It's not easy to understand why people would write stories like that if they thought like we thought and I mean it really it wasn't That long ago that the Bible was written say from a biological perspective. It's really only yesterday0:04:15It's a couple thousand years say four thousand years something like that That's not very long ago from a biological perspective, it's it's nothing0:04:26so the first thing I tried to do is to see if I could figure out how to understand that and so else the lecture once we finish the the0:04:35remains of the story of Noah, I'll start the lecture with a with an attempt to Situate the abrahamic stories in a context that might make them more accessible0:04:48These two contexts that work for me to make them more accessible Let's conclude the Noah Story first however when we0:04:59ended last time The ark had come to its resting place and Noah and his family had0:05:08debarked and so this is the stories of What occurs immediately after afterwards?0:05:17it's a very short story, but I think it's it's very relevant for both Of these stories the tower of babel is well very relevant for our current times and the sons of Noah0:05:28That went forth of the ark were shem, and ham and Japheth and ham Is the father of Canaan? These are the three sons of Noah and of them was the whole Earth overspread and Noah began to be a husbandman0:05:42and he planted a vine yard and he drank of the wine and was drunken and he was uncovered within his tent and Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brethren without?0:05:57and shem and Japheth took a garment and laid upon both their shoulders and went backward and Covered the nakedness of their father and their faces were backward and they saw not their fathers nakedness0:06:07And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son had done unto him and he said curse had to be Canaan a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren and0:06:19He said blessed shall be the lord. God of shem and Canaan Shall be his servant and God shall enlarge Japheth And he shall dwell in the tents of shem and Canaan Shall be his servant0:06:29and Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years and all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died and the whole Earth was of one language and of one speech okay, so0:06:42I remember thinking about this story It's got to be 30 years ago0:06:51And I think the meaning of the story stood out for me sometimes When you read complicated material sometimes a piece of it will stand out. It's for some reason. It's like it glitters0:07:04I suppose that might be one way of thinking about it. It's it You're in sync with it, and you can understand what it means. I've really experienced that reading the Dao. De Jing which is document0:07:14I would really like to do a lecture on at some point because some of the verses I don't understand but others stand right out and I can understand them and I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant and I0:07:24think it means you know we talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve and The idea essentially was that to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability0:07:37the physical Your physical boundaries in time and space and Your your your physiological0:07:46your fundamental physiological Insufficiencies as they mate might be judged by others, so there's biological Insufficiency that sort of built into you because you're a fragile Mortal vulnerable half insane creature0:07:57And that's that's just an existential truth, and then of course even merely as a Human being even with all those faults there are faults that you have that are particular to you that might be0:08:09judged harshly by the group Well might be will definitely be judged Harshly by the group and so to become aware of your nakedness is to become self-conscious and and to and to0:08:19Know your limits and to know your vulnerability, and that's what is revealed To ham when he comes across his father naked and so the question is0:08:30What does it mean to see your father naked and it seems to me and especially in an inappropriate Manner like this it it? it's it's it's as if0:08:41ham He does the same thing that happens in the mesopotamian creation myth When when time out and absolute give rise to the first gods0:08:52there there the father of the eventual deity of redemption Marduk they're very careless and noisy and they kill apps, ooh their father and0:09:03attempt to inhabit his corpse and that makes timeout enraged and so she Bursts Forth from The Darkness to To do them in it's like a precursor to the flood story or an analogue to the flood story0:09:15And I see the same thing happening here with ham. Is that he's is insufficiently respectful of his father and The question is exactly what does the father represent and you can say well there's there's?0:09:28There's the father that you have and that's a human being that's the demand like other men a man among men but then there's the farther as such and that's the spirit of the father and0:09:38Insofar as you have a father you have both at the same time you have the personal father That's a man among other men just like anyone others father, but insofar as that man is your father that means that he's something different than just another person and0:09:54what he is is the incarnation of the spirit of the Father and to see that to take it to what to0:10:03Disrespect that carelessly, maybe even he's like no one makes a mistake right? He? produces wine and gets himself drunk and you might say well0:10:12you know if he sprawled out there for everyone to see it's hardly hams fault if he stumbles across them but The book is laying out a danger and the danger is that well maybe you catch your father at0:10:25his most vulnerable moment and if you're disrespectful Then you transgress against the spirit of the father and if you transgress against the spirit of father and lose0:10:36Spirit of the father and lose respect for the spirit of the father then that is likely to transform you into a slave That's a very interesting idea and I think it's particularly interesting0:10:48Maybe not particularly interesting, but it's it's particularly germane. I think to our current cultural situation because I think that0:10:57We're pushed constantly to see the nakedness of our father so to speak because of the intense criticism, that's0:11:06Directed towards our culture and the patriarch of culture, so to speak we're constantly exposing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities and let's say nakedness and0:11:18There's nothing wrong with criticism, but the thing about Criticism is the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff It's not to burn everything to the ground0:11:27Right, it's to say well. We're going to carefully look at this we're going to carefully differentiate We're going to keep what's good and we're going to move away from what's bad But the point of the Criticism isn't to identify everything is bad. It's to0:11:40Separate what's good from what's bad so that you can retain. What's good and move towards it and And to be careless at that is deadly because you're inhabited by the spirit of the father right insofar as you're a cultural0:11:54Construction which of course is something that the that the postmodern neo-Marxists are absolutely? emphatic about you're a cultural construction insofar as you're a cultural construction, then you're inhabited by the spirit of the father and to be0:12:08Disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes you not all of what you are certainly Certainly not all of what you are But a good portion of what you are insofar as you're a socialized cultural entity and if you pull out0:12:23If you pull the foundation out from underneath that what do you have left you can hardly manage on your own? You know it's just not possible. You're a cultural creation. And0:12:35so Ham makes this desperate error and is Careless about Exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father something like that. He doesn't without sufficient respect. And the judgment is that0:12:50not only will he be a slave, but so will all of his descendants, and he's contrasted with the other two sons who I Suppose are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt something like that, and so when they see him in a compromising position0:13:06they handle it with respect and and and don't capitalize on it and Maybe that makes them strong. That's what it seems to me, and so I think that's what that story means0:13:21It has something to do with respect you know and the funny thing about having respect for your culture, and I suppose that's partly why I'm doing the biblical stories is because0:13:30They're part of a they're part of my culture they're part of our culture perhaps, but they're certainly part of my culture and0:13:39It seems to me that it's worthwhile to treat that with respect to see what you can glean from it and And not kick it when it's down. Let's say0:13:51so and so that's how the story of no ends you know and the thing too is Noah is actually a0:14:06Pretty decent incarnation of the Spirit of the father that which I suppose is one of the things that makes hams Misstep more egregious is that I mean noah just built an ark and got everybody through the flood man0:14:19You know it's not so bad, and so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn't enough to justify humiliating him and0:14:29You know I don't think it's pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation To note on a daily basis that we're all contained in an ark0:14:38Right, and that's the ark that you could think about that as the ark that's been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. That's the Tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit that we take for granted0:14:49Because it works so well that protects us from things that we can't even imagine and we don't have to imagine because we're so well protected and0:14:58So one of the things that's really struck me hard. I would say about the Disintegration and corruption of the universities is the absolute ingratitude that goes along with that0:15:09You know what? Criticism as I said it's a fine thing if it's done in the spirit in a proper spirit And that's the spirit of separating the wheat from the chaff, but it needs to be accompanied by gratitude0:15:21And it does seem to me that anyone who lives in in the west in the western culture at this time in history and in this place and who hasn't0:15:33simultaneously grateful for that is is half-blind at least because it's never been better than this and0:15:42It could be so much worse and it's highly likely that it will be so much worse because for most of human history So much worse is the norm0:15:53so then there's this little story that Crops up that seems in some ways unrelated to everything that's gone before it0:16:06But I think it's also an extremely profound little story it took me a long time to figure it out. It's the tower of babel0:16:15and it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of shinar and dwelt there that's Noah's Descendants and the whole Earth was of one language and of one speech0:16:26And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of shinar and they dwelt there And they said to one another Go let us make brick and burn them thoroughly and they had brick for stone and slime they head for mortar0:16:40So they're establishing a city and they said go let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach Unto heaven and let us make a name lest. We be scattered abroad upon the face of the Earth0:16:54and the Lord came down to see the city in the tower which the children of men built and The Lord said behold the people is one and they all have one language and now this they begin to do0:17:07And now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do Go to let us go down and there confound their language that they may not understand one another's speech0:17:19So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth and they left off to build the city therefore is the name of it called babel because the lord did there confound the language of all the Earth and0:17:32From thence did the Lord scattered them abroad Upon the face of all the Earth It's a very difficult story to understand and it's on the face of it. It doesn't seem to show0:17:43God in a very good light although that happens fairly frequently in the old testament as far as I can tell but You know the thing to do if you're reading in the spirit of the text let's say is to remember that0:17:58It's God that you're talking about and so Even though you might think that He's appearing in a bad light Your duty as a reader. I suppose is to assume that you're wrong and that what he did was right0:18:12And then you're supposed to figure out well, how could it possibly be right because the axiomatic Presupposition is that it's God and whatever he does is right, and you might say well, you can disagree with that0:18:21And it's it's also the case that some of the people that God talks to in the old testament Actually disagree with him and convinced him to alter his actions, but the point still remains that it's God and if he's doing it then0:18:33By definition. There's a good reason There's an idea much later that John Milton develops in in0:18:45Paradise lost Which is an amazing poem And It's it's it's a it's it's a profound enough poem so that it's almost been incorporated into the biblical structure I would say so0:18:58the Corpus of Christianity Post Milton was Saturated by the Miltonic stories of Satan's Rebellion none of us in the in the in the0:19:11Biblical texts or it's only hinted at in very brief passages and Milton wrote his poem To justify the word the ways of God to man, which is quite an ambition really!0:19:25It's an amazing profound ambition To try to produce something to produce a literary work That justifies being to human beings, because that's what Milton was trying to do, so one of my readers here0:19:38Sent me a link the other day for viewers To a work of philosophy by an australian Philosopher whose name I don't remember0:19:48Who basically wrote a book saying that: being as such, human experience, is so corrupt and so Permeated by suffering that it would be better if it had never existed at all0:20:00sort of the ultimate expression of Nihilism and Goethe in in Faust his Mephistopheles who's a Satanic character obviously has that as a credo0:20:10That's that Satan's fundamental motivation is His objection to creation itself is that creation is so flawed and so rife with suffering that it would be better if it had never0:20:21existed at all and so that's his motivation for attempting to continue to Destroy it but in Milton's Paradise lost0:20:31Satan is an intellectual figure, and you see that motif emerged very frequently by the way in popular culture, so for example in the lion king the figure of Skaar who's a Satanic figure is also hyper intellectual and0:20:46That's very common that you know it's the evil scientist motif or the or the evil advisor to the king the same motif it Encapsulates something about rationality and it what it seems to encapsulate is the idea that0:20:57Rationality like Satan is the highest angel in God's heavenly Kingdom. It's a psychological idea. You know that the most powerful0:21:06Sub element of the human psyche is the intellect and and it's the thing that shines out above all within the domain of humanity and maybe across the0:21:17Domain of life itself the human intellect there's something absolutely remarkable about it but it has a flaw and the flaw is that it tends to Fall in love with its own productions and to assume that their total0:21:28Solzhenitsyn when he was writing the Gulag Archipelago had a warning about that with regards to totalitarian Ideology, and he said that the price of selling your god-given soul to the entrapments of0:21:43human dogma was slavery and death essentially and Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost Satan0:21:55decides that He can do without the transcendent he can do without God and that's why he foments rebellion It's something like that and the consequence of that the immediate consequence from Milton's perspective was that as soon as Satan0:22:09Decided that what he knew was sufficient That he could do without the transcendent which he might think about as the domain outside of what you know something like that0:22:21immediately he was in hell and When I read Paradise lost I was studying totalitarianism, and I thought you know the poet0:22:30the true Poet like a prophet if someone who has intimations of the future and maybe that's because the poetic mind the philosophical or prophetic mind is a pattern detector and0:22:43And there are people who can detect the underlying it's like the malady of a nation Melody is in song the song of a nation and can see how it's going to develop across the centuries you see this you see0:22:54That Nietzsche because Nietzsche for example in the mid you know in 1860 or so. I mean he prophesied What was going to happen in the 20th century said that he said specifically that the spectre of Communism would kill0:23:08Millions of people in the 20th century, it's amazing prophecy. He said that in the notes that became will to power and Dostoyevsky was of the same sort of mind someone who was in touch enough with the fundamental patterns of0:23:23Human movement that they could extrapolate out into the future and see what was coming and I mean some people are very good at detecting patterns you know and and uh0:23:34Milton, I think was of that, sort and I think he had intimations of what was coming as human rationality became more and more powerful and technology became more and more powerful and the0:23:45Information was that we would produce systems that dispensed with God That were completely rational and completely total that would immediately turn everything they touched into something0:23:57indistinguishable from Hell, and then Milton's warning was embodied in the poem is that the rational mind that0:24:07Generates a production and then worships it as if it's absolute immediately occupies hell So what does that have to do with the tower of babel?0:24:20we know it back into 2008 when the When we had that economic collapse? the strange idea emerged politically and that0:24:30was the idea of too big to fail and I thought about that idea for a long time because I thought There's something deeply wrong with that is one of the things that made Marx wrong0:24:43was Marx believed that capital would flow into the hands of fewer and fewer people and that the dissociation between the rich and the poor would become more extreme as capitalism developed and0:24:58Like so many things that Marx said that's it's kind of true. It's kind of true in that The distribution of wealth and in fact a distribution of anything, that's produced0:25:11Follows a Pareto Pattern and the Pareto Pattern basically is that a small proportion of people end up with the bulk of the goods And it isn't just money it's it's anything that people produce creatively0:25:24ends up in that distribution and That's actually the economists call that the Matthieu principle And they take that from a statement in the new testament and the statement is to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken and0:25:38It's it's a map of the manner in which the world manifests itself where Human creative production is involved and the map seems to indicate that as you start to produce and you're successful0:25:49The probability that you will continue to be successful or accelerate Increases as you're successful and as you fail the probability that you will fail starts to accelerate0:25:58So if your progress to life looks like this or like this something like that and the reason that Marx was right was because he noted that as a0:26:10Feature of the capitalist system the reason that he was wrong. Is that it's not a feature that's specific to a capitalist system it's a feature that's general to all systems of creative production that are known and0:26:22so it's like a natural law and it's enough of a natural law by the way that the distribution of wealth can be modeled by Physical models using the same equations that govern the distribution of gas molecules in a vacuum, so it's a really profound0:26:37It's a fundamentally profound observation about the world way the world lays itself out, and it's problematic because if0:26:47resources accrue unfairly to a small minority of people and there's a natural law like element to that that has to be dealt with from a social perspective because if the0:27:01Inequality becomes too extreme then the whole system will destabilize and so you can have an intelligent discussion about how to mitigate the effects of0:27:11the transfer of creative production into the hands of a small number of people Now the other reason however having said that the other reason that Marx was wrong. There's a number of them0:27:24One is that even though creative products end Up in the hands of a small number of people it's not the same people consistently across time0:27:37It's the same proportion of people, and that's not the same thing you know like imagine that there's water going down a drain and you say well look at the0:27:46Spiral it's permanent, you think well the spiral is permanent, but the water Molecules aren't they're moving through it And it's the same in some sense with the pareto distribution is that there's a 1% and there's always a 1%, but it's not the same people it's0:28:01the stability of it differs from culture to culture but there's a lot of movement in the upper 1% a tremendous amount of movement and one of the reasons for that movement is that0:28:12things get large and then they get too large and then they collapse and so in 2008 when the politicians said too big to fail0:28:23They got something truly backwards as far as I can tell and that was With a reverse the statement was reversed it should have been so big it had to fail0:28:36And that's what I think the story of the tower of babel is about it's it's a warning against the expansion of the system0:28:47Until it encompasses everything it's a warning against Totalitarian presumption so what happens for example When people set out to build the tower of babel as they want to build a structure that reaches to heaven0:28:59right so the idea is that It can it can it can replace it can replace the role of God it's something like that it can erase the distinction between0:29:10Earth and Heaven, and so there's a utopian kind of vision there as well as we can build a structure That's so large and encompassing that that That it can replace heaven itself0:29:22That's an interesting The fact that that doesn't work and that God objects to it is also extraordinarily interesting and it's an indication to me of the unbelievable0:29:31Profundity of these stories. It's like I think one thing we should have learned from the 20th century, but of course didn't was that There's something extraordinary dangerous about totalitarian utopian visions. That's something dostoevsky wrote about by the way in his great book0:29:47Notes from Underground because Dostoevsky figured out by the early 1900's that there was something very very Pathological about a utopian vision of perfection that it was profoundly anti-human and and notes in notes from underground0:30:01He demolishes the notion of utopia one of the things he says that I loved it's so Brilliant said imagine that you brought the Socialist utopia into being and0:30:12dostoyevsky says and that human beings had nothing to do except eat Drink and busy themselves with the continuation of the species0:30:24He said that the first thing that would happen under circumstances like that Would be that Human beings would go mad and break the system smash it just so that something unexpected0:30:35And crazy could happen because human beings don't want utopian comfort and certainty they want adventure and Chaos and uncertainty and0:30:45so that the very notion of a utopia was anti-human because we're not built for static utopia we're built for a0:30:55dynamic situation where there's Demands placed on us and where there's the optimal amount of uncertainty0:31:07Well, we know what happened in the 20th century as a consequence of the widespread promulgation of utopian schemes and what happened was0:31:16mayhem on a scale that had never been matched in the entire history of humanity, and that's really saying something because0:31:26There was plenty of Mayhem before the 20th century I guess there wasn't as much industrial clout behind it and so so early you0:31:35see so early in the biblical narrative you have a warning against Hubris and and some indication that0:31:45properly functioning systems have an appropriate scale I read an article in the economist magazine this week about the0:31:54rise of Nationalist Movements all over the world as a counterbalance to globalization maybe it's most marked with the European economic community0:32:05And the economist writers were curious about why that counter movement has been developing, but it seems to me that it's also a tower of Babel phenomena is that0:32:17And maybe this is most evident in the European economic community to bring all of that multiplicity under the0:32:28What would you call it under the umbrella of a single unity is? To simultaneously erect a system where the top is so far from the bottom that the bottom has no connection to the top0:32:40You know your your your social systems have to be large enough, so they protect you, but small enough So that you have a place in them, and it seems to me perhaps. That's what's happened in0:32:52in places like the EEC is that the distance between the typical citizen and the Bureaucracy that runs the entire structure has got so great0:33:03that it's an element of destabilization in and of itself and so people revert back to say nationalistic identities because0:33:13It's something that they can relate to If there's a there's a history there and a shared identity a genuine identity0:33:23An identity of language and tradition it's not an artificial imposition from the top an artificial abstract imposition0:33:38in in the egyptian creation myth the version I'm most familiar with in the previous0:33:47Creation myth the older one the Mesopotamian creation myth Mostly what you see Menacing humanity is Tiamat she's the dragon of Chaos and so that's nature. It's really0:33:59It's really mother nature red in tooth and claw but by the time the egyptians come along0:34:09It isn't only nature that threatens humanity it's the social structure itself and so the egyptians had two deities that represented the social structure and one was Osiris who was0:34:21Like the spirit of the father. He was a great hero who established egypt, but became old and and Willfully blind and and and0:34:31and senile and he had an evil brother named Seth and Seth was always conspiring to overthrow him and0:34:41because Osiris ignored him long enough Seth did overthrow chopped him into pieces and distributed all around the kingdom and0:34:50His son Horus had to come back and fight Osiris his son Horus had to come back and defeat Seth to take the Kingdom back. That's how that story ends0:34:59But the egyptians seem to have realized maybe because they had become bureaucratized to quite a substantial degree That it wasn't only nature that threatened0:35:09Humankind it was also the proclivity of human organizations to become too large too unwieldy too deceitful and to willfully blind and therefore liable to collapse and0:35:21Again, I see echoes of that in the story of the tower of babel so It's a calling for0:35:30A kind of humility of social engineering one of the other things I've learned as a social scientist and0:35:41I've been warned about this by I would say great social scientists that You want to be very careful about0:35:50doing large-scale experimentation with large scale systems because the probability that if you implement a Scheme in a large-scale social system that that scheme will have the result you intended is0:36:03Negligible what will happen will be something that you don't intend and even worse something that works at counter purposes to your original intent and0:36:13so and that makes sense because If you have a very very complex system And you perturb it the probability that you can predict the consequence of the perturbation is extraordinary low obviously0:36:27If the system works though you think you understand it because it works and so you think it's simpler than it actually is and so Then you think that your model of it is correct0:36:37and then you think that your manipulation of the model which produces The outcome you model will be the outcome that's actually produced in the world that doesn't work at all0:36:50I Thought about that an awful lot thinking about how to remediate social systems because obviously they need Careful attention and adjustment, and it struck me that the proper0:37:06strategy for implementing social change is to stay within your domain of competence and that Requires humility which is a virtue that is never0:37:20Promoted in Modern culture. I would say it's it's a virtue that you can hardly even talk about but humility means You're probably not as smart as you think you are and you should be careful and so then the question might be well0:37:34Ok you should be careful, but perhaps you still want to do good you want to make some positive changes? how can you be careful and do good and then I would say well you try not to step out the boundaries of your0:37:45competence and you start small and you start with things that you actually could adjust that you actually do understand that you actually could fix I Mentioned to you at one point that one of the things carl jung said was that0:37:57Modern men don't see God because they don't look low enough. It's a very interesting Phrase and one of the things that I've been0:38:06Promoting I suppose Online is the idea that You should restrict your attempts to fix things0:38:15to what's at hand So there's probably things about you that you could fix right things that you know that aren't right?0:38:25Not anyone else's opinion your own opinion that aren't right you can fix them Maybe there's some things that you could adjust in your family that gets hard you Have to have your act together a lot before you can start to adjust your family because things can kick back on you really hard0:38:38And you think well it's hard to put yourself together. It's really hard to put your family together Why the hell do you think you can put the world together? right because obviously the world is more complicated than you and your family and so if you if you're stymied in your attempts0:38:51Even to set your own house in order which of course you are Then you would think that what that would do would be to make you very very leery about announcing your broad-scale plans for social revolution0:39:05Well, it's a peculiar thing because that isn't how it works because people are much more likely to announce their plans for Broad-scale social revolution Than they are to try to set themselves straight or to set their family straight0:39:16And I think the reason for that is that as soon as they try to set themselves straight or their families the system immediately kicks back at them right instantly whereas if they announced their plans for large-scale social revolution0:39:29the lag between the announcement and the kickback is so long that. They don't recognize that there's any error there and so you know you can get away with being wrong if if nothing falls on you for a while, and0:39:44so and it's also An incitement to hubris because you can now see your your plans for large-scale social revolution and stand back0:39:54And you don't get hit by lightning and you think well I might be right even though you're not you're seriously not right. I might be right and then you think well How wonderful is that especially if you could do it without any real effort, and I really do think fundamentally I believe that0:40:10That's what the universities teach students now. That's what they teach them to do. I really believe that and I think it's absolutely appalling And I think it's horribly dangerous0:40:22Because it's not that easy to fix things especially if you don't especially if you're not committed to it and I think you know if you're committed because what you try to do is you try to straighten out your own life first0:40:34and that's enough like there's a I think it's a statement in the new testament that it's I think it's in the new testament that it's More difficult to rule yourself than to rule the city0:40:43And that's not a metaphor. It's like all of you. Who've made announcements to yourself about Changing your diet and going to the gym every January know perfectly well how difficult it is to regulate your own0:40:57impulses and to bring yourself under the control of some What would you say? well-structured and0:41:08ethical attentive structure of values it's extraordinarily difficult and so people don't do it and instead they wander off, and I think they create towers of Babel and0:41:21the story indicates well those things collapse under their own weight and everyone goes their own Direction I Think I see that happening0:41:32with the LGBT community I think because one of the things I've noticed it's very interesting because the community is in some sense, it's not a community but0:41:44That's a technical error, but it's it's composed of outsiders. Let's say and what you notice across the decades is that the acronym list keeps growing and0:41:56I think that's because there's an infinite number of ways to be an outsider and so once you open the door to the construction of a group that's characterized by0:42:07Failing to fit into the group then you immediately create a category that's infinitely expandable and so I don't know how long the acronym list is now it depends on which acronym list you consult but I've seen0:42:21lists of 10 or more acronyms and one of the things that's happening is that The Community is starting to fragment in0:42:30Its in its interior because there is no unity once you put a sufficient plurality under the0:42:39sheltering structure of a single umbrella say the disunity starts to appear within and I think that's also uh0:42:50It's a manifestation of the same issue that this particular story is dealing with0:42:59So that ends. I would say the most archaic stories in the in the bible There's something about the flood story and and also the tower of babel0:43:10I think they outline the two fundamental dangers that beset Mankind one is the probability that Blindness and sin will produce a natural catastrophe or entice one0:43:22That's something modern people are very aware of in principle right because we're all hyper concerned about environmental degradation and catastrophe and so0:43:31That's the continual Reactivation of an archetypal idea in our in our unconscious minds that there's something about the way we're living that's unsustainable and that will create a0:43:43catastrophe it's so interesting because people believe that firmly and deeply and But they don't see the relationship between that and the archetypal stories because it's the same story0:43:55Overconsumption greed all of that is producing an unstable state and nature will rebel and take us down You hear that every day in every newspaper and every TV station?0:44:06It's broadcast to you constantly so that idea is presented in in Genesis in the story of Noah and then the other0:44:15Warning that exists in the stories one is Beware of Natural Catastrophe That's produced as a consequence of blindness and greed will say the other is0:44:25Beware of social structures that overreach Because they'll also produce fragmentation and disintegration, and so it's quite remarkable. I think that that0:44:37With at the close of the story of the tower of babel? we've got both of the permanent existential dangers that0:44:47present themselves to humanity already identified0:44:57At the end of the story of Adam and eve. There's like a fall into history Right so in one way history begins with the fall, but there's like a second fall0:45:06I think with the flood and the tower of Babel and history and even more real sense begins now it begins with this story of Abraham and and it's0:45:16it's We're no longer precisely in the realm of the purely mythical. That would be another way of thinking about it We have identifiable person who's part of an identifiable tribe is doing identifiable things0:45:28We're in the realm of history and so history begins twice in the old testament I suppose it begins again after moses as well, but0:45:37We've moved out of the domain of the purely mythical into the realm of history with with the emergence of the stories about abraham This is from aldous huxley0:45:47So the first thing that that I want to talk about in relationship to the abrahamic stories is this idea of the experience of God because Abraham although quite identifiable as an actual individual is0:46:00Also, characterized by this peculiarity and the peculiarity is that God manifests himself to Abraham Both as a voice and but also as a presence0:46:11The stories never describe exactly how god manifests himself except now and then he comes in the form of an angel That's fairly concrete0:46:20But it's a funny thing that the author of or authors of the abrahamic story seems to take The idea that God would make an appearance0:46:31more or less for granted and so It's very I think the part of the reason that I've struggled so much with the abrahamic stories is because it's so hard to get a handle0:46:42on that and to understand what that might mean and So I'm going to hit it from a bunch of different perspectives and let's see if we can Come up with some0:46:51Understanding of it the first thing I'll do is tell you a story about a female Neurologist whose name escapes me at the moment. She wrote a book called my stroke of insight0:47:03Jill Bolte I think is her name and She was a harvard-trained She was she had she had0:47:12medical training from Harvard in Neuropsychological function and knew a lot about hemispheric specialization we talked a little bit about hemispheric specialization before one of the0:47:22Ways of conceptualizing the difference between the two hemispheres is that the left hemisphere? Operates in known territory and the right hemisphere operates in unknown territory. That's one way of thinking about or the left hemisphere operates0:47:33in the orderly domain and the right hemisphere operates in the chaotic domain or the left hemisphere operates in the Domain of detail and the right hemisphere operates in the domain of the large picture0:47:45It's something like that now people differ in their neurological wiring, so those are Over generalizations, but that's okay we live with that for the time being it's certainly not an0:47:55overgeneralization to point out that you do in fact have two hemispheres and that their structures differ and if the connections between them are cut Which could happen for example if you had surgery for intractable epilepsy that each hemisphere would be capable of housing its own consciousness0:48:09That's been well documented by a neural neural neurologist in Gazzaniga Who did and Sperry who did split brain experiments must be 30 years ago now?0:48:21so And we know that the right in the left hemisphere are specialized for different Functions the right hemisphere for example seems to be more involved in the generation of negative emotion and the left hemisphere more0:48:32Involved in the generation of positive emotion an approach so the right hemisphere stops you and the left hemisphere moves you forward anyways Jill0:48:41Bolte I hope I've got that right had a stroke and Maintained consciousness during the stroke and analyzed it while it was happening and she was able0:48:53while it was happening to hypothesize about what part of her brain was being destroyed and what so she had a congenital blood vessel malformation and had an aneurysm and0:49:06It just about killed her but she said that It affected her left hemisphere And she said that she experienced a sense of divine unity as a consequence of the stroke0:49:21because the left hemisphere function was disrupted and destroyed and so she became a right hemisphere dominant and her experience of that was the dissolution of the specific ego into the0:49:33Absolute consciousness something like that now that's only a case study, and you don't want to make too much of case studies But there is an overwhelming amount of evidence0:49:44that those two kinds of consciousness exist one being your consciousness of you as a localized and specified being and the other being0:49:57this capacity to experience oceanic dissolution and the sense of the cosmos being one0:50:06Now why we have those capacities for different conscious experiences Is very difficult to understand. I mean part of me thinks that0:50:16Maybe we have a generic human brain it's the brain of the species and Allied with that we have a specific0:50:25individual brain and one is the left hemisphere and the other is the right hemisphere the left hemisphere being the specific individual brain and usually it's on and working because you obviously have to take care of yourself as a0:50:37specific entity and not as a generalized Cosmic phenomena, it's hard to dice celery when you're a generalized cosmic phenomena0:50:46Right so you have to be more pointed than that but but look let's make no mistake about it The fact that those different states of consciousness exists is not0:50:56Disputable they can be elicited in all sorts of ways and so I'm going to read you something that Aldous Huxley wrote about this back, I think, in 1956 this was after he0:51:11Started his experimentation with mescaline The psychedelics were introduced into western culture in the 1950s in a whole bunch of different ways psilocybin mushrooms0:51:21LsD. I was discovered right at the end of World War two Was discovered by accident actually? laboratory Sandoz labs the guy who discovered it Albert Hofmann had spilled some on his hands you can absorb it through your skin and0:51:35He was biking home and had the world's first LSD trip which was somewhat of a shock to him and then to the entire world0:51:44Huxley who was a great literary figure, a real genius experimented with mescaline in the late fifties and He wrote a book called the doors of perception which had a huge impact on the emerging psychedelic culture both on0:51:58The East coast at Harvard and on the West coast with Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters the people who popularized LSD That's all documented in a book called the electric Kool-Aid acid test; Which I would highly recommend0:52:10It's Tom Wolfe it's a brilliant book on the east coast it was timothy leary I had timothy leary's old job at Harvard. So that was kind of cool. You know in a warped way0:52:21So I met people there who knew him Who didn't think much of them also, but who did know him but Huxley had this mescaline experience, and it transported him to this0:52:34alternative consciousness And he said that during his mescaline experience that the entire world glowed from within like if there was an inner light like a paradisal inner light and that everything was deeply meaningful and0:52:47Symbolically suggestive and overwhelming and beautiful and timeless so he had an experience of divine Eternity I suppose is the most straightforward way to to put that and we know perfectly well that0:53:00the psychedelic drugs that all share the same chemical structure they interact with the brain chemical called Serotonin Which is a very very fundamental? Neurotransmitter they all have approximately the same0:53:12range of effects Although those effects are very There's a very large multitude of effects that sort of exist underneath that umbrella0:53:23Huxley was staggered by his mescaline experience he he didn't really know what to make of it, and I think that that's0:53:33the common experience of people who have exceptionally profound psychedelic experiences and I'll Tell you some documentation about that in a moment, but he spent quite a long time0:53:45Trying to come to grips with what this might mean from an intellectual perspective and huxley had a great brain I mean someone was going to wrestle with the problem like that. He was a good candidate0:53:54He must have had a verbal IQ of 180. I mean he's his books are incredibly literate Incredible credible mastery of language and complexity of characterization and and0:54:05intellectual Discourse really remarkable So this is what Huxley had to say after his mescaline experience he talked about heaven and hell0:54:14and he talked about that in reference to bad trips essentially because it was known by that point that a Psychedelic experience could transport you to an0:54:24Ecstatic domain of Divine revelation but could take you to the worst imaginable place as well huxley was very interested in why you would even have the capacity for0:54:35Experiences like that and which I think is a very good question and it's completely unanswered question I mean, we don't know much about consciousness and we know even less about psychedelics0:54:44I would say they are an absolute mystery. I don't think we understand them in the least Huxley did a good job of starting to at least map out the mysteries of the terrain he said like the earth of a hundred0:54:56Years ago our mind still has its darkest Africa's its unmapped Borneo's and Amazonian basin in Relation to the Fauna of these regions. We are not yet zoologists0:55:07We are mere naturalist sand collectors of specimens the fact is unfortunate But we have to accept it we have to make the best of it However, lowly the work of the collector must be done before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks of classification analysis experiment and theory0:55:23Making like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus the creatures inhabit these remoter regions of the mind Are exceedingly improbable.0:55:32Nevertheless they exist they're facts of observation And as such they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives0:55:45when psychiatrists started to study LSD that was mostly in the late 50s and running forward from that they thought about0:55:54The drug as a psychedelic which was a chemical substance that would induce psychosis, but that turned out to not be true not with the psychedelics because0:56:06schizophrenics were given LSD and The schizophrenics reported that while the experience experience was certainly0:56:15extraordinarily strange, it wasn't like being schizophrenic and then it was found later that if you gave schizophrenics amphetamines that made them worse in fact you can induce a0:56:27Paranoid psychosis in a normal person by overdosing them with amphetamines So whatever the hallucinogens are the psychedelics are doing It's not the same thing as mania and it's not the same thing as schizophrenia not at all0:56:43so So you can't just write the experience off as an induced psychosis, whatever it is0:56:59Independent of its utility or lack thereof it's not that Now can be induced by drugs Can be induced by deprivation right? I mean there are accounts throughout history of people0:57:12putting themselves in Extreme Physiological situations in order to induce transformations of consciousness fasting is one of the routes to doing that0:57:22Dancing is another route Isolation prolonged periods of isolation will also do it now you could say that exposing yourself to any of those in excess0:57:32produces a state that's indistinguishable from illness and That there's no reason to assume that the phenomena that are associated with illness have any0:57:44Utility Whatsoever although, it's interesting to me that A Disrupted consciousness can Produce coherent experiences. It's not exactly what you expect0:57:56It was just an illness you know if you develop say a high fever your experience Isn't transcendent and coherent its fragmented and pathologized and and the difference0:58:09I think is quite distinct although We don't only we don't have to only speculate about that because there's been enough experimental work done Now with hallucinogens and psychedelics to indicate that0:58:19The notion that what they produce is something that's only akin to Pathology is wrong because It's not a matter of opinion at this point in the sequence of scientific and historical0:58:31Investigation in fact there was a large-scale study done Ten Years ago? five years ago? of two hundred thousand people who had experimented with pSychedelics0:58:40And they were mentally and physically healthier than people who hadn't on virtually every parameter they examined in fact the rate of0:58:49Flashbacks, you've heard of LSD flashbacks mostly a hypothetical phenomena But the rate of self-reported flashbacks was higher among the non psychedelic users than among the psychedelic users0:59:01so that was very interesting was a huge study now it might be you could say that those who had experimented with Psychedelics were prone to be healthier to begin with but he that still contradicts the Pathology argument0:59:14So it doesn't matter either way the Pathology argument is contradicted now,0:59:24oh I did put that in it was Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor This is what she said about her stroke I Remember that first day of the stroke with terrific bittersweetness in the absence of the normal functioning of my left0:59:36Orientation association area my perception of my physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air. I felt like a genie0:59:45Liberated from its bottle it's good metaphor The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent Euphoria the absence of Physical Boundary was one of glorious bliss1:00:00Recently this Dr. Roland Griffith I met him once at a conference in San Francisco surprised surprised a1:00:14Conference on awe and this was just when he was embarking on his experiments with psilocybin which were the first experiments on hallucinogens that were permitted by the1:00:24National Institute of Mental Health in some three four decades he had to be very careful to Lay out the scientific protocols so that the ethics committees would approve the experiments and so that the federal funding agencies would1:00:38also allow the experiments to go through he started to experiment with psilocybin and He's found a number of and published a number of very interesting1:00:49Results one was that a single psilocybin trip and I1:00:59specified trip because Sometimes when people take psilocybin out the doses that griffith uses. They don't have a psychedelic experience Most people who take the dose do but not everyone those who take the dose and don't have the mystical experience don't1:01:15Experience the consequences of taking the drug and the consequences can be quite profound So one consequence is that if you have the mystical experience that's associated with psilocybin ingestion1:01:27You're liable to Represent that to others and yourself as one of the two or three most experienced important experiences of your entire life1:01:36So that would be at the same level as the birth of your child or your marriage let's say assuming that those were transcendent experiences, but that's1:01:47But that's how people describe them so that's that's very interesting in and of itself then the next thing that griffith another thing that griffith reported was that one year after a1:02:02Psilocybin dose a single psilocybin dose profound enough to induce a mystical experience the trait openness of the participants had increased one standard deviation1:02:12Which is a tremendous amount and so it looked like one dose produced a permanent neurological and psychological transformation now You know I'm not saying that that's a good thing1:02:22I'm not saying that because I don't think that openness is a Untroubled blessing, but it's certainly a testament to the unbelievable potency of the of the drugs1:02:35There's about a 10% chance by the way with psilocybin ingestion of a trip to hell and so that's certainly something very much worth considering when you're thinking about the potential effects of this kind of1:02:49experience so the the mystical experience produced by psilocybin is rated by people as the most profound among the most profound experience of their life as1:03:01life-Changing it produces permanent personality transformations eighty-five percent success in smoking cessation with a single dose Right that's another thing that griffiths demonstrated now that is mind boggling because there are chemical treatments for smoking cessation1:03:19bupropion is one it Reduces craving to some degree, but its success rate is Nowhere Near 85%1:03:29certainly not with a single dose and so We don't understand how it can be that that occurs, but it's nicely documented by griffiths team in this1:03:43Experiment he gave psilocybin to people who are dying of cancer cancer patients often develop Chronic clinically significant symptoms of depression and anxiety1:03:54Previous studies suggest that psilocybin may decrease depression and anxiety in cancer patients aldous huxley took LSD on his deathbed by the way1:04:03so the idea that there was something about psychedelic substances that could1:04:12Buffer people against the catastrophes of mortality is an idea. That's as old as experimentation with the drug itself the effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life threatening diagnosis and symptoms of depression and/or anxiety1:04:29unsurprisingly I don't really know if it's reasonable to describe the emotional state of people diagnosed with cancer of uncertain Prognosis or1:04:43Mortal significance as depression precisely You know you know what I mean is that if you go to the doctor and he tells you that you have intractable1:04:52fatal cancer The normative response is to be rather upset and anxious about that and so it One of the things that bothers me about clinical psychiatry and clinical psychology is the automatic1:05:04Presupposition that even overwhelming states of negative emotion are properly categorized as depression I don't think you're depressed when you get a cancer diagnosis. I don't think that's the right way to think about it1:05:15I think that you have a big problem And it's not surprising that you're overwhelmed by negative emotion and to think about that as a psychiatric malfunction is a major error1:05:24but anyways It's a side issue with regards to this study the effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life threatening diagnosis and symptoms of depression1:05:36And/or anxiety I cannot imagine how they got this through an ethics committee. It's just We're going to take people who have uncertain diagnosis of cancer that are potentially life-threatening, and we're going to give them psychedelics. It's like1:05:49But they did it they did it and I think it's a testament to griffiths stature as a researcher that That that was allowable This is a randomized double-blind crossover trial very carefully designed clinical investigation1:06:04people were assigned to the treatment group or the to the drug group or the non drug group randomly blindly and Investigated the effects of the drug also with different doses which is another hallmark of a well-designed1:06:18Pharmacological study very low Placebo like dose 1 or 3 milligrams per 70 kilograms of body weight versus a high dose 22 or 30 milligrams per 70 kilograms of1:06:29psilocybin chemical psilocybin administered in counterbalance sequence with five weeks between sessions and a six-month follow-up instructions to participants and staff minimized the effects of expectancy participant staff and community observers rated1:06:45Participant Moods attitudes and behaviors throughout the study, that's also The Hallmark of a well-designed study because they didn't rely on a single source of information for the outcome data right they got self reports1:06:56That's fine, but they had Relatively objective observers also Gathered data at the same time High-dose psilocybin produced large decreases in Clinician and self related measures of depressed mood and anxiety1:07:08along with increases in quality of Life life meaning and Optimism and decreases in death anxiety That's interesting. It's a subtle and1:07:19Scientifically Sparse statement, but it's a very interesting one it was the in there's a there's an intimation of a causal relationship here increases in quality of Life life meaning and1:07:31decreases in death anxiety I mean the intimation there is that one of the ways of decreasing your anxiety about death is to increase the1:07:41felt meaning in your life and the psilocybin Dosages potentiate that but it's a good thing to know in a general manner if it happens to be a generalizable truth1:07:51right if you're terrified of mortality terrified of vulnerability there's always the possibility that the life path that you're following isn't rich enough to buffer you against the1:08:03negative element of Existence. It's a reasonable hypothesis and an optimistic one I think although a difficult one that six-month follow-up1:08:13these changes were sustained with about 80% of participants continuing to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety1:08:23Steven Ross commenting about this He was a co-investigator said it is simply unprecedented in Psychiatry that a single dose of a medicine produces these kinds of dramatic and enduring results1:08:33Right which means we have no idea Why this happens participants attributed improvements in attitudes about life/self mood relationships and1:08:46spirituality to the High-dose experience with more than 80% endorsing Moderately or greater increased well-being in life satisfaction1:08:55Community Observers showed corresponding changes mystical types psilocybin experience on session day Mediated the effect of psilocybin dose on therapeutic outcomes. What that means is that1:09:08well When researchers were trying to look at a causal relationship between drug ingestion and the positive outcome The causal relationship was drug ingestion mystical experience positive outcome it wasn't drug ingestion positive outcome there had to be the experience1:09:23Produced by the pharmaceutical agent in order for the pharmaceutical agent to have had its effect now. We don't again We don't know why that is either?1:09:32Maybe some people needed a higher dose who knows because people vary tremendously in their sensitivity to pharmaceutical substances Now why am I telling you all this well? I'm telling you for a variety of reasons one is the first is1:09:46Make no mistake about it human beings have the capacity for forms of consciousness that are radically unlike our normative forms of consciousness and1:09:57the evidence that those alternative forms of consciousness are purely Pathological which is the simplest explanation right? You perturb the system it produces Pathology that's negative that is the simplest explanation1:10:10the Evidence for that is weak at Best Leaving out the bad trip issue which which is non-trivial the empirical evidence as it accrues in fact seems to suggest that the consequence of mystical1:10:25positive mystical experiences associated with psychedelic intake is overwhelmingly positive even in extreme situations, and you really can't find a more extreme situation than1:10:36uncertain Cancer diagnosis with Concomitant and depression and anxiety like I mean that's not as bad as it gets But it's kind of in the ballpark and so the fact that even under circumstances like that. There is the overwhelming1:10:50Probability that the experience would be positive because that's another thing you wouldn't expect you know Even from some of the earlier earliest discussions about psychedelic use that were put forth by people1:11:00including Timothy Leary Describing the importance of set right so that the early experimenters noted that if you had a psychedelic experience1:11:10and you were in a bad state or in a bad place that that was one of the precursors to a bad trip that the negative emotion that you entered the1:11:19experience with could be magnified tremendously by the by the chemical substance and so that it was necessary to be somewhere safe to be around people that you trust to be in a familiar environment to get all the1:11:32Variables that you couldn't control under control, but here is a situation where that isn't what's happening at all because people have this1:11:41cancer diagnosis of cancer diagnosis of unspecified outcome And they still the vast majority of them had a positive experience and the positive experience experience had long lasting positive consequences1:11:53so so the case that the transcendent experience is not real That's wrong1:12:03It's real. now, We don't know what that means because it actually challenges to some degree our concepts of what two dudes real But it's certainly well within the realm of normative human experience1:12:14So it's part of the human capacity and you know there's been other neurological experiments too. There's there's a researcher Canadian researcher if I remember correctly who invented something he called the God helmet and1:12:25It used Electromagnetic stimulation brain stimulation to induce mystical experiences now I don't remember what part of the brain. He was shutting off or activating with that particular Gadget, but1:12:39And you know there's also. There's all sorts of other indications of this sort of thing that have cropped up in other1:12:49domains of the Neurological literature for example It's very common for people who are epileptic to have religious experiences as1:12:58part of the prodrome to the actual seizure that was the case with dostoyevsky for example who had Incredibly intense religious experiences that would culminate an epileptic seizure1:13:09and he said that they were of sufficient quality that he would give up his whole life to have had them and the funny thing too is that In my reading of dostoevsky at least is that I think that1:13:22epileptic seizures and the associated mystical experiences were part of what made him a Transcendently Brilliant author I don't think that he would have broken through into the domains of insight that he possessed without those strange neurological experiences1:13:36And it was certainly not the case that his epilepsy or the experiences that were associated with it Produced what you might describe as an impairment in his cognitive functions quite the contrary at least that's how it looks to me1:13:53here's another Here's another something worth considering And I don't know how important it is but it might be really important it depends on how important This is something that carl jung said so depends on how important jung is1:14:06now freud Established the field of psychoanalysis and with it investigation I would say1:14:15Rigorous investigation into the contents of the unconscious a modern psychologists and psychiatrists like to What would you say? denigrate freud, but I think there's a reason for that1:14:26I think that freud's Fundamental insights were so profound and so valuable that they got immediately absorbed into our culture and now they seem self-evident and so that all That's left of freud is his errors1:14:37You know because we believed everything else. We believe all the profound things he discovered We just take them for granted and so we don't believe the things that he said that weren't quite on the money1:14:46And that's all we credit with him with now But he was certainly the first person who brought up the idea of the unconscious in a in a rigorous manner1:14:55And he was the first person to do a rigorous examination of dreams the interpretation of dreams is a great book it's well worth reading and he was the first person to note that people were in some sense inhabited by1:15:08subpersonalities that had a certain degree of autonomy and and and independent life Brilliant observation the cognitive psychologists haven't caught up with that at all yet1:15:20Jung was profoundly affected by freud jung was profoundly affected by Nietzsche and by freud those were his two main intellectual1:15:29Influences, I don't think one more than the other He split with freud on the religious issue That was what caused the disruption in their relationship1:15:40And I think it's an extremely interesting historical occurrence and it might be of profound significance freud believed that the fundamental myths of the human being was the Oedipal myth, and the Eda pole myths1:15:54From a broader perspective is a failed hero story, so the Oedipal myth is the myth of a man who? Develops who grows up, but then1:16:04accidentally becomes too close to his mother sleeps with her. He doesn't know who she is and as a consequence blinds himself and there's a1:16:14There's a there's a warning about human development gone wrong in that story and I think that freud put his finger on it extraordinarily well because1:16:23human beings have a very long period Of dependency and one of the things that you do see in clinical practice is that many People's problems are1:16:34Associated with their inability to break free of their family like they're consumed by the family drama right they can't get Beyond What happened to them in their family?1:16:43They're stuck in the past. It's and that's That's equivalent symbolically speaking you might say to the idea of being too close to your mother of1:16:52the Boundaries being Improperly specified and that happens far more often than anyone would like to think As I said freud thought it was a universal1:17:03but Jung See he had a different idea and his idea was that it wasn't the failed hero story. That was the universal human myth it was the successful hero story, and that's a big difference like it's seriously a big difference because1:17:20the successful Hero's story is Remembering sleeping beauty you may remember this in the disney movie The Evil queen traps the prince in a dungeon, and she's not going to let him out till he's old right1:17:31And so there's this comical scene where she's down in the dungeon. He's all in chains, and she's laughing at him telling him what his future is going to be like it's quite evil and1:17:42you know she Paints this wonderful picture of him being freed in like 80 years and hobbling out of the castle on his his horse That's old it can barely stand up in him with Grey hair and you know she and she recites this story of his eventual1:17:56Triumphant departure from the castle as a old and decrepit man and she has a great laugh about it, and it's nice You know it's a real punchy story. It's really something wonderful for children. That's story and1:18:10he gets free of the of the Shackles and the things that free em are three little female fairies? It's the positive aspect of the feminine that frees him from the dungeon, so it's very interesting and very accurate from a psychological perspective1:18:26it's the negative element of the feminine that encapsulates him in the dungeon and suppose development of the feminine would freeze him and and then he has a the queen the evil queen is not very happy when he1:18:37Escapes, you may remember that she stands on top of her castle tower and starts to spin off Cosmic Sparks I mean, she's quite the creature enveloped in flame, and then she turns into a dragon and she then the prince has to fight with her in order to1:18:53Make contact with sleeping beauty and and awaken her from her comatose existence as her unconscious existence and1:19:05That's a brilliant, It's a brilliant representation of a successful hero myth. He He doesn't end up1:19:15staying in an unholy relationship with his mother let's say he escapes and then conquers the worst thing that can be imagined and1:19:27Is Noble by that and not as a consequence, He's able to wake the slumbering feminine from its coma and That's a Jungian story1:19:36And that's the story that he juxtaposed against freud see freud thought of religious phenomena As part of an occult tide that would be they would drown rational rationality1:19:48that's why freud was so dominant Lee anti-religious and Jung thought no It's not the case you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's something profound and1:20:00Central to the Hero myth and Jungian Clinical work is essentially the awakening of the hero myth in the1:20:11analysand in the in the client or in the patient to conceptualize yourself as that which can confront Chaos and triumph and that that's associated with an1:20:21ennobling of the of consciousness and the establishment of proper positive relationships between male and female and1:20:30You know I'm a skeptical person I'm a very very skeptical person and I've Tried with every trick. I have to put a1:20:40Lever underneath Jung story and lift it up and and disrupt it and I I can't do it I Think he was right and that freud was wrong. I mean I have great respect for freud1:20:50I think he got the program problem diagnosed very very nicely and in my clinical work I See the phenomena that freud described emerged continually constantly that the best if you're interested in that1:21:03There's a documentary you should watch. I may have mentioned it before I think it's the best documentary ever made certainly the best one I've ever seen it's called crumb And it's about an underground cartoonist Robert crumb who who is part of a hippie movement and although he hated hippies1:21:19He was part of the hippie movement in the 60s in San Francisco and started the entire underground comic What? culture that manifested itself eventually in in1:21:29graphic novels, there's quite a significant figure from the perspective of popular art and a very very intelligent man and1:21:38Also, I would say a hero although a very bent and depraved and warped one Someone very acutely aware of his own shadow and the documentary outlines his attempts to escape from his1:21:52absolutely dreadful mother and The failure of his two brothers to do the same thing one of whom Ended up as a street beggar in San Francisco the other who drank furniture polish and died six months after the documentary was produced1:22:04It's an unbelievably shocking documentary it's the only piece of Film that I've ever seen that captures1:22:14Freudian Pathology I've never seen anything because you can't see it. Generally unless you're in a clinical Situation unless you know the details of someone's lives the personal intimate details you cannot communicate it1:22:26but the documentarist who made the film Who's Robert zwigoff if I remember correctly was a friend of the crumbs and so he got access in a way that no one else?1:22:35Would have and they were also very forthright and forthcoming about their situation in general I would highly recommend that it's it's a real punch if you want to know how a rapist thinks1:22:46Like if actually want to know because maybe you don't want to know in fact you probably don't want to know Right because do you really want to know that? Because the understand that means to put yourself in that position and to understand it if you really want to know how a serial sexual1:23:01Predator thinks and why if you watch crumb and you pay attention? you'll know and That's only a tiny bit of what the film has to offer. It's really quite remarkable1:23:14anyways Jung split with freud on the issue of1:23:23Beautiful story as the fundamental myth of humankind and on the issue of the validity of the religious Viewpoint and1:23:33Jung came down heavily on the side of the validity of the religious Viewpoint and he established that in a book called symbols of Transformation which was written in 1914 and that's the book that broke that produced the break1:23:45permanent split with freud and that book I Would say that books actually been written three times it was written as symbols of four times written in symbols of transformation which jung1:23:57extensively revised when he was all and then it was rewritten in his innocence by a student of Jung's called Erich Neumann who is also something someone I would really recommend Erich Neumann I think is Jung's greatest student and1:24:12He wrote two books. He wrote one called the origins and history of consciousness Which is a description of the development of consciousness out of unconsciousness Using the hero myth as a...1:24:24what would you say? as a as an interpretive Skeleton, so Neumann viewed the hero myth as The dramatized story of the emergence of human consciousness out of the surrounding1:24:36Unconsciousness in which it was embedded the struggle for consciousness the struggle of consciousness upward towards the light like a lotus flower Struggles up through the muck and and the water to to lay itself on the surface of the1:24:49Water and bloom and reveal the Buddha which is of course what the lotus flower does from the symbolic perspective? for Neumann The Hero's story was the story of the development success development of consciousness and the origins of consciousness1:25:03The origins and history of consciousness is a great book interestingly Camille Paglia wrote read The origins and history of consciousness. She's one of the few1:25:15Mainstream intellectuals that I've ever encountered who read that and commented on it and she believed that it would be sufficient antidote to postmodern denigration of literature, she thought it was that powerful of work and I1:25:32Believe that I I think it's a remarkable Book carl jung wrote the foreword to that book and he said in the foreword that it was the book that he wished he would Have written so sort of like Jung he. Wrote I don't remember how many volumes1:25:46dozens of very thick difficult volumes was like Neumann was able to What? Distill those into a single1:25:56volume statement And so I would also say if you're interested in Jung the best book to read is the origins and history of consciousness It's the best intro into into the Jungian world seems very difficult to1:26:08very difficult to understand it requires a real shift of perspective in order to understand what he's talking about and Neumann wrote another book called the great mother1:26:18Which is a little bit more specialized in some sense but it's also extremely interesting because it flashes out the archetype of Chaos and1:26:27It's representation as feminine. It's a brilliant book as well, and highly worth Highly worth reading both those books1:26:36anyways Young was a very strange person and a visionary and and So he that's kept him outside of1:26:45The academic realm almost entirely I mean I was constantly warned as an undergraduate, and then a graduate student and then a professor against ever talking about jung in any way whatsoever1:26:57When I went on the job market when I was at McGill when I had graduated from McGill I'd done my scientific research in alcoholism, and I had a fairly Lengthy publication record1:27:06That was pure empirical research and really neural physiological research into the pharmacology of alcoholism and I1:27:16established a reasonably solid dossier of publications but at the same time I was writing this book that became maps of meaning and sorry split my time and graduate student school between1:27:27these two endeavors one very Specifically neurological and pharmacological and really biologically based on the other very1:27:36Abstract religious symbolic psychoanalytic The complete opposite, but I could see that the two things overlapped really nicely and there was a number of1:27:46Scientists at the time that were also drawing the same conclusions the same Relationship between the biology and the psychoanalysis jacques panksepp who wrote a book called effective neuroscience which is a great classic is1:27:59one of those people who who saw the relationship between the Neurobiology of emotion and motivation and the psychoanalytic insights Never became a mainstream view but I think it's too complex1:28:10I think that bridging the gap between the biology and and the symbolic is too much for people generally speaking You know it was certainly virtually too much for me because I got quite ill when I was a graduate student I think1:28:22for a variety of reasons I also like with glug party three nights a week, and so that probably had something to do with it, but But working on those two things simultaneously was also rather exhausting now1:28:36Jung Was a tremendously insightful clinician And he was a strange person introverted visionary High in introversion very very very very very high in openness like off-the-charts and also God only knows what his IQ was I mean1:28:50Every time I read you it's like reading Nietzsche It's terrifying because you know he's so damn smart that he can think up Answers to questions that you don't even it's not like you don't understand the answers they never conceptualized the damn questions1:29:03It's really something to read someone like that right who says well Here's the mystery and you think wow I never thought of that as a mystery and here's the solution. It's like okay. That's that's1:29:15That's something you know and he could read Greek and he could read He read all the ancient... He read a very large variety of ancient languages and was very familiar with the entire corpus of1:29:27astrological thought and of alchemical thought and of classic literature and biblical stories, and I mean educated in a way that no one is educated now and1:29:40So he's very daunting person to encounter and terrifying absolutely terrifying his book ion which is the second volume of1:29:50it's the second volume of Volume 9 which is the archetypes of the collective unconscious that damn book is just Absolutely terrifying because jung is one of these visionaries who can see?1:29:59Way underneath the social structures and look at patterns that are developing across for in Jung's case across Thousands of years and lays them out and so that's a really that's really something to to encounter ion is a terrifying book1:30:15anyways one Question might be well because I read Jung and I think how the hell did he know these things how could he figure these things? Out I can't understand how he could possibly know these things1:30:26Well, here's a partial answer Jung Was a visionary and so what that means as far as I can tell and like we could do a little quick survey here1:30:38How many of you think you think in words? Put up your hands. Do you think in words? Ok so it looks like what about pictures. How many of you think in pictures?1:30:49Ok so that's interesting how many of you think that's about half and half by the way probably a few err on the word side How many of you think in pictures and words?1:30:58Ok and so alright, so it was Roughly 1/3 in each category But that's also something that I really haven't encountered any research on1:31:07from the neuropsychological perspective, it's like Well, do you think in pictures or do you think in words and and is that actually a reliable distinction? I think I think in words1:31:17Most of the time, but I can think in pictures like if I'm trying to build something I can think in pictures very Almost instantaneously, but it isn't my natural mode of thinking1:31:26I'm hyper verbal and so my natural mode of thinking is to think everything through in words But I know my wife isn't like that. She thinks and images and then has to translate them into words and so1:31:37Anyways, you was very literate, and he could really think in words but he could really think in images also talking to my wife quite extensively like her the1:31:47intensity of her visualization vastly exceeds mine So for example if I close my eyes and then try to imagine the crowd in front of me it's pretty low resolution and vague and not brilliantly colored and vivid you know it's it's it's1:32:02Like I'm seeing through a glass darkly. Let's say I can't bring images to mind with that with spectacular clarity but my wife is very good at that and you seem to be absolutely a1:32:13Genius at that kind of thinking and he had a lot of visionaries in his family history as well So I don't know to what degree there's a hereditary component of that And I don't know to what degree that's actually like a neurological specialization. I presume it would be associated with1:32:28the trait Openness Distinguishes itself differentiates itself into interesting ideas and interest in aesthetics And my suspicion are is that the people who are more interested in aesthetics are the visionary types the ones that think in images.1:32:41Anyways Jung could really think in images and he could imagine beings and I had a client once who was a lucid dreamer and1:32:51How many of you had lucid dream? So you know you're dreaming? Well you well you're okay many That's that phenomena wasn't really even even identified as a phenomena until the end of the 19th century1:33:03There was a book written about it that freud tried to get his hands on but couldn't because it was a very rare book and then there was a researcher about 30 years ago who started to study lucid dreams1:33:14But anyways, I had a client who was a lucid dreamer and one of the things she could do was Ask her dream characters what Information they were trying to convey and they would tell her.1:33:26So that was very interesting; and one of the consequences of that was I don't have this story completely right in my memory But it's close enough1:33:35She was afraid of a very large number of things and in her dream. I think it was a gypsy Standing by a wagon told her that if she was going to be successful in university1:33:49that she would have to visit the slaughterhouse and That was something that was way beyond her capacity of tolerate she was a vegetarian1:33:58she couldn't stand the sight of raw meat even and so and She was very oppressed and depressed and anxious because of the slaughterhouse nature of existence and so her dream1:34:09focused on that and One of the consequences of that because the slaughterhouse was out of the question as a clinical intervention1:34:18I Took her to an embalming Right because because I asked her I asked her what what? What might be equivalent to that and so she suggested that and you know exposure therapy is a hallmark of Clinical psychology?1:34:33right one of the things you do with people as a clinician is you find out what they're afraid of and You gradually and voluntarily expose them to that and that cures them and that's associated with the hero myth, right?1:34:45It's exactly the same thing. It's like. There's a dragon It's stopping you because there's lots of dragons most of them aren't stopping you. You can ignore them You don't have to just go you know slash away it randomly1:34:57You're not supposed to be fighting dragons that aren't in your way, but if they are in your way You can't ignore them and then you decompose them into sub dragons And you have people you know take them on and as they take them on1:35:08They dispense with the dragon and they gain the power of the drag. It's like a video game Actually a video game is like that. That's why people like the video games. Well, that's right, right?1:35:17There's a reason that you absorb power when you overcome things when you play a video game. It's not like that's Intrinsic to the video game structure, that's an archetypal idea1:35:27Anyways, we went and saw an embalmbng which was a very interesting experience and and quite quite useful for her because she knew what she could tolerate after that and it was a hell of a lot more than she1:35:42Thought she could tolerate and so that's very useful to know Back to Jung He's a visionary thinker now my client. I said she could lucid dream, and she could ask her dream1:35:57characters What they wanted and what they were trying to communicate to her so that was pretty interesting That happens spontaneously had nothing to do with me I mean, I'm interested in dreams and many of my clients are great dreamers1:36:09Especially the creative ones because I think it's a hallmark of creativity to have vivid dreams and to be able to remember them But that was a faculty that was natural to her1:36:20Jung Had this other client at One time at one point And she had a variety of fears and she had this dream that1:36:29She told me and she was walking down a beach And on the side of the beach up a dune a small dune there was this old man with a snake a big python, and there's a crowd around him and1:36:41she was walking by the Snake handler and the snake in the crowd and she didn't want to have anything to do with them he was sort of showing people the snake and1:36:50She told me that dream, and I thought well. You know you probably need to go see that snake and so I Relaxed hers quasi hypnotic technique, and it's very straightforward1:37:01Hypnosis is generally nothing but pronounced relaxation well you have to be susceptible to hypnosis to actually fall into a hypnotic trance as a Consequence of being relaxed I just relaxed her1:37:12I had her breathe deeply and pay attention to different parts of her body and just relax her muscles One by one essentially so that she could concentrate and then I told her we play with the dream a little bit1:37:23It's a Jungian technique said well, so call the dream image to mind which she could do quite well said okay So let's let's explore it. It's like pretend. It's like pretend play1:37:34You know if you're a kid in your pretend playing you don't exactly direct the game right you you play the game? So it's partly your direction obviously because you're the player1:37:45But the thing also happens spontaneously Out of its own accord and you can think about that as a dialogue between the conscious mind in the unconscious mind in some sense It's a developmental dialogue. It's not a fun game. If you just direct it. It's only a fun game if1:37:59you're inviting and something is well as a consequence the same thing that happens when you're You're engaged in some kind of artistic or literary production if it's all top down1:38:09You know if you're forcing it then it's Propaganda It's empty what you want to sort of put yourself in a receptive state of mind in an imaginative state of mind And it's sort of half you in half1:38:20Nature itself Manifesting itself in your creative imagination, and that was the sort of state that we were striving for, and she, I1:38:30Asked her when she was in relaxed. I said well, what do you think about the snake handler and she said well? He's probably a Charlatan and he's just their turn to impress the crowd and to show off and she was afraid to go up there1:38:40Because she thought people would push her towards the snake and she'd have to touch it And so there was a fear of the crowd issue going on there too, and I said well, just look go up there1:38:49About do it under these conditions. Is that you know if people get pushy What are you going to tell them and so we figured out something said look? Just tell them that1:38:59You know you want to look at the snake at your own pace and that you don't need any encouragement or help and it would be good if you Were just left alone so that enabled her to defend yourself1:39:08so she was afraid that the crowd would push her to do something that She didn't want to do that was part of the theme of the dream So anyway she Eventually climbed the dune in her imagination1:39:18And went into the crowd and the crowd turned out to be quite welcoming and not hostile and not pushy Which isn't what you'd expect right because the you'd think the crowd would have,1:39:27Reacted in accordance with her fears since it was her fantasy, but that's the thing about fantasies. They have this autonomous quality But the crowd was welcoming and not hostile and it turned out that the snake handler wasn't a Charlatan1:39:39He was just an old guy who had this snake and he was out there just showing it to people because he thought it was a cool thing and and And that maybe it was good for people to come and look at a snake and so she got close enough to the snake to1:39:52touch it and so So I'm telling you that because I want you to understand a bit more about what jung was trying to do and so He wrote these books1:40:02notebooks that haven't been published yet called the black books and the black books are the documentation of his experiments with his imagination1:40:11and What he would do is he dream like a child daydreams. He regained that faculty although I think with Jung it was a faculty that had never really disappeared and1:40:22he had figures of imagination that came to him that he could speak with and He spoke with these figures of imagination and documented that over a very long period of time, and that was originally that was1:40:36eventually Distilled into a book called the red book which was published about three or four years ago and it was a book that jung regarded as the1:40:49Central source from which all his inspiration emerged it was sort of the way it looks to me is that1:40:59we embody a lot of information in our action right and our action has Developed as a consequence of imitating other people and not only the people the people around us1:41:11But of course the people around us imitated the people who came before them and those people imitated the people who came before them And so on so far back that it's as far back as you can go and so you embody these patterns of behavior that are1:41:24Extremely informative that you don't understand that are a consequence of collective imitation across the centuries and so then those patterns can become manifest as figures of the imagination and those figures of1:41:37imagination are the distillation of patterns of behavior and so as The distillation of patterns of behavior they have content and it's not you that content. It's you could even think about it as content1:41:51That's evolves although It's culturally transmitted this content that's evolved and so these figures of the imagination can reveal the structure of reality to you and1:42:01That's what happened with jung, and that's what he described in the red book, and that was what permeated his psychology, A Psychology that was based on the presupposition1:42:11That the fundamental archetypal structures of religious belief were not pathological not deceitful not1:42:20Protective in some delusional sense against the fear of death, but quite the contrary the very stories that in enabled us to move forward as1:42:31confident human beings in the face of Chaos itself And it's conceivable. I think perhaps probable1:42:40That nothing more important Conceptually happened in the 20th century than that Because it was the first time1:42:50post enlightenment that a rapprochement between the intellect and the underlying religious archetypal sub structure1:42:59Occurred you have in the capacious intellect of young the same thing happened to some degree with Piaget the religious domain and the factual domain were brought back together and1:43:12the fact of Jung's enduring and Increasing popularity and influence, I would say is a direct consequence of that now1:43:23some of his work was spun off into the new age and And the new age is a very optimistic and naive movement It's predicated on the idea that you can do nothing say, but follow your bliss and that will take you1:43:37Ever higher to enlightenment, and that's not the Jungian idea at all the Jungian idea is that1:43:46What you most need will be found where you least want to look So there's this story king arthur There's this story of king arthur that they're all in a round table right king arthur and his knights. They're all equals. They're all1:43:58superordinate, but they're all equals and they go off to look for the holy Grail and The holy Grail is the container of the redemptive substance whatever that is1:44:09It might be the cup that christ used at the last supper might be Chalice that was used to capture his blood on the cross right when he was pierced by a sword the stories differ1:44:20But that's the holy grail and the holy grail is lost that's the redemptive substance and the knights of king arthur go off to search for the holy Grail and But they don't know where to look1:44:30So where do you look when you don't know where to look for something you need? desperately But have lost well each of the knights goes into the forest at the point of the Darkest to him and1:44:43That's Jungian psychoanalysis in a nutshell It's like that which you fear and avoid that's what you hold in contempt that which disgusts you and that you avoid1:44:54That's the Gateway to what you need to know There's nothing new age about that. That's for sure1:45:03Now Jung when he started this endeavor, He started with this this is part of the notebooks from the black book he said1:45:12He wrote my soul For my soul. Where are you? Do you hear me? I speak I call you are you there? I've returned I'm1:45:22Here again, I've Shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I've come to you. I am with you After long years of long wandering I have come to you again1:45:35for the Jungians the Hero's journey is a journey within and and I think that that's probably the1:45:44Bias of introverts to believe that the Hero's journey isn't only an inward Journey I think that it can be an outward journey too because I don't think it matters where you confront the unknown whether it's within or1:45:56Without what matters is whether or not you confront the unknown. That's what matters1:46:07But he found that what he had ignored Was an undiscovered part of himself so that might be something that was equivalent to huxley's1:46:16Notion that there were tremendous Tremendous Potential breath in the realm of human Conscious experience and Huxley was influenced to some degree by Jung1:46:26now Jung knew of Huxley's experiments and had commented on psychedelic use and he said something like Beware of wisdom you did not earn and1:46:37Jung was very good at stating things very profoundly very simply and that's a very intelligent piece of advice Beware of Wisdom you did not earn he wrote a paper1:46:47If you're interested in this sort of thing he wrote a paper be called the relations between the ego and the unconscious Which is an absolute masterwork, but completely incomprehensible unless you know what it unless you know what it's about1:46:59And what it's about is the danger of what he called ego inflation And so one of the things that can happen as a consequence of a revelatory experience is1:47:09that the Division between the individual ego and and and what would you call it? So hard to come up with a word that isn't1:47:19somehow naive or or cliched To erase the relationship the boundary between the specific consciousness of the ego and the more generalized1:47:32consciousness And more generalized consciousness as such is A dangerous thing to do because you can start to equate yourself your specific self with that more generalized1:47:45consciousness as such and Jung thought about that is it something akin to a psychotic inflation and the paper relations between the ego and the unconscious is a document that tells you how to avoid that if you're1:48:02playing in this kind of realm and one of the Injunctions is to keep your feet on the ground He thought that was what partly what happened to Nietzsche was that Nietzsche wasn't grounded enough in life1:48:16He wasn't grounded enough in Day-To-day rituals and routines and the mundane now you could debate whether or not That's the case whether or not that's a reasonable argument, but that was still what Jung believed1:48:28Okay, so why am I telling you all this? I'll finish with this from December 1913 onward jung carried on in the same procedure1:48:38Deliberately evoke a fantasy in a waking state And then entering into it as a drama these fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form in1:48:48Retrospect he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness the example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity1:48:58And he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging just as one does when taking mescaline. These journals are jung's contemporary? Contemporaneous clinical ledger to his most difficult experiment or what later describes as a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world?1:49:14You'll believe that we were dreaming all the time but that during waking life the pressure of external images was such that the1:49:23Unconscious fantasy imagery was or that the fantasy imagery was of insufficient magnitude to be conscious But that we were always situated in a dream in relationship to the world1:49:35so1:49:44When we started talking about The creation of the universe at the beginning of the genesis stories, I spent quite a long time setting the stage for the stories because1:49:56There's no point in having a conversation about the God who gives rise to being Unless you have some sense of what that might conceivably mean to the modern mind, and I felt the same way about1:50:08the Abrahamic stories is I couldn't get a handle on them Until I could understand and articulate more clearly What it might mean?1:50:18how a modern person might understand a direct experience of God in the first question would be1:50:27is such a thing possible and the answer to that seems to be a Qualified yes, first of all it's a universal human experience. That's a very strange thing1:50:36It's not something that people have made up as freud might have it as a defense against death. It's not a tenable hypothesis it's a realm of potential experience now that experience doesn't necessarily have to have the1:50:50Judeo-Christian content that we've been discussing quite the contrary there are Manifestations of this these alternative forms of consciousness all over the world that take on their own peculiar forms although1:51:00They're patterned to some degree that's like the hero myth for example of myth of the fight against the dragon seems to be unbelievably widespread and So it's not as if it's random1:51:13Sorry, I should just see what time it is here But there's not much point in having a discussion about what happens to abraham1:51:26Unless you can conceptualize it in terms that are amenable to modern skeptical consciousness So we can establish the proposition that1:51:35Mystical experience is not only possible It's quite common and It's inducible in a variety of ways and the manner in which it's inducible is reliable and there's no evidence as well that it's pathological1:51:45In fact there's a fair bit of evidence that the patterns of behavior that are associated with the mystical experience are core elements of proper Human adaptation in the world1:52:19The abrahamic stories open up with a manifest God now I'm going to read you some things from Friedman who wrote the disappearance of God1:52:28He was trying to look at the underlying structure of the stories now. You know Friedman noted that The books in the old testament were written by a lot of different people1:52:37At very different times and then they were sequenced by other people for reasons that we don't exactly understand1:52:46But there's still an underlying narrative There's multiple underlying narrative unities despite the fact of that rather arbitrary sequencing, and that's a strange thing1:52:56You know I guess you could say If you had a collection of ancient books and you were trying to put them together you'd try to put them together in some way that made sense1:53:05right and it wouldn't make sense unless you stumbled across some kind of underlying narrative that allowed you to order them and So it's not entirely surprising that that they're ordered in a manner that's comprehensible, but1:53:17Friedman's comments on the Underlying narrative structure part of it was well, we'll go through this the books of the old testament were composed by a great many authors according to both traditional religious views in1:53:29Modern Critical scholarship the phenomenon of the diminishing apparent presence of God across so many stories Through so many books by so many authors spread over so many centuries is1:53:40Consistent enough to be striking impressive and ultimately mysterious But the hiding of the divine face is only half the story There's another development also extending across the course of the entire narrative of the Hebrew Bible1:53:53which we must see before we can appreciate the full force of this phenomena and before we can pose a solution to the mystery of this of how this happened gradually from1:54:02Genesis to Ezra and Esther there is a transition from Divine to human responsibility for life on Earth the story begins in Genesis with God in complete control of the creation1:54:13But by the end humans have arrived at a stage at which in all apparent ways they have responsibility for the fate of the world the first two human beings1:54:24Adam and Eve. Take little responsibility themselves they do not design or build anything when they're embarrassed over there nudity They do not make clothes they cover themselves with leaves. It's God who makes their first clothing for them1:54:38Noah By no means a fully developed personality Noah is not an everyman either broadly speaking He reflects a step Beyond Adam and eve in human character and responsibility1:54:49Abraham Beyond the counts of Divine commands that abraham does carry out the narrative also includes a variety of stories in Which abraham Acts on his own initiative he divides land with his nephew lot1:55:00He battles kings he takes concubines he argues with his wife Sarah on two occasions he tells kings that Sarah is his sister out of fear that they will kill him to get his wife and1:55:10He arranges in son's marriage in the place of the single story of Noah's drunkenness There are in the case of Abraham the stories of man's life The Abraham section thus develops the personality and character of a man a man1:55:22To a new degree in biblical narrative while picturing in him a new degree of responsibility it is not just that Abraham is kind lured Kinder gentler More Intrepid more ethical or a better debater than his ancestor, Noah?1:55:34Rather both the Noah and the Abraham stories are pieces of a development of an increasingly stronger stance of humans relative to the deity Before the story is over humans will become a great deal stronger and bolder than abraham1:55:55I don't know what that means you know see It isn't it is certainly the case that1:56:04the individual exists in the Modern world the differentiated Self-Aware self conscious individual and it's certainly the case that that wasn't the case at some point in the past and1:56:14So it's the case that there's been a development I don't know if you could call it a progression But a development of the autonomous individual over some span of historical time now1:56:25We don't know how long that's been but my suspicions are it hasn't been that long I mean, I read once1:56:36about a neolithic ceremony that involved the particular placement of a bear skull in a cave, and then I read that and1:56:45They had found these placements in caves that were at least 25,000 years old And then I read that they found caves in Japan among the Ainu who were1:56:54the indigenous inhabitants of Japanese territory and Rather Archaic people who Had the same ceremony with the bear and that put the skull in the same orientation1:57:04And place in caves and that that tradition remained unbroken for about 25,000 years And you think: Well is it possible for an oral or ritual tradition to remain unbroken for?1:57:15Spans of tens of thousands of years and the answer to that is not only is it possible. It's actually the norm because like One Chimpanzee is like the next chimpanzee right in the in the progression in the biological1:57:28Progression if you took a chimpanzee troop now, and he went back 25,000 years and you looked at a chimpanzee troop It'd be the same thing. There's no historical progression That's how you can tell the chimps really don't have culture1:57:39Because it's bigger it could even accrete one one thousandth of a percent of culture transmissible culture per generation It wouldn't take more than about a million years before1:57:48They'd have a whole civilization And they don't they're the same as they were and so the continuity the stability and unchanging nature of the species1:57:59Essentially speaking is the rule that the variant is us It's like what the hell happened after the last ice age fifteen thousand years ago1:58:09We went from Tribal Uniform stable to whatever the hell. We are now it's this transition from1:58:18Generic to specific, it's something like that, and I can't help but think that that's reflective in this text and it has something to do with this transition of consciousness from1:58:28From what from possession by the Generic divine to dominance by the specific individual? It's something like that. Is that a neurological transformation?1:58:37is that what this is a record of being that we don't know one of the things young said about God because Humans relationship with God as an object of belief is very complex1:58:51He in his technical writing He always talks about the image of God he never talks about God he talks about the image of God He said that the image of God dwells within that's not the same thing as God dwelling within right we could mean all of these1:59:05Capacities that we have for transcended consciousness could be a byproduct of biological evolution they could have no reflection They could have no relationship whatsoever to an actual transcendent reality1:59:16There's no way of telling the transcendent reality seems to manifest itself as an element of experience But that doesn't mean that it has in reality outside of the subjective1:59:25even if it's even if it exists as it is it clearly does but1:59:41Friedman suggests that what's happening in the biblical narrative is the sequential emergence of the individual as a redemptive? Force and1:59:50that the old testament documents that implicitly unconsciously as a consequence of Descriptive fantasy and that that's what's going on in the book and that2:00:02so the cosmos is under the control of Generic Deity to begin with something like that and then that control shifts to2:00:13localized identifiable increasingly personal and detailed individuals you see that in Noah, and then you see the neighbor ham and then you Moses and2:00:24Then there's this working out of what it would mean to be a fully developed individual, and that's what these stories. They're... They're like prototype, they're attempts to...2:00:36To bring about the proper mode of being right and so Abraham is a is a manifestation about because he enters into a covenant with God he's selected by God or enters into a partnership with God. It's not exactly obvious. God2:00:49provides him with forward motion and intuition and Leads them towards a successful mode of being and it's complex successful mode of being cuz Abraham is a very complex life2:01:00There's plenty of ups and downs right it's it's not unbroken purity of being Towards a divine and abraham lies and cheats and deceives and does all sorts of things that that a real person would do and2:01:14And moses for example kills someone and so these people that the biblical people are very Genuine individuals, but they're given with all their faults right with all their sins with all their deceit2:01:26They're still put forth as potential modes of proper models of potential proper being in the world and the entire corpus of the2:01:35Bible seems to be nothing but an attempt to keep throwing up variants of the Personality trying to experiment to find out what personality works in the world2:01:48of course from a Christian perspective that culminates in the figure of christ as the redemptive word and that's associated as we've already talked about with the force that brought order out of Chaos at the beginning of time and2:02:02so well, that's my attempt to provide proper context for the understanding of the abrahamic stories2:02:13And so hopefully with that context we can move forward being able to swallow the camel so to speak of the initial presence of God in the stories and2:02:27So we'll return to all of that next week2:02:48Let's wait one second. Okay till people Have an opportunity to leave I would very much like to ask the people who are asking the questions2:02:57To take a few seconds before they ask the question and make sure that the mic is positioned properly So that everyone can hear you because people keep writing and complaining that while they're very happy with the questions2:03:09And I would say the questions have been a very high caliber so far, but they're not very happy that they can't hear them So I know that you know you're obviously nervous and in a hurry when you want to ask you a question2:03:19but take a second or two to Set the mic up properly and make sure that everyone can hear you and so Have a way at it. "Hello Dr. Peterson"2:03:28Hey, there we go "Tonight, I'd like to ask you about two different psychological disorders the first being Borderline personality disorder2:03:37so two lectures ago Somebody asks you about it, and you gave a very sparse answer I can't remember exactly what you said, but it seemed like it was uh2:03:48It would there was too much complexity to just answer it right there and then and then somebody else also acts Asked you about the same disorder in2:03:57your patreon livestream recently and when they when they asked you that you kind of you kind of Stopped for a moment and Something I don't know something kind of flicked on in your head2:04:08It seemed like and you and you thought for a couple seconds And then you said you know what I don't think That I can answer that right now because just - it's just too bloody complex, and I was wondering just like2:04:22Many young men have gravitated towards your lectures. Do you think that there's something about this particular disorder that2:04:31There's something about people with this particular disorder that might gravitate to your insights and your lectures" Okay, okay, so now I would say probably no to the second one, but I could comment more about Borderline personality disorder2:04:44I think I have enough mental energy to do that tonight, so technically speaking It's often considered the female variant of antisocial personality disorder2:04:56So it's it's it's it's classified or it's classified in the domain of externalizing disorders acting out disorders and2:05:05I think what happens, We don't understand Borderline personality disorder very well, and it's characterized by Tremendous impulsivity2:05:18Radical confusion of identity and then this pattern of idealization of people with whom the2:05:28person afflicted with the disorder is Associating with radical idealization of those people and then radical devaluation of them and then there's another theme that sort of weaves along with it, which is2:05:40the proclivity of people with Borderline personality disorder to presume that they will be abandoned and then to act in a manner that makes such abandonment virtually certain and2:05:53So it's a very complicated disorder, but that I Think gets at the Crux of it One of the things that's interesting about people with Borderline personality disorder in my experience. Is that they're often2:06:08quite intelligent and You you see in the person with Borderline personality Disorder something like the waste or the squandering of tremendous potential2:06:20they seem capable of thinking through the Nature of their problems and analyzing it and discussing it but not capable whatsoever of implementing any solutions and2:06:41Technically, there's no relationship between IQ and conscientiousness It's very weird because if you read the neuropsychological literature and you2:06:52Read about the functions of the prefrontal Cortex. They're usually conceptualized in intellectual terms and they're associated with planning and strategizing and so forth and2:07:04That's what conscientiousness is is planning and strategizing and implementation? But the correlation between IQ and conscientiousness is zero and so as the correlation between working memory and conscientiousness2:07:16zero and Zero Is a very low correlation right? I mean really it's hard to find things in psychology that are correlated at zero2:07:25Things tend to be correlated to some degree. They tend to be interrelated the Borderline seems to be able to strategize and to abstract but not to be able to implement and2:07:39And so this the intellect per se seems to be functional But it's not embodied in action2:07:48It's very so it can be frustrating to be associated with someone who has borderline personality disorder because They can tell you what the problem is and even tell you what the solution might be but there's no implementation2:08:03So maybe something went wrong developmentally We don't know exactly how these sorts of things come about the other thing that seems to be characteristic of Borderline people with Borderline personality2:08:12disorder is that they they remind me very much of people who are 2 years old and in some Manner like people with Borderline personality2:08:22Disorder can have temper tantrums in fact they often do and we know now and then you see a temper tantrum And they're usually thrown by two-year-olds right most people go out of temper tantrums by the time they're about three2:08:33They're very rare at four it. Which is a good thing because if they're still there at four that is not a good diagnostic predictor that's a actually good diagnostic predictor, but it's not the kind that you want and2:08:45You know it's funny the way that we respond to two-year-old temper tantrums because the two-Year-old will throw themselves on the ground beat their hands and their legs on the floor and scream and yell and turn red or even blue2:08:57I saw a child once who was capable of holding his breath during a temper tantrum until he turned blue Which was really an impressive feat you should try that right? It's really hard is you really have to work at it and2:09:09You see that in adult borderlines. They'll have temper tantrums, and the funny thing is when a two-year-old does it it's like It's you know, it's little off-putting2:09:18but when an adult does it it's Completely bloody terrifying and it happens very frequently with borderlines, and so I would also say to some degree2:09:27they didn't get properly socialized between that critical period Of development between two and four and you See the same thing with adult males who grow up to the anti-social2:09:36Because a large proportion of adult males who grow up to be antisocial are aggressive as children as two-year-Olds So there's a small proportion of two-Year-olds who are quite aggressive2:09:46They'll kick and hit and bite and steal if you put them with other two-year-olds it's about five percent of the of the Male's Smaller fraction of the females, but most of them are socialized by the time, they're four2:09:56but there's a small percentage who aren't and they tend to stay antisocial and they tend to turn into long term offenders and then attend the devel the critical period for socialization development seems to be between two and four and it seems to be mediated by2:10:10pretend play and Rough-and-Tumble play and those sorts of mechanisms, and if it isn't instantiated by the age of four It doesn't happen, and it doesn't look like it's addressable now there are2:10:22dialectic behavioural therapies that have been developed for people with borderline personality disorder, and they're purported to be successful, but2:10:31"Okay, thank you. If I may so the second Psychological disorder I want to ask you about is psychopathy So you've mentioned that2:10:40Psychopaths tend to switch from dominance Hierarchy to dominance Hierarchy because people get tired of their shenanigans. They have to move on to fresh people and2:10:49Psychopaths also tend to be very low in conscientiousness, and you said that when you see some of these protesters at your speeches2:10:58some of the men in particular, your Clinical intuition tells you that there's something seriously pathological about them and I was wondering if you would suspect2:11:09That some of these men might be Psychopathic as..." well some of them likely are but I don't know if a higher proportion of the ones who show up at Protests and sort of creep me out2:11:18Or I don't know if there's a higher proportion of people like that at the protests or not I mean I suspect in general that regardless of the protest the proportion of people who have personality disorders among2:11:31Protesters is higher than the proportion of people who have personality disorders in the general Population because you just expect that you just expect that kind of acting out behavior. I'm not believe me2:11:42I'm not saying that all protest is associated with personality disorder. I'm not saying that at all There's plenty of reason for protest But some of the reason for protests are Credible reasons and some of them aren't credible reasons that -- "I was just thinking that like the social justice2:11:56Hierarchy so to speak would be one of the last that these Confusing--", that's that's that's a different issue. You know there are There are analysis of the dangers of agreeableness, so agreeable2:12:09This is a personality trait that underlies the radical Egalitarian ethos because agreeable people want everything to be shared equally and it's a good I think it's a good ethos for a small group for a family because family is kind of a communist system in some sense2:12:24Right it's like you want the food to be divided up equally among the children clearly and you want all the children sort of regardless of their Inherent abilities to have the same opportunities and perhaps even the same outcomes2:12:35So I think agreeableness which is associated at least in part with maternal Maternal the Maternal Instinct let's say maternal patterns of Behavior. I think it's2:12:46It's a good first Pass Motivational approximation to a localized familial ethic I think it's a catastrophe at larger scales2:12:55I don't think it scales at all. I actually think that's why we evolved conscientiousness Because conscientiousness is the principle that allows larger scale organizations to exist agreeableness won't do it2:13:08now Conscientiousness is a mystery right we don't have a neurological model We don't have a conceptual model We don't have an animal model. We don't have a pharmacological model, and we really only have one way of assessing it which is2:13:22self and other reports of personality proclivity so anyways The problem with agreeableness. This has been modeled a game theorist is that a2:13:35Population of cooperative people can be dominated by a single shark So agreeable this is insufficient as a principle because it opens itself up to2:13:51you call that manipulation and "infiltration?" "I thought that was part of.. [unintelligible]"2:14:02Manipulation let's let's leave it at that to manipulation and and and and exploitation. That's the other thing exploitation so2:14:12"Thank you" "Hi, Dr. Peterson. I had one quick comment and a question so my comment was about your idea of but2:14:25Subpersonalities as one-eyed monsters now. There's the idea of multiple personality or split personality disorder It's controversial as to whether or not it exists2:14:34But there's some research recent research that suggests that you may actually have multiple personalities That use different parts of the brain so they have differential access to the hippocampus. They have their own memories2:14:46They can they use the brain differently, but that seems to be an exaggeration of sub personalities2:14:55Which is quite interesting. The question I had was about So you talked about Jung and how You should confront that which you don't want to confront the most2:15:07so you're most afraid or disgusted by that you've the most resistance to arm, so but we were talking about psychedelics and in the experience of hell, so2:15:17at least some of the people I've talked to they describe negative trips as an experience of a constant fear prolonged fear and2:15:28some of the most Dramatic and personalized fear that they've ever experienced; so shouldn't negative on psychedelic trips2:15:38Elicit the kind of concentration that Jung thought you should engage them?" Could be. Could could well be you know it2:15:49It's conceivable that... I read this strange book once that2:15:58made the claim that what was in the ark of the covenant was a mixture that was made from Amanita Muscaria mushrooms2:16:07And that's not as far-fetched as you might think Because there's a mycologist an amateur mycologist named Gordon Wasson who2:16:16Established, credibly, the notion that it was Amanita Muscaria potions that was the soma of the Rig veda and2:16:26so it's a strange idea but it's not an idea that's completely outside of the realm of possibility and2:16:37the Amanita Muscaria is the fly agaric in the red mushroom with white dots, and it's used in shamanic rituals in Cross Asia2:16:47and It's apparently not toxic in its dried form although that is not a recommendation You know this is serious serious and dangerous2:16:59speculation and material One of the things that the priests had to do before they commune with what was ever in the ark of the covenant was purify themselves and2:17:13So one possibility is that? the bad psychedelic experience is a Involuntary2:17:22Confrontation with what you would describe as the shadow It's like so Beware of experimenting with2:17:33substances that produce divine revelations if you're in a serious state of disorder And I do think that is what happens to people is that they encounter?2:17:43Everything about them that's chaotic and out of place. And some people get trapped in that and they can't get beyond it and that's because there's so much of it2:17:53and so But we don't know enough to know so2:18:12"Citizen Peterson, you son of a bitch How are you?" I'm not too bad you got a question?2:18:24"That's the question. No I've got a real question. I got a great question you're going to like this one, okay? It's about inspiration because you talk about inspiration quite a bit in this lecture series and also I wanted to point out2:18:34you have a I guess a 45-minute Armchair discussion, which you have a video of one paragraph of Nietzsche's Beyond good and evil2:18:43You posted and it seems like you're awestruck at the structure and the choices and I guess the ideas contained in various layers of this paragraph2:18:55And you're inspired and that inspires you to I guess do your work that you do..? I encountered, I guess a similar2:19:04Phenomenon here with one sentence written by the great Joseph Cardinal ratzinger and I mean this one sentence answers the question why do people search for God and if you could read it out and then2:19:18Deconstruct it. It's on sentence I've copied the original pages It's at the end of page 105 if you want to read it from the book or I just--" that's 'the question that2:19:32human existence not only poses but itself is the in conclusiveness inherent in it the bounds it comes up against and that yet yearn for the2:19:42Unbounded more or less in the sense of Nietzsche's assertion that all pleasures yearns for eternity It experiences itself as a moment This simultaneity of being limited and of yearning for the unbounded and open has always prevented man from resting in himself2:19:57Made him sense that he is not Self-sufficient, but only comes to himself by going outside himself and moving toward the entirely other and infinitely greater'2:20:08Well, it's a hell of a sentence "Like when I read that sentence. I decided I wanted to write like Joseph Cardinal ratzinger I had a very similar experience when I watched the Joe Rogan podcast2:20:20877 I said I want to speak like Jordan Peterson That's what I wanted to do" so I had this...2:20:29I had this discussion with a patreon supporter this week a young guy from Australia and He said something very interesting that's related to this and it's a bit. It's something that's very profound. I said I think2:20:45There's this idea in Christianity that we've discussed briefly that the judge and the redeemer are the same figure now You know in the book of revelation you may know this and you may not2:20:56Christ comes back as a Judge he has a sword coming out.. it's a revelatory vision. Not that that book it's a very strange2:21:05It's the last thing you'd expect conservative Christians to believe and believe me and such a visionary hallucination the book of revelation but christ comes back with a sword coming out of his mouth and he comes back as a judge and he2:21:19Divides the damned from the redeemed and most are damned and some are redeemed It's very very harsh Jung believed that the figure of christ in the gospels was too agreeable2:21:29To merciful to tilted towards mercy and that that called out for a counter position and that the counter position of judgment very interesting hypothesis2:21:39But then but then there's this this melding of the two ideas that the judge and the redeemer are the same thing Okay now2:21:48This young man told me that his life lacked Purpose and direction and meaning and that he was nihilistic until he started he read "zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance"2:22:00Which is a book I actually like quite a bit I've read it three times at different decades of my life and one of the things that's very interesting about that book is that it's an examination of the idea of quality of the idea that there are2:22:12Qualitative distinctions between things and that we have an instinct to make qualitative distinctions and so a qualitative distinction is Simply this is better than that which is a judgment2:22:24Okay, now what ratzinger is hypothesizing is that The person in enough you know how you the idea of the modern idea is you're supposed to accept yourself2:22:35I think that's an insane idea by the way really I think I can't think of a more nihilistic idea than that you're already ok It's like no You're not and the reason you're not is could you could be way more?2:22:46Than you are so what do you want to be you want to be ok as you are or do you want to strive towards what's better? and This young man this australian2:22:55he said that the reason that 'zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' had such a Impact on him was because he wasn't happy with his current mode of being right he didn't2:23:04Consider the Manner in which he conducted himself sufficient and the fact that The author of Zen and, it was Persik laid out the notion that you could make qualitative distinctions,2:23:17And there really was a difference between good things and bad things or great things and evil things, it gives you direction it gives you gives you the possibility of moving upward and2:23:28Ratzinger is pointing out at least to some degree that Human beings are insufficient in and of themselves and need the movement upward and so they need to conceptualize something like the highest good and then to strive for that and2:23:41The thing is is that there isn't any difference between conceptualizing the good and being judged because if you're going to2:23:50conceptualize the good and move towards it what you have to do is separate from yourself all those things that aren't good and leave them behind and that's where the redeemer and the judge are the same thing and2:24:01One of the things that's really appalling I think about our modern world is that we're rejecting the notion of qualitative distinctions You say well, we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by saying that one thing is better than another it's like okay fair enough2:24:15It's not fun to be cast off with the damned. That's for sure But if people are in fact insufficient in their present condition2:24:25Which seems to be the case; I mean try finding someone who isn't? Then if you deny the possibility of qualitative distinction because you want to promote a radical2:24:37egalitarianism then you remove the possibility of redemption because there's no movement towards the good and it seems to me that it's a Catastrophe to sacrifice the good for2:24:48Well, it's a catastrophe to sacrifice the good for the equal; because for us to be equal would be mean as far as I can tell that we would all be equally unredeemed and miserable and2:24:59so "He also mentioned in the previous paragraph2:25:08I believe that even in the case when you experience the human life at its fullest that it's most Beautiful as its most meaningful you have a deep I guess2:25:19Understanding that you have something to be thankful for you need to thank somebody for that It's not based entirely on your own merit and that Points you towards something else and also, and-" I don't think that you can have a profoundly positive2:25:32experience You know in the best sense without that accompanying it That's a feeling of being blessed. It's something like that. Yeah. That's a good oh2:25:43Wait hold it. I'm going to stop you Okay, because I'm going to ask this person, but I would like to say that those were remarkably good questions2:25:52so "Dr. Peterson, thank you for the wonderful lecture2:26:04given your working definition of truth and And let's say within the abrahamic religious tradition would you say that the more perhaps2:26:14mystical sects and denominations which place more emphasis on the transcendental experience of God also on this experience2:26:24as opposed to the more fundamentalist, Orthodox literalist which perhaps Emphasize that what I've noticed2:26:35Moral policing of behaviors" yeah? "would you say that the former is more true than the latter?" no. "and--" no. and and okay, sorry continue. "And B: could the former in some ways serve as an antidote to2:26:50extremists literalism, Jihadism Fundamentalism?" okay, so yes to the second part, but the first part it's a great question2:26:59We did some research on this a while back because we're looking at the different religious proclivities of liberals and conservatives and2:27:08Liberals like if you're liberal it means you're high in openness and low in conscientiousness, and if you're conservative Then you're high and conscientiousness and low and openness and that the liberals are spiritual and the conservatives are dogmatic2:27:20but it's best to think of those as partners, right? because the spiritual mystical end is where the revelations Emerge and the renewal, but that's where there's Chaos and and2:27:34Discord as well, because what's new disrupts what's stable and so What's new has to be turned into... It has to be integrated into what's stable2:27:43And so you need both those poles and of course if the dogmatists get the upper-hand then everything turns into a Tyranny of stone that that's egypt in the old testament, but if the if the if the2:27:55Mystics get the upper hand then everything floats off the earth into some impractical ether that is equally counterproductive, and so there has to be a2:28:04dialogue between those different poles And I think you see that in the distribution of human temperament You know the conscientious types there they tend to be orderly the orderly types tend to tend towards kind of a right-wing2:28:16Totalitarianism that's their proclivity when they when they when things get out of hand especially if they're low in openness, that's a danger but2:28:25You see the same thing with the people who are too open and not conscientious at all They're dreaming all the time, but they never do anything. There's never anything implemented and that that's bad. That's a bad thing2:28:36So I don't think that you can say that like- the dogmatic structure is necessary because that perpetuates the system and the revelatory Element is necessary because that renews it when renewal is necessary and there has to be a continual dialogue between those elements2:28:50So that neither of them fall prey to their own particular form of Pathology that's one of the problems with the current political What would you call it?2:29:00Polarization that's occurring across the west is that the right and the left and are talking to each other anymore. That's a very bad thing because the left will wander into a pit and fail without2:29:12boundaries and the right will enclose itself in smaller and smaller spaces until it can't move without the left and One of the reasons that democracy works is because it makes people talk; or allows them to talk you can have it either way2:29:26but it's in its bits because Every virtue has its vice right and so a meta virtue is something like the amalgamation of singular virtues into something that's a2:29:39Transcendent structure that has more to do with the harmony of virtues rather than with any given virtue even though I think that freedom of speech is the clearest manifestation of that harmony of virtues, so and2:29:52"So all could be a lubricant for the beginning of this discussion. Do you think between the liberals and conservatives?"2:30:04I don't know how to answer that It doesn't follow immediately from your from your initial presupposition, so the awe experience is a different issue2:30:15"[Unintelligible]" Yeah, we'll be able Yes, "at least exposing conservatives to some form of that experience could it be if we requisite for a more productive dialogue?"2:30:31See I mean in it in in in the church in church ceremony let's say a classical church ceremony There's some intermingling of both right you mean you think about a church ceremony that takes place in the Gothic cathedral2:30:42We've certainly got the dogma and they're under and the relatively rigid rule structure but at the same time that's aligned with intense beauty and2:30:51In the architectural forms in the in the light that's streaming in through the stained-glass windows and the music and I mean the Gothic cathedrals are forests right it's a stone forest with sunlight streaming in through the Trees and2:31:04It's a balance between structure light there are absolutely unbelievable structures And they speak of the transcendent but but inside that there's a structure and so it2:31:14Seems that in order for the religious impulse to be balanced properly there has to be a reasonable dialogue even in practice between the mystical awe-inspiring transcendent and the dogmatic yeah either of those can2:31:28Can go as either those goes astray without the other if you're too dogmatic. Do you need aw? likely yes, because that would show you that there's something beyond your own presuppositions, so2:31:43So awe, I should tell you something interesting about awe as a as a physiological phenomena You know how you're listening to music and you get chills? Some people experience that more than others open people experience that more or music is a pretty2:31:58reliable elicitor of Chills, that's piloerection. That's your hair standing on end. You see a cat when it sees a dog puffs up. That's awe2:32:11It's the same thing like that that chill is your hair standing on end And that's this that's sensation you get in the presence of a meta predator2:32:20It's something like that and so the awe experience is a I mean obviously it's become very cognitively and emotionally complex in human beings, but it's fundamental2:32:31evolutionary underpinning is the Instantaneous piloerection that you see in prey animals when they're confronted by a predator and of course that would be if you are a rabbit2:32:41You can bloody well believe that you see a wolf and it would inspire. Awe that's for sure I mean if a wolf that was 20 feet high came bounding in here, man, you'd feel awe so2:32:52Yeah, that will convince you that there's something that you still need to know last last question2:33:02"Perfect timing. Hi, Dr. Peterson My name is Gary, and I'm a clinical and counseling master student right now and so one of the key ideas That's been surfacing time and time again in your2:33:12Lectures is the idea that Phenomenology is structured and flows mythologically and the way that plays out is I'm2:33:23supposing effectively just pay attention to what comes up kind of naturally and you can locate the chaotic elements in your experience and2:33:32Prod at them with whatever degree of Necessity you think so trying to situate this within the clinical context2:33:43We can conceptualize Psychotherapy as a kind of guided journey just as you touched on in this lecture Where it's more of a meta journey in a sense a meta heroic journey if I don't know how you want to think about it2:33:56but Just for those of us who are interested in kind of grounding and implementing these ideas within? psychotherapeutic practice2:34:05What should we watch out for in the process itself? What comes up? What should we be afraid of or fearful of or cautious about or what should we tend towards that's my question"2:34:17Well, I think one of it One of the people who I've read that's had the biggest Impact on me as a Clinician was carl Rogers2:34:30And the reason for that is that carl Rogers put tremendous emphasis on listening. Like it's almost impossible to overestimate how useful it is to listen to your clients like you need a meta2:34:42Scheme in some sense and The meta Scheme, I think is laid out in the sermon on the mount. It's something like2:34:51orient yourself and your client Towards the good The client has to conceptualize what that might be you can serve as a guide2:35:00But it has to come from that person because one of the things that you want to find out from your client is okay What's wrong? they have to tell you and2:35:10What would not having something wrong look like like what is it if you could have what you wanted and that and that... That would be good. What would that look like okay? So that establishes your star, right? It's like Geppetto2:35:24Establishing the relationship with the star at the beginning of pinocchio. Here's what we're aiming at Okay, so now you've got that schema Here's what we're aiming at now you might say you might think well now that what happens to the client is they meet their dragons along the way and2:35:37The dragons would be well now You know what you want, And there are things in your way and some of those things might many of those things are going to be intensely practical2:35:47But they're practical/ Psychological so like so maybe someone is has a job and they would like to move forward in the job But they're terrified of speaking in public2:35:56Well, you know is that a psychological problem or a practical problem? It's both It's also a real problem in many positions unless you can speak fluently Publicly you're you're going to hit a ceiling and you're not going to go anywhere and so2:36:10For the person to move towards that goal Then they have to confront the obstacles that manifest themselves Within that framework and part of your job as a clinician is to identify the obstacles2:36:23And to discriminate them from things they don't have to worry about right part of it is you know you can't just run around and try to Combat all the Chaos in the world some of it is your Chaos and a bunch of it isn't and the Chaos2:36:37That's yours is the Chaos that emerges as you move towards a necessary goal And so partly what you're doing by listening to your client is to help them cut their dragons down to size2:36:46You know because what will happen if you start to talk to somebody about public speaking and you really talk to them Is that you decompose the problem into a set of maybe 20 subproblems like well2:36:57Do you know exactly how to give a speech? What's your theory of Public speaking? Do you know how to look at people when you're talking? Do you know how to speak loudly enough?2:37:07so that people can hear you? do you have a philosophy of Public speaking? you know all those things are necessary in order to do it properly you need to decompose that with the client and then to2:37:17Make those problems you have to decompose them to the point where they can be met by a practical solution and then you have to guide the person through the implementation of the practical solution and2:37:30Mostly you do that by by listening It's like the what you need to be is the person who helps the person That you're working with orient themselves towards a better future2:37:39That's the compact you and I are in this space at this time to make things better first of all we have to decide what better would look like and2:37:49Second we need a strategy and third we need to Once we have that we're going to see the obstacles and some of those are going to be Psychological and some of them are going to be practical and we're going to engage in joint2:37:59problem-solving of whatever, sort is necessary in order to Minimize the impact of those problems or to gain from the problems and dream analysis can be extremely useful for that by the way2:38:11It's even more useful for helping the person identify what the goal is because that's often difficult for people. It's like well I know that something's wrong But I don't know what I want. sometimes people get so stuck there that they just can't get they just can't get out of it2:38:25So and then what would you watch out for? "Phenomenologically. The way it shows up, The way, It's experienced"2:38:34Well, I would say the clinician one of the things that you should watch out for is resentment So there's a there's a couple of rules of thumb that I think are useful2:38:43Don't do anything for your clients that they can do for themselves and don't do them any favors? Now I think you can step Beyond the confines of your role2:38:55carefully now and then to show that There's there's there's a more human connection than the merely contractual. I think that's very useful but2:39:09Their problems are not your problems you do not have any right to their problems And so you have to maintain that detachment because otherwise you can steal their destiny You don't want to be the person that solves their problems because you steal their destiny when you do that2:39:22You want to be someone with whom they can figure things out for themselves? And so there can be hubris in being a clinician because you can be the problem solver and that elevates you to a position2:39:32You elevate yourself to that position. You'll fall flat on your face You'll hurt your clients and things will kick back on you very very hard because what the hell. Do you know?2:39:41right Nothing because that person is very complicated and they need to they need to sort themselves out and but you can be a facilitator For that, but that's all you should be2:39:52And so you have to watch that you have to watch over becoming over and k over ly entangled so you have to maintain your detachment in the best sense, and you have to not overstep your2:40:02It's easy to become hubristic when the person is looking to you for the answers It's like you might you don't have the answers although you might be able to find help the person find their way2:40:13That's what you do with everyone. You love - right? I mean, you don't provide them with the answers because then they become little clones of you and2:40:23unhappy bitter resentful and Angry little clones of you because you usurped their destiny and so2:40:32the same thing applies within familiar Arrangements or friendships all about it, so0:00:00Biblical Series IX: The Call to Abraham
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:09so I've been thinking this week about doing this one from once a month on a continuing basis so0:00:25so I think if I do that I think it'll be here although it's harder to rent this theater during the academic year but if it isn't here it'll be somewhere else0:00:34and because I'd like to continue doing this I'm learning a lot from doing it and and once a month would really be good because then I could really do the background work and and I could probably0:00:46do that for a couple of years because obviously this is going very quickly but that's okay you know I mean it shouldn't go any faster than it can go and that's how it that's how it seems to me anyways0:00:56so this has been this has been a very0:01:05steep learning curve for me with regards to these stories because I didn't understand them very well and I got better at using the resources on line to help me do my background investigation I0:01:15have a lot of books and some of you may have noticed that online I posted a conversation I had with Jonathan Powell0:01:24and his and his brother Matthew I hope it's Matthew ivory names escape me so badly but I believe that's right he just finished a book on them on the0:01:33Bible and so I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking about these stories trying to understand what they're about and and then there's all these0:01:42commentaries there's a great site I think it's called Bible hub that has every single verse of the Bible is listed there and then with each verse0:01:52there are like they've aggregated ten commentaries from about ten commentaries from over the last four hundred years and so there's like a dense page on0:02:01every line and that's one of the things that's really interesting about this book too is that it's it's aggregated so much commentary that it's that it's it's0:02:10much bigger than looks the book is much bigger than it looks and so it's been very interesting to become familiar with those two and the fact that this site is set up with all the commentaries split0:02:19up by verses means you can rapidly compare the commentaries and get a sense of you know how people have interpreted this over while at least several hundred years but of course much longer than0:02:28that because the people who wrote the commentaries were of course reading things that were older than that so that's been very very interesting0:02:38so last week we talked about a couple of things we talked about how you might understand the idea of the divine encounter and then we also paralleled0:02:48that with the idea that God disappears in the Old Testament he he boughs out as the stories progress and that seems to be a an emergent property of the0:02:59sequencing of the stories right because all the books were written by independent people different people and then they were aggregated by other people and so the narrative continuity0:03:08is some kind of emergent property that's it's a consequence of this interaction between people readers and writers over centuries and it's it's strange that0:03:17given that there are also multiple coherent narratives that United you know it's really it's really not that easy to understand that but it does at least seem to be the case and so and the third0:03:27thing we talked about was that as God bows out so to speak the the the individual personality seems of the0:03:37characters that are involved the human characters that are involved seems to become more and more developed and it isn't exactly clear what that I mean what it means is that God steps away and0:03:46man steps forward that's what it means but why it's arranged like that or they or they say ultimate significance of that is by no means clear and so so0:03:57Abraham who we're going to concentrate on today is quite a well-developed character and I would say there are two there multiple endings and beginnings in0:04:07the biblical stories the most important ending I suppose is the ending of the the garden of paradise and and the0:04:16disenchantment of the world and the sending forth of Adam and Eve into history right into the future into into a mode of being that has a future as0:04:26part of it and that has history as part of it and that has the necessity of sacrifice and toil as part of it that's obviously crucial and then that's that0:04:35is replayed with the story of Noah because everything is destroyed and then the world is created anew and then sacrifices have to be made in order for the world to begin and then you see the0:04:45same thing happen again after the Noah story in the Tower of Babel because history as we really understand history seems to start with Abraham because the stories of Abraham0:04:54sound like historical stories and no scholars debate about the historical accuracy of the Bible and I suppose there's no way of ever determining once0:05:03and for all the degree to which you might regard the accounts as equivalent to modern empirical history but this is0:05:12a psychological interpretation of the biblical stories not a historical interpretation and it certainly does seem to be the case that from a psychological perspective we enter0:05:21something like the domain of the modern conceptualization relatively modern conceptualization of history with Abraham beyond the accounts of divine0:05:30commands that Abraham carries out this is from Freedman man I mentioned in the last lecture who wrote the disappearance of God a variety of other books that are well0:05:39worth reading the narrative also includes a variety of stories in which Abraham acts on his own initiative he divides land with his nephew lot he battles Kings he takes concubines he0:05:48argues with his wife Sarah on two occasion he tells Kings that Sarah is his sister out of fear that they will kill him to get his wife he arranges his sons marriage in the place of the single0:05:59story of Noah's drunkenness there are in the case of Abraham the stories of a man's life and one of the things I was really struck by reading this in depth and read the commentary is how much like0:06:10a story about a person it is you know Abraham isn't a divine figure in any in any archetypal sense precisely when he has archetypal elements because he's0:06:20also obviously the founder of a nation but fundamentally he's a human being and and he makes he has the adventures and he makes the mistakes of a human being0:06:30and that's it's the mistake part that really struck me you know because it did I was talking with a friend of mine this week Norman Doidge who's a very0:06:41remarkable person in many ways and he was taking me to task he was reading my book which I'm going to publish sure which will be out in January and in in the book I in one section I contrasted0:06:51the God of the Old Testament with the god of the New Testament and made the case sort of based on north of Freud's ideas that the God of the Old Testament was really harsh and judgmental you know0:07:01and that the god of the New Testament was more merciful and you know at least to some degree more sweetness and light and Norman took me to task about that saying0:07:11that that was a overly Christianized interpretation which would make sense because I derived it in part from Northrop Frye and I really have come to understand that more that he's right0:07:21because that he's right about that because the God in the Old Testament is actually far more merciful than he's generally made out to be and you really see this with it's good news0:07:30fundamentally if you regard the representation of God as somehow key to the description of being itself I mean Abraham makes a lot of mistakes0:07:39you know serious mistakes and and yet he has a life and he's and he's blessed by God despite the fact that he's pretty deeply flawed and engages in deceptive0:07:48practice I mean he's a good man but he's not a perfect man by any stretch of the imagination and and things work out really well for him and he's the founder of the nation and all of that and that's0:07:57good news for everyone because perfect people are very very hard to find and if the only pathway to having a rich and meaningful life was through perfection0:08:08then we would all be in deep trouble and so that that's very satisfying to read that and the other the other thing that I've been struck by is that you know0:08:17Abraham and I think this is actually absolutely key to the interpretation of the story Abraham goes out and does things that's the thing and so one of0:08:27the things that I've noticed in my life is that nothing I've ever done was wasted and by done I mean put my heart and soul into you know like like0:08:37attempted with with all of my effort that always worked now it didn't always work the way I expected it to work that's a whole different issue but the0:08:46payoff from it was always positive I always something always a something of value always accrued to me when I made the sacrifices necessary to do something worthwhile and so I think part of the0:08:57message in in this in the story of a and the Abrahamic stories is go do something and and I thought about this in a0:09:06variety of ways outside of the interpretation of this story because I have this program some of you might be familiar with which is called future authoring program and it's it's designed to help people0:09:16make a plan for three to five years into the future you know and we so what you do is you you answer some questions it's a writing program you know answer some0:09:25questions about how you would like your life to be what you would like your character to be three to five years down the road if you were taking care of yourself like you were taking care of0:09:35someone that you actually cared about so you kind of have to split yourself into two people and treat yourself like you like someone you have respect for and that you want the best for now it's not0:09:44easy because people don't necessarily have respect for themselves and they don't necessarily want what's the best for themselves because they have a lot of self contempt and a lot of self hatred a lot of guilt and a lot of0:09:53existential angst and and a lot of self-consciousness and all of that and and so people don't necessarily take care of themselves very well and and I0:10:02think it's I think it's I think you have an obligation it's one of the highest moral obligations to treat yourself as if you're a creature of value and and0:10:11that is in some sense it's in some sense that's independent of your actions and you might think about that metaphorically as a recognition of your divine worth in the biblical sense0:10:21regardless of your of your sins so to speak and I think that's that's that's powerful language as far as I'm concerned once you understand it anyways with the self authoring program the0:10:31future authoring program you you ask you answer questions about what what how you would like your friendships to be conducted because it's useful to0:10:40surround yourself with people who are trying to move forward and more importantly who are happy when you move forward and not happy when you move back backwards not when you fall that isn't0:10:49what I mean but when you're doing self-destructive things your friends shouldn't be there to cheer you on and because then they're really not acting like friends obviously you know I know0:10:58it's obvious but it still happens all the time and people allow it to happen it's not a good idea and you know how would you like to sort your family out and I was thinking about this this week0:11:08too because I was thinking about Noah's Ark and there was a phrase in that story that I didn't understand which was that Noah was perfect in his generations I don't know what that means you know when0:11:18you're when you're going through a book like the Bible if you don't understand the phrase that actually means you've missed something it doesn't mean that that's just not you know that's not germane to the story it means you're0:11:27stupid you didn't get it man you didn't get it you didn't standard and so the idea that Noah was perfect in his generations and that's0:11:36why he could build an ark that would sustain him and him and and humanity itself through the flood it meant that he not only did he walk with God which0:11:46is something that we talked about in the context of the Sermon on the Mount but he established proper relationships with his family with his children and so what that meant was that his not only was he0:11:55well integrated as a person but his level of integration had reached the point where it stretched out beyond him and encompassed his family and so it was0:12:04Noah and the family that was in the ark and I can tell you and I really understood this this year because I had a very tumultuous year you could think about it from a personal perspective I could think about it as a year that had0:12:14no shortage of floods and might and part of the reason that I was able to get through it I also had terrible health problems and one of the reasons I was0:12:23able to get through it was because my family really came together around me my kids my wife my parents and my friends as well and particularly a certain group0:12:34of friends and that's partly all of that came together in my mind that's we can I thought well that's what it means to be perfect in his generations meant that he0:12:43hadn't just straightened himself out he'd also straightened out his relationships with his family and I can tell you that when crisis strikes you0:12:52which it will it will the flood will come right that's why the apocalypse is always upon us the flood will definitely come in your life and to the degree that you've organized yourself0:13:02psychologically and also healed the relationships between you and your family that could be the critical element that that determines whether you live or die when a crisis comes or or0:13:11whether someone in your family lives or dies and so the idea of the Ark containing the man who's who walks with God and who's generations are perfect and that that's what sustains humanity0:13:22through the crisis it's like you couldn't be more psychologically accurate than that no the other thing I was thinking about this weekend I was thinking about another line in the New0:13:32Testament I think it's from the Sermon on the Mount but I'm not absolutely sure Christ compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed and so I was thinking0:13:41about a mustard seed as a very tiny seed and it grows into a spectacular complex plant and I was thinking about how you should operate in0:13:50the world in order to make it a better place assuming that that's what you should be doing and that is what you should be doing and there's lots in the world to fix everything that bothers you0:14:00about the world and about yourself should be fixed and you can do that and my dawning realization I have a friend0:14:09he is in Montreal his name is James Simon he's a great painter and he's taught me a lot of things helped he's helped me design my house and beautify it and I bought some paintings from him0:14:20a couple of years ago and he did this series of paintings where he went around North America and and stood in different places and then he painted the view from0:14:29here down and so it's his feet planted in different places on roads in the desert on the ocean I have one actually hanging over my toilet which is him0:14:39standing at a urinal yeah well you know he was trying to make a point and the point was that wherever you are it's worth paying attention and that's because you know so all these places0:14:49that he visited he looked exactly where he was from standing by the side of the road in the desert sort of mundane in some sense but then maybe he put 400:14:58hours into that painting you know it's very very realistic painting with really good light and what he's telling you as a painter is everything is worth paying attention to an infinite amount but you0:15:08don't have enough time so the artist does that for you right the artist looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and then gives you that vision and so then you can look at the painting and it0:15:17reminds you that right where you are is there's every everything that there is is right where you are and that's a hard thing to realize but it's actually true0:15:26and so I've been telling people online in various ways and in lectures that they should start fixing up the world by cleaning up their room and I wanted to0:15:36just elaborate on that a little bit before I get back to the lecture itself so as it's becoming this internet weird internet meme you know and and and it's0:15:48a joke and good it's a joke I'm really happy about the fact that so much of this has got like the leaving of humor and it's really important because that's what stops things from degenerate0:15:58getting into into conflict humor and I was thinking about this idea of cleaning up your room in relationship to the mustard seed idea and you see the thing0:16:07about cleaning up your room this is also something I learned from Carl Jung and his study is on alchemy because for Jung when the alchemist was attempting to0:16:16make the philosopher's stone he was not only engaged in the transformation of the material world but he was engaged in the process of self transformation that occurred at the same time as the0:16:26chemical Trent as the chemical transformation so the psychological work in some sense let's say you want to sort out your room and beautify it because the beauty is also important and let's0:16:36say that all you have is just a little room like you're not rich you're poor and you don't have any power that's another thing but you've got your damn room and you've got this space right in front of you you know that that's a part0:16:46of the cosmos that you can come to grips with and you might think well what's there in front of you right in front of you and the answer to that is it depends on how open your eyes are that that's0:16:56the proper answer because you could say and William Blake said this for example Aldous Huxley made comments that were very similar that in a transcendent0:17:05state you can see infinity in the finite and you might say well you can say and you can see infinity and what you have within your grasp if you look and you could say maybe that's the case with0:17:14your room and so you want to clean up your room well okay how do you do that exactly well a room is a room is a place to sleep and so if0:17:24you say your room ups properly then you figure out how to sleep and when you should sleep and how you should sleep and then you figure out when you should wake up and then you figure out what clothes you should wear because they0:17:33have to be arranged properly in your dresser then you have to have some place to put your clothes and you're going to have some clothes you have to figure out what you're going to wear those clothes to do right and then that means you have0:17:42to figure out what you're going to do and then your room has to serve that purpose because otherwise it doesn't set up properly and if it doesn't set up if it doesn't serve your purposes you will0:17:52be unhappy and not happy in the room because the way that we perceive the world is as a place to move from point A to point B in and then if the place that0:18:03were in facilitates that movement then we're happy to be there and it's the place that we're in serves as an obstacle to that movement then we run0:18:12happy to be there and so what it means to set up your room is that you have to have somewhere to go that's worthwhile or you can't set up your room and then your room has to be set up to facilitate0:18:21that and then the next thing is well maybe you have to make it beautiful but that's not easy right that means you have to have some taste and that doesn't mean you have to have money it doesn't0:18:30because you can be garish with money and you can be tasteful with nothing all you need is taste and taste beats money when it comes to beautifying things you know0:18:40I mean not that money is trivial because it's not the taste is crucial and people who are very artistically oriented can make beautiful things out of virtually nothing and not only that the literature0:18:50suggests that if you're going to make beautiful things putting real constraints on on what you allow yourself to do facilitates creativity instead of interfering with it because0:19:00let's say you have to make something out of nothing right which I suppose would be a godly act right you have to make something out of nothing it you have to be creative in order to do that and so0:19:10then to beautify your room means that you also have to develop your capacity to be creative and so then you can make your room shines but then what will0:19:20happen is that if your family isn't together they will interfere with that you'll interfere with that because you won't have the discipline to do it properly but then when you start building this is this little microcosm0:19:31of perfection with what you have at hand and Italy evoke all the pathologies of everyone in your household they'll wonder what the hell you're up to in there and they won't necessarily be0:19:40happy because if you're if they're in a lowly place let's say and so are you and you're trying to move out of that then the higher you move out of that the more0:19:49the place they're in looks bad and you might say well what they should do is celebrate your victory over chaos and evil but that isn't what will happen what will happen instead is that they0:19:58will attempt to pull you back down they'll attempt to and I mean obviously all families don't do that but but all families do that to some degree and some0:20:08families do almost nothing but that and so what that means is that if you're going to organize your room then you're going to have to confront the devil's in your house and that's often that's often0:20:19a terrifying thing because some of those Devils have have lineages that go back many many many generations and god only knows what you have to struggle with in order to overcome that0:20:28and so and so to sort your self out and to fix up your room is a non trivial matter you know and you can do that0:20:37you'll learn by doing that and then maybe you'll learn enough by doing that so that you can fix up your family a little bit and then having done that you'll have enough character so that0:20:46when you try to operate in the world at your job or maybe in the broader social spheres that you'll be a force for good instead of harm because you'll have learned some humility by noting just how0:20:56difficult it was to put your damn room together well and yourself for that matter and so you'll proceed cautiously with your eyes open towards the good and so well those are0:21:08some of the things I've been thinking about this week and they're Jermaine they're like they're germane to what we're going to discuss tonight because what happens at the beginning of the0:21:17abrahamic stories is basically God comes to Abraham and just says go get going man do something do something get going0:21:26and you might think well where should I go and God God is somewhat vague about that and where he sends Abraham it's a real fixer-upper man it's like there's0:21:35starvation there and there's tyranny and there's and there's marital dissolution and there's deceit like it's it's just like where you live you know it's exactly the same thing it's it's it's0:21:45tyranny and catastrophe so that's you know the the great the tyrannical Great Father because because Abraham ends up having to sojourn in Egypt and and0:21:55there's a famine and so mother nature is on the rampage and Abraham lies about his wife as we'll see and so it's the world it's the world it's tyranny and0:22:04and vulnerability and deceit and the other God says Gold because if you do go then you'll become a father of Nations and you think well again that's pretty0:22:14good news although it's strange because you'd expect that if God chose Abraham then he'd send it immediately to the land of honey land of milk and honey and that isn't what happens at all it0:22:23doesn't happen at all and Abraham never gets there but his mission is still regarded as divine and thank God for that because that's what your mission0:22:32will be because that's what you will encounter in your life those are archetypal things everyone encounters is the tear of the social structure and and the0:22:41rapaciousness of nature and the deceitful the deceitful quality of the human psyche it's like that's the world now it's a negative that's a negative view in some sense but it's positive in0:22:52this story because what it basically says is something that's akin to the Sermon on the Mount which is that if you're aligned with God and you pay attention to the divine injunction then0:23:03you can operate in the midst of chaos and tyranny and deception and flourish and you could hardly hope to have a better piece of news than that given that that's exactly where you are0:23:13so and I didn't see any of that me Abrahamic stories to begin with so it's been very interesting to have that sort of reveal itself0:23:22Baberaham section nuff develops the personality and characters of man to a new degree in biblical narrative well0:23:31picturing him in a new degree of responsibility in him a new degree of responsibility so here's the other thing that's really struck me and I think this is absolutely crucial importance and I0:23:41don't know how much importance but it's certainly important to me one of the things that has just blown me away in the last year because I've talked to lots of people lots of people live you0:23:52know but also lots of people online but it's more obvious live and it's obvious in this theatre as well is that I've gone around and spoken and a large0:24:01proportion of my audience is being young man young you know under 30 something like that and I've spoken to them a lot0:24:10about responsibility and what's so odd about about this is that of all the things that I've spoken about if I can see the audience and I can feel how the0:24:19audience is reacting because I'm always paying attention to all of you it's insofar as I can manage that so I get some sense of how what I'm saying is0:24:28landing you know what you have to do if you're going to speak effectively to people and what what happens is if I talk about responsibilities everyone be is silent just like they are now it's0:24:39silent and and not moving right focusing attentive say pick up your responsibilities pick up the heaviest thing you can and carry it and the room0:24:49goes quiet and everybody's eyes open and I think whose makes me break up I was0:24:59[Applause] I don't I don't know why I was speaking0:25:08to an English journalist today he was going to write an article in Spectator magazine I was talking about this and at the same point in the discussion the same I had the same emotional reaction I0:25:18don't really understand it I think it's something something about it that's so crucial because you know we've been fed this unending diet of rights and0:25:28freedoms and there's something about that especially there's something about that that's so pathologically wrong and people are starving for the antidote and antidote is truth and responsibility0:25:39right and it isn't it isn't because that's what you should do and some you know and some some I know better or someone knows better for you what you0:25:50should do sense it's that it's that it's that it's that that's the secret to a meaningful life and without the meaningful life and all you have is suffering and nihilism and despair and0:26:00all about and self contempt and and that's not good and so the man it's necessary for men to stand up and take responsibility and they all know that0:26:10and and are starving for that message and and the message is more that that's also a good thing to stand up and take responsibility because you're cursed so0:26:19much now from come from from when you're young with this notion that you're active engaged with with the world is part of what is destroying and0:26:28undermining the planet and adding to the tyranny of the social systems it's like how about not so much of that Hey because it's it is to soul deadening its0:26:37anti human right to the car and my sense instead is that you know if you if you were able to reveal the best of yourself to you in the world that you would be an0:26:47overwhelming force for good and that whatever errors might be made along the way would wash out in the works and that's the other thing that you see in0:26:56the Abrahamic stories because Abraham is not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination he's a real person and he makes mistakes but it doesn't matter the overarching narrative is you know0:27:07maintain your covenant with God and despite your inadequacies then not only will you prevail but your descendants will prevail it's like great0:27:17that's really good news you know so it's been really something to see that in the in the stories it's not that so that's responsibility it's not just0:27:27that Abraham is kinder gentler more intrepid ethical or a better debater than his ancestor Noah rather both the Noah and Abraham stories are pieces of a development of an increasingly stronger0:27:37stance of humans relative to the deity before the story is over humans will become a good deal stronger and bolder than Abraham oh that's really something0:27:46to say because Abraham is pretty bold so we'll let's read the stories the first one is about Abraham Sarah and lot now these are the generations of Tara0:27:56Tara begat Abram so his name is Abram to begin with and that actually turns out to be important it's not Abraham Nahor and Haran and Haran begat lot so Haran0:28:06is Abraham's brother and Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his Nativity in ur of the Chaldees and Abram and Nahor took them wives the name0:28:16of Abraham's wife was Sarai and the name of nahor his wife Milka the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and the father visca but Sarai was0:28:25barren she had no child and Terah took Abram his son and lot the son of Haran his son son and Sarai his daughter-in-law his son0:28:34Abraham's wife and they went forth with them from the ur of Chaldees from ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of canaan that's exile and they came unto Haran and dwelt there and the days of0:28:43Terah were 205 years and Terah died in Haran and there's a reason that Sarah is is introduced as barren and and it's to0:28:52set the stage I think it was anton chekhov who when he was talking about the stage setting for a play that if there was a rifle hanging on the walls and it had better been used before I0:29:02believe the second act or it shouldn't be hanging there at all right and so this is stage setting and I give part of the reason that the biblical writers are pointing out that Abraham's wife is0:29:12barren is because it's a real catastrophe for Abraham oh and for Sarah as well that she's barren and so it's showing the trouble that Abraham's in at0:29:21the beginning of the story and it's also it's also see what happens as the story progresses is that Abraham Abraham and0:29:30Sarah are eventually granted the Sun but it's way late in the story and they're very very old by the time it happens and of course you're not going to be a father of Nations without having a child and so0:29:40the writers are attempting to to make the case that if you forthrightly pursue that which God directs you to pursue0:29:50let's say that all things are possible that's that's the idea in the narrative you know you might say that's naive and you know it's not it you think it when0:30:01you're naive right and then you dispense with that idea and then when you stop being the sort of person who dispenses with ideas then you come to another0:30:10place and that's the place where you think you have no idea what might be possible for you with you if you've got things together and pursued what you should pursue you don't know how much0:30:21what's impossible to you right now would become possible under those conditions it's an unknown phenomena and like I've watched people who put themselves0:30:30together across time you know incrementally and continually and they become capable of things that are taught not only jaw-droppingly amazingly but0:30:39also sometimes metaphysically impossible to understand and so we don't know the limits of human endeavor we truly don't and it's premature to put a cap on what0:30:51it is that we are what that what it is that we're capable of and so you you know you're already something and maybe you're not so bad in your current configuration but you might wonder if you did nothing for the next thirty0:31:02years except put yourself together just exactly what would you be able to do and you might think well that's worth finding out but of course that's that's the adoption of responsibility and one0:31:11thing I've also learned over the years because I've been curious about this battle between meaning and nihilism to know and I mean I mean I could see for a long while the rationale in nihilism and0:31:22the power of the nihilistic argument but it occurred to me across time that despite that the power of the nihilistic0:31:31argument is more powerful than naive optimism but it's not more powerful than the optimism that is not naive because the optimism that is not naive0:31:42says it's self-evident that the world is place of suffering and that there are things to be done about that and it's self-evident that people are flawed and0:31:51that there's things to be done about that and then the non naive optimist says the suffering could be reduced and the insufficient see could be overcome0:32:01if people oriented themselves properly and did what they were capable of doing and I do not believe that that's deniable I do I do I think that human0:32:11potential is virtually limitless and that there's nothing perhaps it's beyond our grasp if we're careful as individuals and as a society and so I think that there's no reason for0:32:21nihilism that there's no reason for hopelessness and and there's no reason to bow down before evil because we're capable of so much more and I think that0:32:31you can easily you know that first because you're not happy with who you are and you're ashamed and embarrassed about it as you should be and you know it because if you look out there you see people who are capable of doing great0:32:41things and you know that we're not giving it our all and still we're not doing so badly you know and so you might wonder if if if we devoted 90% of our0:32:51effort to putting things right instead of fifty-five percent of our efforts or maybe even less than that you might wonder just how well could things be put together and I think that you can figure0:33:01that out by starting with your room by the way and the Lord said unto Abram and this is this is the this is the opening0:33:10of the story get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee and this is0:33:20one of those phrases where every clause is significant go somewhere you don't understand that's the first thing get the out of thy country you know back in0:33:31the 1920s there was a whole slew of American writers who ended up as expatriates in Paris Hemingway among them and and who wrote the Great Gatsby0:33:41Fitzgerald yes and then a variety of others it was very inexpensive in Paris at the time and part of their transformation into great literary figures was the fact that they were out0:33:50of their country and now they could see what their country was because you can't see what your country is until you leave it so you have to go into the unknown that's that's God's first command go0:34:00into the unknown because you already know what you know and so and that's not enough unless you think you're enough and if you're not enough and you don't think you're enough then you have to go0:34:09where you haven't been and so that's the first commandment to Abraham it's like okay that that's a good one that makes perfect sense go to where you don't know yes and from my kindred well that what0:34:20does that mean means grow up right that's what it means it means get away from your family enough so that you can establish your independence and that0:34:29isn't because there's something wrong with your family although perhaps there is you know as there is perhaps wrong with you but it means get away you know I talk to people very frequently whose0:34:40families have provided them with too much protection and they know it themselves and that means they're deprived of necessity you know one of the things that you see in the United0:34:49States for example is that the children of first generation immigrants often do better than the children they're children and the reason for that is that0:34:58the children of first generation immigrants have necessity driving them and you don't know how much you need a necessity to drive you because maybe you're not very disciplined and if the0:35:08catastrophe doesn't immediately befall you if you don't act forthrightly today then maybe you never act forthrightly right because the the gap between your0:35:18foolishness and the punishment is is lengthened by your unearned wealth and so you never grow up and learn and you have to get yourself away from your dependency in order to allow necessity0:35:30to drive you forward and that's to become independent and to become mature and I think part of what's happening in our culture is that the the force that's0:35:40attacking the the fourth right movement forward of young men in particular is afraid of the power of men because it's0:35:49confused about the distinction between power and authority and competence like an a man who's who has Authority and0:35:58competence has power as a byproduct but the authority and competence is everything and and and people who can't understand that failed to make the0:36:08distinction between power and authority of competence and they're afraid of power and so they destroy authority and competence and that's a terrible thing because we need0:36:17authority and competence what else is going to what else is going to allow us to prevail in the long run and so you get away from your country and you get away from your kin and from your father's0:36:27house right and you go out there and you establish yourself in the world it's a call to adventure that's what this the first lines in the Abrahamic story is a0:36:36call to adventure so great unto a land that I will show you well you know what does that mean you know one of the0:36:49things that I'd been struck very hard by a number of writers Carl young obviously among them I mean he he wrote things0:36:58like Nietzsche that if you understand them they just break you into pieces you know and and one of the things that Jung understood in the psychoanalysts understand it's one of the most0:37:07terrifying elements of psychoanalytic thinking is very tightly allied with religious thinking which is that you are not the master of your own house there0:37:16are spirits that dwell in within you meaning you have a will and you can exercise a certain amount of conscious control over your being but there are0:37:26all sorts of things that occur within you that seem to be beyond your capacity to control your dreams for example that's a really good example or your impulses for example you might you might think of those as so foreign from you0:37:36that they're not even you don't even want them to be part of you but but more subtly even how about what you're interested in what compels you like where does that come from exactly0:37:46because you can't you can't conjure it up of your own accord you know so if you're a student and you're taking difficult course you might say to0:37:55yourself well I need to sit down and study for three hours but then you sit down and that is what happens your attention goes everywhere and you might say well whose attention is it then if0:38:05it goes everywhere because you say it's your attentions like well if it's your attention maybe you would be able to control it but you can't and so then you might think well Jenin just exactly what0:38:15the hell is controlling it and you might say well it's random it's the vall it's better not be random I can tell you that that's that happens to some degree in schizophrenia there's an element of0:38:24randomness and it's not random it's driven by the action of phenomena that I think are best considered as something like0:38:33subpersonalities although even that's only a partial description you can't make yourself interested in something0:38:42interest manifests itself and grips you that's a whole different thing and so what is it that's gripping you and how0:38:51do you conceptualize that is that a divine power well it's divine as far as you're concerned because it grips you and you can't do anything about it and so there's a calling in you towards what0:39:01you're compelled by and what you're interested in and sometimes that might be very dark and sometimes not but you're compelled forward by your interest and so and so the idea that0:39:13what moves you away from your country and your father's house and the comforts of your child at home is it's something that's beyond you and that you listen to and hearken to that's exactly right and0:39:24you can say well I don't want to call that God it's like doesn't matter what you call it exactly it doesn't matter to what it is what it's called it still is and if you0:39:37don't listen to it that's the other thing if you don't listen to it and I've been a clinician and talked to enough people now as old as I am to know this absolutely if you do not listen to that0:39:46thing that beckons you forward you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine you'll have everything that's terrible about life in your life and0:39:55nothing about it that's good and worse you'll know that it was your fault and that you squandered what you could have had so this is not only a calling forth0:40:07but a warning unto a land that I will show thee and that's it that I will show thee that and you don't want to be too concrete about this you know there's all0:40:17sorts of new territories that you can inhabit if you there's this abstract and conceptual territories of guilty University and you study biology or you study physics or or any discipline0:40:26you're in a territory right you're in the territory that all the scholars have established and then as you master the discipline you move out beyond the established territory into the unknown0:40:35and that's a new land right maybe it's even the land of your enemies for that matter but it's a new land the frontier is always in front of you and so you know when the earth was0:40:45less inhabited than it is now the frontier was the psychological frontier and the geographical frontier was the same thing and now they've separated to some degree because there's not so much0:40:54geographical volunteer but there's the frontier is a place that never disappears and the land that's beyond the land that you know is always there0:41:03and it's always where you should go and all of that packed into these what four phrases so well so when I've been0:41:12thinking about narrative you look at the world through a story you can't you can't help it and the story is what gives value to the world or or the story0:41:21is what you extract from the value of the world you can look at it either way you're somewhere and it's not good enough right that's the eternal human predicament wherever you are isn't good0:41:30enough and to some degree that's actually a good thing because if it was good enough well there's nothing for you to do so it's actually maybe a good thing that it's insufficient and that0:41:39might be why sometimes having lessons is better than having more and I don't want to be a Pollyanna about that I mean I know that there's deprivation that can0:41:49reach to the point where it's no where it's completely counterproductive but it isn't always the case that starting with little is you if you start with little0:41:59you start with more possibility it's something like that so you moved from always from what's unbearable about the present to some better future right and if you don't have that then you have no0:42:09you have nothing but threat and a negative emotion you have no positive emotion because the positive emotion is generated in the conception of the better future and then the evidence that0:42:20you generate yourself that you're moving towards it that's where the positive and fulfilling meaning of life comes so you want to set up the structure properly it's very very important and so what it0:42:29means is that you want to be going somewhere that's good enough so that the going is worth the while and you can ask yourself that and that's partly what we0:42:38tried to build into the future authoring program which is well we know what's wrong with life it's rife with suffering and insufficiency and deception and evil it's all of that obviously okay what0:42:49would make the journey worthwhile or you can ask yourself that it's like alright in order to bear up under this load what is it that I would need to be0:42:58striving to attain and if you ask yourself that that's to knocking and the door will open that's what that means if you ask yourself that then you will find0:43:07an answer and you'll think you'll shrink away from it you'll think well there's no way I could do that it's like well you don't know what you could do you don't know what's possible and you're0:43:17not as much as you could be and so god only knows what you could what you could do and have and give if you sacrificed0:43:26everything to it and that's the reason that Abraham is constantly making sacrifices and it's archaic right he's burning up like baby lambs but like well0:43:36they're alive you know that's something and and they're valuable and that's something it's you have to admit even if you think about it as a modern person but the act of sacrificing something0:43:46might have some dramatic compulsion to it you know to go out into a flock and to take something that's newborn and to cut its throat and to bleed it and to0:43:55burn it might be a way of indicating to yourself that you're actually serious about something and it isn't so obvious that we have rituals of seriousness like that now and so it's not so obvious that0:44:05we're actually serious about anything and so maybe that's not such a good thing and so maybe we shouldn't be thinking that these people were so archaic and primitive and superstitious it's possible that they knew something0:44:15that we don't it's certainly in the or hammock stories one of the things that maintains Abraham's covenant with God is his continual willingness to sacrifice0:44:24it it's so that sacrificial issue is so important because you are not committed to something unless you're willing to sacrifice for it commitment and sacrifice are the same0:44:33thing and I think it's borders on miraculous that those concepts are embedded into this narrative at the level of dramatic action you know0:44:42instead of abstract explanation people are acting this out and then the fundamental conception is so profound that it's really quite it's quite inspiring it's breathtaking really when0:44:53you understand what message is trying to be conveyed you have to make sacrifices and what you have to sacrifice you have to sacrifice that which is most valuable0:45:03to you currently that's stopping you and god only knows what that is it's certainly the worst of you it's certainly that and god only0:45:12knows to what degree you're in love with the worst of you so well so you move from the unbearable present to the ideal0:45:21future and and you can't help that you have to live in the structure like that that's your house that's another way of thinking about it and if you want to get your house in order and if it you want0:45:30it to be a place that you can live properly then you have to plan the future that is perfect and then I think0:45:41well what does that mean and it means it's good for you right and one of the things that I'm I do all the time with my clinical and consulting clients is0:45:51trying to figure out what would be good for them but we do more than that we try to think okay well what how can we set this up so it's really good for you and that all the side consequences of that0:46:01are things that are good for other people and so because people are often also tended about trying to get something that's good for themselves because they feel that it's selfish or that they don't deserve it so we set it0:46:11up so that well look we're going to set it up so that it's plainly obvious that this will not harm the structure of the universe for you to have what you need0:46:21and to do it in a way that's of benefit to other people there's no downside to that and so it's okay it's okay if you reach out and take that and one of the0:46:30things that's interesting about the biblical stories Abrahamic stories as well is that God doesn't really seem to be opposed to the success of the people that he's chosen you know what happens0:46:40to them is that they progress through their journey as they they get larger flocks and they they get more authority and they they get they get more they get0:46:49life more abundant that's what happens it's God isn't does it seem to be a miser in the Old Testament it's like if you put in the effort and you and you0:46:58accept the covenant and you make the sacrifices then you get to be successful and maybe successful beyond your wildest dreams and that that's actually seems to be okay with God and that's pretty cool0:47:09given that you know that the general notion of Old Testament God is that all he's doing is casting out curses and death you know wherever he happens to wander and0:47:18I mean there's certainly no shortage of that but but again it seems to me that that's very good news and that you also don't have to be perfect in order for to have that happen and then the other0:47:29thing this is the issue about going into the unknown it's like well if you leave your country and your kin and your father's house and you go out into a land that your intuition guides you to0:47:40you're going to undergo these radical transformations this is the sacrificial transformation too because you're you're moving forthrightly and voluntarily into chaos right and that's the same as the0:47:51dragon fight that's the hero story and what will happen there is that you will transform yourself and so the call to an ideal is also the call to a sequence of0:48:00deaths and rebirths that move you closer and closer to the ideal and that's what that's what God is calling Abraham to do0:48:09in the first sentence of this story0:48:20you see these things echoed in the strangest places and so these are stills that I took from Pinocchio and this0:48:29little cricket so he's the still small voice right that's the thing that calls to you it's your conscious conscience and part it's your intuition in part and it's the thing that opens up the great0:48:39book of the world the great sacred book of the world and that's what happens here right and the animators are at pains to show you that it's a leather-bound book with gilt lettering0:48:48it's a valuable book and it's something that's quiet that's showing it to you right you have to meditate let's say you have to be somewhere where the world isn't drowning you out in order to0:48:58understand how to open this to listen to that voice that tells you where you should go with what you should do next and then what happens is that something0:49:08beckons to you in the night it's a star right it's something that transcends the horizon it's it's glitters it's brilliant it's it's not day to day it's0:49:18something that's beyond you it's something that represents a transcendent ideal and that makes it manifest to you if you're quiet enough to listen and0:49:27that's what you wish upon so strangely right and people do that they wish upon a star they teach their children that and they don't know why well what do you0:49:36mean you wish upon a star what the world does that mean it means you lift your eyes to the heavens and make a pact with the transcendent and then you're and then what your hearts desire will come0:49:46to you that's what it means and you think well that's so that's not naive it's the most sophisticated thing that you can know and it's the birth of the0:49:56hero right because that's the that's the nativity star obviously and this is0:50:05where it takes place it's just anywhere and the person it is just a carpenter and a toy maker but that's pretty good a carpenter if you're a deceitful0:50:14carpenter then your house falls down and if you're a toy maker then you love children it's that's good start you know so so Geppetto who lives in this little it's it's a it's not a grand house it's0:50:25it's just in every day house but everything that's happening and it is good and so that means it's it's a palace because everything in it is how that's happening0:50:34good there's the saying and I don't remember where it comes from then it's better to have bread and water in peace than a feast in conflict and that's not a saying that's just the starkest0:50:44possible description of the truth because there's nothing worse than eating a grand meal with people you hate and despise that are at each other's throats it's much better to have bread0:50:54and water in peace it's it's not it it's just clear-headed analysis of the structure of the world to say things like that and so the magical transformation can0:51:04happen in the most mundane of places because and the reason for that is that the mundane nature of places is an illusion because every place is the0:51:15potential birthplace of the kingdom of God that's the case and so Geppetto he's a good guy he has a kitten0:51:25you know the kitten likes him he makes puppets and he's humble person and he knows that compared to the ideal that he's attempting to subscribe to that0:51:35he's he's not a based before it or anything like that he's not despicable in relationship to it but the reason he's on his knees is because the thing0:51:44he's pointing at is above him you know he he it wouldn't be the right aim if it wasn't above him and so the fact that0:51:53he's on his knees so to speak is only an indication that his aim is proper because you should be on your knees to something that you actually admire and if you don't feel like being on your0:52:03knees in front of it then perhaps you don't actually admire it and then that means you haven't got the stage set properly it could be it should be something that fills you with awe your aim should should be add something that0:52:13fills you with awe because whatever why do something else well perhaps because it's easy and perhaps because it's malevolent and all of those things but0:52:22but those are no answer to the problems that beset you they just make things worse and that's clear and so then Gepetto have is having made his pact his0:52:33covenant just like Abraham he falls into a dream right he falls into a dream and the rest of the movie actually takes place in a dream and it's a dream it's the dream within which transformation0:52:43takes place and that's laid out at least in part time stops in in the pinocchio story and everything happens to Pinocchio in some sense in a land it's outside of normal time and0:52:54that's that's the infinite archetypal space and that's a real place that's a real place the infinite and the finite coexist and most of the time we're in the place of the finite but that doesn't0:53:04mean that the place of this infinite doesn't exist it just means that we can't get access to it we just get intimations of it from time to time you know when things are going perfectly well for you on those rare occasions0:53:14where everything comes together for the brief moment you inhabit that divine place and you have some sense of what your life could be like if you organized0:53:24it from the smallest element to the largest element and that's a place that you can inhabit if not forever in a manner that at least felt like forever0:53:41well because of Gepetto's decisioned the transcendent manifests itself it takes the form of the blue fairy here that's the positive element of nature right so0:53:51we could say well nature it's not so clear that she's on your side right she's the Red Queen and Alice in Wonderland who runs around screaming0:54:01when you go down the rabbit hole she runs around screaming off with their heads and who says in my kingdom you have to run as fast as you can just to0:54:10stay in the same place that's mother nature but then we might say well how do we know that mother nature's attitude towards you isn't negative because your attitude towards things isn't proper and0:54:20that's what this film attempts to indicate the idea is that if you aim properly then nature aligns itself behind you now it also arrays itself in0:54:31front of you perhaps even as an antagonist but the power that it it it provides you with from within might be sufficient to overcome it from without0:54:42and i think that i think that the clinical evidence is clear about that because one of the things that we do know is that if you take people who are0:54:51confronting terrible things and shrinking from them and you teach them how to structure their behavior so that they can advance0:55:01with courage everything works better for them their fears decrease and their character grows and so there might be0:55:11enough of nature within us to help us withstand the nature that's outside of us and it depends at least to some degree and how it is that we orient ourselves in the world to some into some0:55:22unknowable degree now Geppetto wants an autonomous individual as a son and0:55:33that's also something that makes him a great person because autonomous individuals have their own will and if you're a tyrant it's the last thing that0:55:43you're going to want and if you're the tyrant who's jealous of his son it's even more so the last thing you're ever going to want and so to aim high and to0:55:52want the development of the autonomous individual are the same thing and I would say that's the core story in some sense of Western culture is that to aim high and to develop the autonomous0:56:01individual are the same thing and that's what happens in Pinocchio that's what happens in the story of Abraham and the transformation takes place0:56:10the magical transformation and in the Pinocchio story one of the things that's so interesting about it and this is part of its mythological substructure from0:56:19the scientific perspective there's only two determining forces with regards to the destiny of the individual there's nature deterministic and culture0:56:28deterministic and then scholars wrangle about which of those is the greater force but in mythological stories0:56:37there's always a third element and that third element is something like autonomous consciousness and there's no place for autonomous consciousness in the deterministic story of nature and0:56:46culture but we all act as if autonomous consciousness is the primary reality and the biblical stories are predicated on the idea that autonomous consciousness0:56:55is what gives rise to the world and I don't think that we're in a position to presume that that is necessarily in error and so what that means is to aim0:57:04high and to develop the autonomous individualist is simultaneously the decision to formulate an allegiance with the0:57:14the conscious power that brings being into existence and that all takes place inside this little puppet and then he0:57:24has his adventures right he's he's he's still half jackass and half deceptive but he still despite that and despite all the errors he has the capacity to0:57:34move forward and to transform it into something to transform himself into something that can be properly considered described as a true son of0:57:45God and that's the Rite Aid and it works like this as far as I can tell you know0:57:54when I talk to people about doing the Future authoring program they often put it off and it's not surprising because it's hard and and be it but it's more0:58:03than that they think well I don't know how to write I'm going to do a bad job I don't really like assignments I'm going to have to do it perfectly I need to wait till I have enough time and like0:58:14one of those is enough to stop you cold and all five of them you're just done and so I tell people do it haphazardly a tiny bit at a time and badly because you0:58:26can do that I tell my students when they're doing their thesis master's thesis write a really bad first draft and then we have a little conversation about that because they don't think I0:58:35mean that because it sounds like a cliche in some sense it's not a cliche it's not a cliche at all it means you're0:58:46a terrible writer but but if someone put a gun to your head and said you have to have your hundred page pieces done by next Monday or I'll shoot you but I0:58:55don't care how terrible it is you would sit down and write it and the thing is then you have it right then then you have something and then you can fix it you could iterate and fix it that bad0:59:06first draft that's the most valuable thing and so that's what you need you need a bad first draft of yourself and there's there's an idea that young0:59:15developed about the trickster and the Jester the comedian right that the trickster is the precursor to the Savior that's one of the things I learned from young it was just it's so unlikely you0:59:25never think that it's so amazing that that my be the case but the the the satirical in the Iran Akande and the troublemaker0:59:34that the comedian the fool the fool is the precursor to the savior why because you're a fool when you start something new and so if you're not willing to be a0:59:44fool then you'll never start anything new and if you never start anything new then you won't develop and so the willingness to be a fool is the precursor to transformation and that's0:59:53the same as humility and so if you're going to write your destiny you can do a bad first job you're going to get smarter as you move forward that's the thing is that so something beckons to1:00:03you that's what happens here maybe the star that Geppetto wished on was the wrong damn star but at least it was a star right at least it was in the sky at least it moved him forward and so you1:00:14say in your life well something grips you and it fills you with interest and you think well should I do that an answer is if not that then something1:00:25what if it's a mistake it's a mistake rest assured what do you know you're going to stumble around right and what's going to happen is this you're going to1:00:35move to you're going to not stay in stasis you're not going to wander around in circles and I see people like that they said well I never knew what to do and now I'm 40 it's like that's not so1:00:45good that's not so good and you might say well and there is a literature too that suggests that people are a lot more unhappy when they look back in their1:00:54lives about the things they didn't do than they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things and so that's really worth thinking about too1:01:03because there's redemptive mistakes and a redemptive mistake would be a mistake that you make when you go out and try to do something you know you actually you think okay I'm going to try to do this1:01:12when you're not good at it you make a bunch of mistakes it's like what's the consequence if you pay attention is you're not quite so stupid anymore that's the thing is you've been informed1:01:22by your by the results of your errors and so what happens is you follow the beacon you follow the light and and you're blind so you don't know where the1:01:31light is it's dimly apprehended only and you're afraid to follow it but you decide to take some stumbling steps towards it and as you take stumbling1:01:40steps towards it you become illuminated and enlightened and informed because of the nature of your experience because you're pushing yourself beyond where you are and you're1:01:49going into the country that you have not yet been in and you learn something and so what happens then is the star moves you move 10 feet towards it you think no1:01:58that's not right I didn't get it right it isn't there it's actually there and so then you you see it somewhere else and you shift yourself slightly and you move forward and that's what happens1:02:08is that you continue as you change the thing that guides you forward moves right it's like God in the in the in the1:02:20desert in Egypt the pillar of light that you're following it's moving it's not a permanent thing you move towards it it moves away it guides you forward and so1:02:29you say well is what I'm aiming at paradise itself and the answer to that is no because what do you know you you couldn't see paradise if it was right in1:02:38front of you but you might get a glimmer of it and so you move towards it and you grow and then the next time you open your eyes you see a little bit more1:02:47clearly and that's what happens is that just happens over and over right it keeps moving and so you move like this1:02:56but the thing that's so cool is that although zigs and zags you say in each of those zags is it and zigs is a catastrophe I hit a wall my god and then1:03:06I had to die a little bit and I barely got back up it's a Phoenix transformation at each at each turn and it's painful but the thing is is that even though you've you've traveled 201:03:16miles let's say on that road and you've only moved 3 miles forward you've moved three miles forward instead of falling backwards because that's the thing too1:03:26is that if you stand still you fall backwards you cannot stand still because the world moves away from you if you stand still and there's no stasis1:03:36there's only backwards and so if you're not moving backward back forwards then you're moving backwards and that's more1:03:46more of the underlying truth of the Matthieu principle to those who have everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything1:03:55we'll be taken it's a warning do not stay in one place well as you dig and1:04:04zag maybes and maybe the Cataclysm of each transformation starts to lessen there's not so much of you that has to die with every mistake and maybe you end1:04:16up oriented at least reasonably properly if you were sensible that would have been your trip but it wasn't right it's that and perhaps it's a lot worse than1:04:25that perhaps there's no shortage of backtracking but it doesn't matter because as you stumble forward you illuminate and inform yourself and1:04:34perhaps that's partly because the world is made of information and if you encounter it and tangle with it then it informs you and then you become informed1:04:45and then your information and then you're ready and so God says to Abraham I will make of thee a great nation and I1:04:59will bless thee and make thy name great and thou shalt be a blessing that's that's a good offer1:05:08fundamentally I mean it means what does it mean to to be made a great nation of1:05:18well perhaps it has something to do directly with your descendants but I don't think it's just that you know is if you're a force for good in the world then that radiates out from you and if1:05:29you're good enough it's difficult to say how much of an impact on things you could have you know Dostoyevsky who is a very crazy person partly because of his1:05:38epilepsy he said a man is not only responsible for everything he does but for everything that everyone else does and you think well no no no and yes1:05:53sometimes no sometimes that's what you think if you're cataclysmic cataclysmically depressed right is that your sins are so egregious that that1:06:03they're unforgivable and that in some manner you're at you're at fault for everything that's terrible with world but there's actually truth than that and there's actually redemptive1:06:12truth in that is that things wouldn't be so bad if you weren't so if you weren't so far from what you could be and that's1:06:22terribly pessimistic because it's all on you man but it's terribly optimistic because God there's a lot of things that you could do and if you're crying out1:06:31for something to do then that's the best news you could possibly have it's like things aren't so good but you know are you so if you stop doing the things that1:06:40you knew to be destructive which is the right place to start you know if you're going to clean up your room what do you do first well you just get rid of the mess you know and you know what1:06:49now no one has to come in and tell you hopefully what's the worst mess it's just it announces itself to you and you can certainly know yourself and this is a very easy meditative exercise to sit1:06:59down and think okay I'm doing one thing really stupidly that I should stop doing it's like how long is it going to take you to figure out what that is it's about two seconds right you've known it1:07:09forever but you could even make it less demanding you could say there are some stupid things that I'm doing that I know are stupid and wrong that I could stop1:07:21doing that I would stop doing and then you can just start with that and you can just do that and maybe it's just a little thing although it's not because1:07:31it's it's a it's a step forward on the proper voyage it's not a small thing and you think well what would happen you could say let's do this for a year even a month just try not to do things you1:07:41know to be stupid and wrong for a month and that means not to say things you know to be stupid and wrong as well maybe that's the most important thing just do it as an experiment see what1:07:51happens and so fun because I have people writing to me from all over the world who are saying they're doing that they're saying well you know I cleaned up my room and and then I stopped saying1:08:00stupid things and my god it's like things are way better it's like who would have guessed it you know and so it's low-hanging fruits man because1:08:12they're saying that's the other thing if there's a lot of things wrong with you then it's it's really easy to start fixing it you know you got so much there's so much territory that you can inhabit1:08:21I will make of thee a great nation I will bless thee that's good I mean the whole nation thing that's positive but to have God on your side that's you know1:08:31you might want that when things get rough that would be good and make that name great and now it shall be a blessing wonderful that's a good deal1:08:43then I will bless them that bless thee that's good too and curse him that curseth thee and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed that's something that's1:08:57something that wouldn't it be something if you could wake up and your day was composed in part of people thanking you for all the good things you've done in1:09:07the world would that be good it's not impossible for that to happen so Abram1:09:16departed yes as the Lord had spoken unto him and Lord went with and the neighbor him was seventy in five years when he departed out of her and that's all now1:09:27Abraham lives a long time but this is also part of the story so he has a wife who can't have children he has nothing obviously he's been hanging around dad's Shack for a little too long given that1:09:36he's 75 right it's kind of time to get a fire lit underneath him a bit and so it is not got much going for him but he still decides to to move forward and1:09:46I've seen this too you know like if you don't have your destiny in hand by your time you're thirty it's it's rough you start hurting and if you don't have your1:09:55destiny in hand by the time you're 40 then you really start hurting and 40 is a real fork in the road the fork in the1:10:07road that's always where you meet the devil by the way and that's because every time you have to make a decision the possibility of evil beckons that's why that is I had a friend I told you a little about1:10:17him and he killed himself just after 40 you know he had had a book published and with a very small press he was quite a good writer but he could not get himself together and it hit him too hard at 401:10:28and I'm not saying that it's hopeless at 40 I'm not saying that and I'm not saying that partly because of these verses but also partly because of in my clinical practice I've had people1:10:37come to me who have had very chaotic and ill-spent lives let's say who were in that neighborhood of age and and it's true for people who are older as well1:10:47who then decided to make a real effort and to try to make where they were better you know instead of being bitter about where they weren't because that's1:10:57better nasteria lee does you in it's really not good it's the opposite of gratitude it's it's it's the manifestation of resentment it makes you malevolent it's very very bad to be1:11:07better it's not it's not it's hell to be bitter and if you're 40 and you're not successful then you have to accept your1:11:17lot and you have to start to improve what's right in front of you and if you do that it doesn't take very long it's quite interesting to watch people things can be a lot better in six months and1:11:26they can be way better in two years like it's a struggle uphill struggle but it's by no means impossible and and I don't know again what the limit of that is I1:11:35suppose it depends to degree to some degree on the degree of your commitment but anyway so abran other indication of the real validity of this story God isn't setting this up to be easy right1:11:46Abraham's old and his and his wife is old too and more than that she's barren how is he going to be the father of Nations how is he going to be successful1:11:55well the initial departure point is insufficient radically insufficient and and that's very inspiring because it1:12:08means that you can start from where you are so Abram departed as the Lord had spoken unto him and lot went with him and Abram was 75 years old when he1:12:17departed out of Haran and Abram took Sarai his wife and lot his brother's son and all their substance that they had gathered and they know he has a relationship with law right he doesn't1:12:27have his own son but he his brother died and so he takes his nephew as his son that's grateful you know he could be very angry and have nothing to do with1:12:37him because he didn't get his own son but that isn't that isn't what happens is he's offered a substitute let's say and he accepts it and so good for him you know and and that's an1:12:49it's also something that I've seen that characterizes people who can make the best of a bad lot is they don't get exactly what they want but something comes along that offers possibilities1:12:59that are sufficient perhaps if exploited properly and they open their heart and welcome them in instead of rejecting them in bitterness and so that's a good1:13:09thing and that's part of Abraham's character and Abram took Sarai his wife and law his brothers son and all their substance that they had gathered and all the souls that they had gotten in her on1:13:19and they went for us to go into the land of Canaan into exile let's say and into the land of Canaan they came and that's another repetition of the transformation1:13:30story right you have to go to a land where you're not welcome an abram passed through the land unto the place of CGM unto the plain of mora and the Canaanite1:13:41was then in the land and the Lord appeared unto Abram and said unto thy seed I will give you this land and there he builded an altar to the Lord who appeared unto him and he removed from1:13:50thence unto a mountain on the east of the cell and pitched his tent having the fell on the west and high on the east and there he built an altar unto the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord now we don't understand1:14:01these rituals precisely you know I don't know if the people who did this engaged in a meditative ritual without the idea that you take something of value you do1:14:11this youyou undertake this dramatic transformation a life and death transformation and is that an aid to meditation and what you do do you sit1:14:20down and thank you you pray pray being to ask you know - what do I do next how do I orient myself in the world as a useful exercise to do that - I think1:14:31it's something that people could do every morning I think it's useful to sit down and think okay what's the most important thing I should do today what I have an array of things that call1:14:40to me to be done some of which I will do with joy and some of which I will bear as responsibilities but I raised em1:14:50selves in front of me and with what should I attend to first well do you ask or do you decide and it seems to me when I do it because I do it1:14:59all the time I do it every morning I try to sit down and think okay I've got things that I would like to do and things that call to me out of necessity what do i do first and it's not so much1:15:10a decision as it is a question and I don't know what I'm calling on it's I'm calling on my capacity to think I suppose but that's not my capacity1:15:19exactly I'm there I can I can commune with whatever provides answers and I can think that that's me thinking but and I1:15:30didn't that I believe that I can't think I do believe that I can consciously think but that's not the same as calling for inspiration it's not the same process just like a dream is not1:15:39conscious thinking it's something that happens to you and that kind of inspiration is also something that happens to you because I ask myself well what's the most important thing I could do next and then I have an answer to1:15:51that but it isn't because I decided exactly I've decided that I'll do it whatever it is and that I want to know what it is those are the decisions but but there's an involuntary aspect to the1:16:01sorting that occurs and and that's the psychological equivalent I suppose to this and I guess the sacrifice is when I1:16:11feel that I will do whatever it is that calls to be done then I don't do the other things that I might want to do and1:16:20that's a sacrifice it's to me it's the proper sacrifice because my sense is that things don't go properly unless you1:16:29do what's most important and if I want things to go properly and I do because I've had my taste of things not going properly I want things to go properly1:16:39and so then it's not so difficult to do what's necessary to to do what makes1:16:48things go properly under those circumstances and it's partly see this is partly why the story of Sodom and1:16:57Gomorrah is embedded in the Abrahamic stories I think because that's an apocalyptic story right if things go badly enough the whole city is destroyed1:17:07and then and the reason it goes badly is because the people in the city do not behave properly and the people in the1:17:16city might bu and so if you're not behaving properly then you go and so does the city and maybe you don't want maybe you do want that but maybe you don't want1:17:26that and if you don't want that then maybe and you know that if you don't do things property then it's you and the city if you actually know that then1:17:35maybe that terrifies you badly enough so that you're willing to make the sacrifice to do the right things instead of the impulsive things that you might otherwise want to do you know I learned1:17:47from Viktor Frankl and from Karl yoga and from Alexander Solzhenitsyn and for many of the people whose works on the Holocaust that I read and on the1:17:57catastrophes in the Soviet Union and the people who studied it most deeply always came to the same conclusion the state became corrupted because each individual1:18:07allowed themselves to be corrupted or perhaps participated joyfully in the process of being corrupted and the consequence of that was the end of the1:18:17world and so what that means is that if you don't behave properly then you bring about the end of the world and maybe you1:18:26think well that's only the end of your world fair enough or maybe it's the only the end of your family's world you know which I suppose might give you some pause but there's more to it than that1:18:37because you're connected to everyone else and what you do that isn't good distributes itself and all the things1:18:47you don't do that could be good take away from the whole and so if you know that and I do think you know that if you1:18:56take it seriously because if you look at if you look at historical events the cataclysmic events of the 20th century1:19:05seriously I do not think that you can fail to come to that conclusion and1:19:14Abraham journeyed going on still towards the south that's interesting because to go south means to go downhill too it's1:19:24not good to go south it's colloquial for going to where you shouldn't go and this is what happens to Abram you know he his a cent is preceded by a descent1:19:36and that's very common in life I would say and so it's a little the redemptive element of this narrative is that if the1:19:45Covenant is constructed properly so it's an arc which is your decision to align yourself with God for all intents and1:19:54purposes then even the journey south can be part of a broader journey upward and there was a famine in the land that's1:20:05Mother Nature failing to cooperate I mean that's going to be pretty disheartening for Abraham don't you think is he finally gets it together when he's 75 to leave and then you know1:20:16because God says well do you not get going and and so the first place he goes everyone's starving to death it's like you know you might think about that as a test of faith1:20:25wouldn't you say but he keeps going and then what happens well he has to go to Egypt so great he goes where he's starving where everyone's starving and1:20:34then to get away from where everyone's starving he goes to a tyranny so the whole beginning of the story is not particularly auspicious and Abram went1:20:44down into Egypt to sojourn there for the famine was Grievous in the land it's a repetition of the same idea again there's downhill voyage out into chaos1:20:54right it's repeated over and over that the beginning of Abraham's journey is basically a sequence of of experiences of Exile chaos tyranny and catastrophe1:21:05well you should be able to relate to that you know how hard it is to get things together you know you go out to do what you're supposed to do say and1:21:14there's you're beset by the intransigence of the world and failure well so what are you supposed to do about that well maintain your faith in1:21:24the good and continue to move forward that's the idea and part of that even if even if you don't buy the metaphor it's like what are you going to do instead1:21:33that won't make it worse so even if there it isn't enough that you're pursuing your at least for stalling the1:21:43transfer may of the chaos into your of your life into sheer hell and that can certainly happen you know you see people who are having a terrible time and then you see people1:21:53who are having a terrible time who are also in hell and it's a lot better to just have a terrible time than to have a terrible time and be in hell at the same1:22:02time and it came to pass when he was come too near to enter into Egypt that he said unto Sarai his wife behold now I know that thou art a fair woman to look1:22:12upon therefore it shall come to pass when the Egyptians shall see thee that they shall say this is his wife and they will kill me that they will save thee alive so look I mean Abraham is1:22:22Abram is really having a rough time he's a failure right I mean he's wandering around through the land of starvation now he's going to go be a quasi slave in1:22:31Egypt he has this incredibly attractive wife and all he can look forward to is the fact that the most successful man in1:22:40Egypt the Pharaoh will take her from him so he's got the whole embitterment thing pretty much nailed down as far as I can1:22:49tell and this is when he makes one of his errors let's say and one of the errors that humanizes him say I pray thee that thou art my sister that may be1:22:59well for me for thy sake and my soul shall live because of thee and it came to pass that when Abram was coming to Egypt the Egyptians beheld the woman1:23:08that was she was very fair the Prince is also a pharaoh saw her and commended her before Pharaoh and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house and he entreated Abram well for her sake and he had sheep1:23:18and oxen and he houses and menservants and maidservants as she houses and camels so actually things work out pretty well for for Abram despite his deceit right which is quite interesting1:23:28and I guess it's because if the overarching structure is solid something like that it's something like that then then errors can still be forgiven to1:23:39speak about it from a metaphorical perspective and the Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai Abrams wife well it doesn't1:23:50seem very fair but because the Pharaoh didn't know but but it's not the right way to look at it the right way to look at it see there's1:23:59a story later in the in the Bible about David and David David could be a pretty bad guy you know so one of the things he1:24:08does is when he becomes king he's in his castle and he's looking over the city and he sees a woman nude bathing nude1:24:17sunbathing nude on a roof out on the city and he's smitten by her floored by her and he has inquiries made about who1:24:26she is her name is Beth Sheba and and he finds out who her husband is and her husband actually happens to be a general in his army and he arranges for that1:24:40general to be put at the thick of the battle and killed and then he takes Bathsheba so and and and the Lord is not1:24:51pleased by that let's put it that way and that's interesting is only did it's an interesting story because you might say well why can't the King do whatever1:25:01the hell he wants like seriously he's the king he's not just he's not like the Prime Minister the president right he's the king and so you might say1:25:12well why is the King subject to any rules whatsoever what's the rationale for the king being subject to rules well the rationale emerges in these1:25:21stories if there are social strictures that are such that even if the ruler of the land transgresses against them there1:25:30will be hell to pay and that's continually presented over and over in the biblical stories and it's a natural law sort of idea that there are there are intrinsic rules to1:25:41the game of social human being and if you and maybe intrinsic rules to this to the natural state of human being you1:25:50break those rules consciously or unconsciously at your absolute peril and not only at your peril but at the peril of the state and it doesn't matter who1:26:00you are and so I would say this is actually an indication of God being fair rather than being unfair because the rule here is Pharaoh or not1:26:11you don't get to take someone else's wife and the ignorance is no excuse now you might say that's a little bit harsh and perhaps it is a little bit harsh but it's not without merit the idea is not1:26:22without merit and of course Abram is implicit in this despite that he is successful and Pharaoh called Abram and1:26:33said what is this that thou has done unto me why did so now tell me that she was thy wife why said Stowe you she is my sister I might have taken her to me1:26:43to wife now therefore behold thy wife take her and go thy way and Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him and they sent him away and his wife and all that he had and Abram went out of Egypt1:26:54he and his wife and all that he had in lot with him into the south and Abram was very rich in cattle in silver and in gold and that's it so what's interesting1:27:03you know big Abraham he he goes to the place of famine and then he goes to the to the place of charity and then he he lies and then he almost loses his wife1:27:13but because he goes things work out for him and so hooray for that and he went1:27:23on his journeys from the south even to Bethel unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning between Bethel and high unto the place of the altar so he makes another sacrifice which he had1:27:32made there at the first and there Abram called on the name of the Lord well so he's had an adventure right he's he's he's finished his journey and and so1:27:41there's a culminating point in this narrative and now I just know what to do he's left the place he said he doesn't know what to do so it's time to build an altar and make a sacrifice and figure1:27:50out and to ask for divine guidance once again to figure out okay well I've done that been there done that what's next and I'm the question is asked seriously1:28:00and this is something to consider if you want to know what to do ask seriously and say I'm willing to see Abraham1:28:09sacrifices a life to his vow well so what do you do well you don't sacrifice an animal you don't you don't make a blood sacrifice you do it1:28:19psychologically you say I'm going to sacrifice my life to the same that's what you do if you're serious what do I do next well I'm going to1:28:28sacrifice my life to this aim what is it that I should do that's worth sacrificing my life to that's a serious question well then maybe that's the sort1:28:37of question that people don't ask because they're afraid of the seriousness of the question and and what the magnitude of the potential answer do you really want to know what you should1:28:46do that would be worth sacrificing your life to well the answer is yes because it's worth it but the answer is also no because what really it's your life you1:28:56know what if you're wrong and you're probably wrong but maybe that doesn't matter maybe it doesn't matter because1:29:05maybe the rightness is in the process and not in the and not in the decision right because it's not it's the beginning of a sequence of decisions as we've already pointed out to the place1:29:15of the altar which he had made there at the first and there Abram called on the name of the Lord and Lord also and Lord also which went with Abraham Abram had1:29:24flocks and herds and tents and the land was not able to bear them that they might dwell together for their substance was great so that they could not dwell together and there was a strife between the herdsmen of Abrams cattle the1:29:34Cowboys and the herdmen of lost cattle and the Canaanite and the perizzite dwelled then in the land well that's interesting too because you know Abraham's having a pretty good time of1:29:44it now right he's out of starvation hey that's good he's out of the tyranny now he's kind of wealthy and then the story flips on him he's wealthy and now a bad1:29:54thing happens to him right it's that he's got all this wealth and so does his nephew now they can't get along because they have too much stuff so that's quite comical as well that I think that's a comic interlude here now they handle it1:30:04properly and Abram said unto Lord let there be no strife I pray they between me and thee and between my herdmen and I heard them because we're brothers it's1:30:14not the whole land before they separate thyself I pray thee from me if you'll take the left then all take the right or if you depart to the right then I'll go to the left so basically they sit down1:30:24and say well you know one of us has got to get out of town and it can be one or the other it doesn't really matter we can flip a coin or but we have to we have to separate and so they do it1:30:33amicably and Lord lifted up his eyes and looked at all of the plain of Jordan that it was well watered everywhere so that's an intimation of Eden right1:30:42because you remember he even means well watered place before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah even as the Garden of the Lord like the land of Egypt as thou1:30:52comest unto Zoar so interesting you get foreshadowing here again right so Lawton Abram are making the decision about where to go and and law it looks out and1:31:02and sees a reasonable place but then this warning comes up that there's a city out there there's a place out there where things are not going to go well1:31:12things are being done badly and things are not going to go well then Lord shows him all the plain of Jordan and law journeyed East and they separated themselves the one from the other Abram1:31:22dwelt in the land of Canaan and lot dwelled in the cities of the plain and pitched his tent towards Sodom but the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners1:31:31before the Lord exceedingly now the word sin I've mentioned this to you before I think it's an interesting word it's it's the derivation of an archery term in my1:31:40understanding of its derivation and it the Greek word was hamartia and Hammar he is an archery term which means to to miss the bullseye and you think it's1:31:49worth thinking about that metaphorically because you've got to think about all the ways that you could miss the bullseye right you can close your eyes that's very common you could just not lift up the damned bow and arrow to1:31:59begin with you could face the wrong way you could be unskilled in your aim but I'm and I also like the the archery metaphor because human beings are built1:32:09on a hunting platform right and we always aim at things were things that were ballistic creatures on a trajectory always and we're always aiming at1:32:18something we're always aiming at the mark and which is of course what you do when you hunt right because you have to hit the mark precisely and that's what we're like and so what we're like that psychologically we have to aim at1:32:27something and then move towards it and and so to sin is to miss the mark is to is to miss the bullseye to to fail to1:32:36take aim to aim badly gain carelessly or to not aim at all and that says well that's that's like a sin of omission1:32:47that's to not do and then to be wicked is to aim at what you know you shouldn't aim at and again I don't I don't think of that as an external morality precisely I think1:32:57that you can read the entire biblical narrative again from a psychological perspective and say we're not talking about external codes of conduct here1:33:06although we could we're not the wickedness that's being described is the act of you doing something that you know to be wrong1:33:15period you know and you may do something you don't know if it's wrong or not that isn't a sort of thing that we're talking about and we're not talking about the things that you do that are right there that other people think are wrong we're1:33:25not talking about those either we're talking about those things that you consciously do although you know them to be wrong yourself and that's the things that seem to get people into the most1:33:35trouble in these stories and I believe that to be the case I think that's very accurate psychologically it's amazing because I see this all the time if you do something wrong it's because you're1:33:45Stig nur n't you don't know better it doesn't go well for you that's the case but if you do something wrong and you know it's wrong the punishment is is1:33:55manifold and I think the reason for that I think the reason for that is because that makes you Cain it means you betray your own ideal right if you just don't know well you haven't betrayed your1:34:05ideal you're just not together maybe you're even willfully blind but if you do something you know to be wrong then you've betrayed your own ideal and that lands you Cain says to God once Cain1:34:15destroys Abel he says I cannot bear my punishment and the Lord said unto Abram1:34:24after that lot was separated from lift up now thine eyes look upward and look from the place where thou art northward and southward and eastward and westward1:34:33for all the land which thou seest to thee I will give it and to thy seed forever and I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth so that if a man can1:34:42number the dust of the earth then shall all the I seed be numbered arise walk through the land in the length of it and the breadth of it for I will give it unto thee1:34:56in the cathedral at shark I can't say that properly because my French is non-existent1:35:05so a cathedral is across and the transformation takes place at the crux of the cross which is exactly right because the transformation takes place1:35:15at the point of maximal suffering and the cathedral is designed to indicate that right symbolically now what happens1:35:28in the religious ceremony is also a journey and it's a journey in some sense to the holy city and then that's also played out in the idea of pilgrimage right because you go to the holy city1:35:37actually you go to Jerusalem or wherever it is that you think the holy city is you go there and that takes you out of your country and away from your kin and away from your family into the strange1:35:47land and as you make the journey you transform and when you come back you're not the same that's the Hobbit right that's the story of the Hobbit but let's1:35:56say you can't afford to go on a pilgrimage so you go to the cathedral at Chartres and there's a huge maze on the ground and it's the world north west1:36:05south and east just as God describes here so it's laid out and you enter the maze at one side and in the middle is a1:36:14stone pattern that looks like a flower and it's it's the place where being wells forth and it's at the center of the Cathedral and what that means is1:36:25that if you accept your suffering then you move to the place where the spirit of being wells forth that's what that means and so you enter the maze and you1:36:36walk and it's divided into quadrants and you walk one quadrant completely and then the mains pathway takes you into the next quadrant and you walk that1:36:45completely and then it takes you to the third one and the fourth one and then when you walk the maze completely everywhere when you've gone everywhere in the world north south east and west1:36:54where you when you traverse the territory completely then you come to the center and then it's yours and that's what this is so I've noticed when1:37:05I've been renovating houses I like to do that I paid a lot of attention to the psychological process of a house renovation because I learned from young1:37:14that young said this this is something man he said if he was he was talking about the stages of integration1:37:23psychological integration and he looked beyond Piaget I would say although Piaget looked very far he said here's a conjunction you have to get your1:37:33rationality on your emotion together that's a male/female conjunction symbolically speaking male rationality female emotionality you want to bring those together so that they're oriented1:37:43in the same direction your emotions in your rationality served the same purpose so then you're unified in mind and spirit let's say that's are good enough once you've got that together then1:37:53there's a boat you have a body and then that's a male/female conjunction again a divine conjunction the recreation of Adam before his division into female and1:38:03male and the reconstruction of the androgynous Christ that all that all those ideas are linked together so now you have your emotion and your1:38:12rationality moving in the same direction but you're not acting it out so now you have to unite that abstract part of you with your body and start acting out what1:38:22you think and feel and that's the next conjunction but it's not the last one the last conjunction is when you realize that there is no distinction between you1:38:32and your experience they're the same thing and so then when you put together your house you're putting together yourself so I've noticed in when I've1:38:43lived in places rented or owned didn't matter and if there were part of the place if there was a part of the place that I hadn't attended to whatever that1:38:52might mean it might meant cleaned it might have meant fix but it certainly meant at least thoroughly investigated then that was chaos it was like it was1:39:01it was like the desert that part that's that's a way of thinking about it it wasn't mine even if I owned it wasn't mine I had to interact with it before it became mine and I had to interact with1:39:10it and I had to put it in order and then it became mine and then and then to the degree that it became mine and was in order then I was also put in order now1:39:19you know that because you go into places that make you uncomfortable and maybe it's your own house it's highly probable it's highly probable I you know I walk into well Chinese1:39:29doctors do this traditional Chinese doctors they go into place people's place and they they diagnose their health conditions on the on the balance of yin and yang chaos an order they1:39:40walked into a house that this is easy to do you walk into a house there's too much chaos hey you can detect that in no time flat everything is out of order and chaotic you don't even want to be there you1:39:50certainly don't want to open the refrigerator that's for sure and there are things that should have been done years ago everywhere and every one of those things is a fight that hasn't happened and something that's being1:40:00avoided and you can't even walk in there and maintain your health this is you walk in there you're sicker than you were when you were outside and that's one sort of place and then another sort1:40:09of place is you go and look at the living room and the person has vacuumed the living room rug and the lines that1:40:19were vacuumed are parallel to one another and the and the furniture is covered with plastic and you get a glass of water and then just as you're going to1:40:28set it down on the coffee table the person rushes over and puts a coaster underneath it and everything in that house says to you that it would be a lot more perfect in that house if you were1:40:37either not there or dead and that's there and that's the message that the whole house is blasting at you and if you happen to live there then you're going to be sick and what you're going1:40:47to be sick from is too much order and in the other house you're going to be sick from too much chaos and so when you interact with a house the unexplored1:41:00parts are the chaos that have that parts that you have not yet contended with are the chaos that has not yet been transformed by your embodied logos1:41:10action into habitable territory and it does not belong to you arise walk through the land in the length of it and1:41:19the breadth of it for I will give it unto thee the neighbor him removed his tent and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre which is in Hebron and built there an altar unto the Lord and it came to1:41:30pass in the days of amraphel king of shinar arioch king of ellasar chair de L'Amour there's a lot of kings we won't talk about them he's made war with barrett1:41:40king of sodom and with Persia king of gomorrah she and ab king of admah and the king of bela wishes or and these were joined together in the Vale of Siddim which is the salt sea hmm now1:41:52this is actually very much relevant because you see the Vale of Siddim which is the salt sea is the farthest south1:42:01you can go if South is down because it's the Dead Sea and the Dead Sea is the lowest place that there is so what's happened is that there's chaos in the1:42:10lowest place that there is that's what this story says and what happens to lawd is he gets tangled up in the chaos of the lowest place that there is and in1:42:25the fourteenth year came Chidori l'amour and the kings that were with him and smote the ref Eames and Ashtaroth her name and the Susan's and ham and the Emmons and shava Korea Korea Thames and1:42:35the horites in their mount sire unto Alperin which is by the wilderness and they returned and came to end mishpat which is Kadesh and smote all the country the Amalekites Amalekites and1:42:46the amorite that dwelt in has a cup houses Zonta my hey hey hazards on1:42:55tomorrow there we go perhaps and there went out the king of sodom and the king of gomorrah and the king of admah and the king of the bulla and the king of bela the same is zoar and they joined battle with them in the Vale of Siddim1:43:04so this is absolute chaos and mayhem in the lowest place it's hell essentially with cheddar loam or the1:43:15king of the lamb and with tidal king of nations and amraphel king of shinar arioch king of ellasar four kings with five and the Vale of Siddim was full of slime pits low in hell like with war isn't enough1:43:26they had to throw the slime pits in there apparently around the Dead Sea there are pits of bitumen like the like the tar pits in near LA and so that this1:43:36seems to actually be historically accurate and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled and fell there and then that remain fled to the mountain and they took their Goods and they took all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah and all1:43:45their victuals and went their way and they took lot Abrams brothers son who dwelt and sought him and his Goods and departed so Abram has a family member who falls into the lowest place and1:43:55there came one that had escaped and told Abram the Hebrew for he dwelt in the plain of Mamre the Amorite brother of his skull and brother of a nur and these were confederate with abram and the1:44:05neighbor him heard that his brother was taken captive he armed his trained servants born in his own house 318 and pursued them unto down well so now we also know that Abraham's a pretty brave1:44:14guy right he gets word that this horrible war has broken out in the worst of all possible places and that his nephew is involved and the first thing1:44:23he does is you know mount up his posse and get the hell in there and rescue his nephew so Abraham's oh whatever goodness is from the Old Testament1:44:32perspective it isn't harmlessness right it isn't emasculation and castration it's not that it's not weakness it's not1:44:41the inability to fight none of that is associated with virtue it's a sort of strength that enables someone to mount an armed team of 300 people when he finds out that his nephew is being1:44:50kidnapped in a terrible war and to get the hell out there and take them back and so that's it that's a that's a that's a call to - it's a call to power1:45:01that not know a kind of peaceful meekness that's funny too because you know there's a line in the New Testament the meek shall inherit1:45:10the earth I got a look at my phone for a sec here I don't know what time it is there's a line in the New Testament that says and send the Sermon on the Mount says the meek shall inherit the earth1:45:19and that I read that line always bothered me I thought no way that's not that that's not right meat can't be the right word so when I was doing this1:45:28story of Noah and talking about the Sermon on the Mount I spent a bunch of time looking at commentaries on that line looking at the roots you know the Greek roots and the1:45:37Hebrew roots and trying to figure out what that meant and in meat does not mean meat that's wrong here's what it means those who have weapons and know1:45:46how to use them but still keep the machine will inherit the earth Jesus that's a lot different man it's a lot better right because the way it's1:45:57normally it's normally interpreted is if you're so weak that you're harmless then things will go well for you it's like no that's not right that's and that's not1:46:07that can't be right it doesn't fit with the narrative it certainly doesn't fit with this narrative and he divided himself against them he and his servants by night and smote them and pursued them1:46:17unto Hoba which is on the left side of Damascus and he brought back all the goods and his brother lot and his Goods and the women also and the people did1:46:26work Abraham and the kings of Sodom went out to meet him after his return at the slaughter of charrid Aloma and of the kings that there were there with him at1:46:35the valley of shaveh which is the Kings Dale and Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine and he was the priest of the Most High God and He blessed him and said blessed be Abram of1:46:45the Most High God possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be the Most High God which had delivered thine enemies into thine hand and gave him tithes of all and the king of Sodom said to Abram1:46:55give me the persons and take thy goods to thyself this is that that were the goods that Abram that they'd been rescued of the Kings and Abram said to1:47:04the king of Sodom I have lift up mine hand unto the Lord what does that mean it means I've made a vow that's what it means that that's what that phrase means I've1:47:13made a vow to God the possessor of heaven and earth that I will not take anything from a thread even to a shoelace I won't take anything that's yours lest you should say I've made1:47:24abram rich I'll take only that which my young men Avedon and the portion of men that went with me and inner s : ma'am let them take their portion and so1:47:34Abraham decides here he's made this immense sacrifice and done this incredibly brave act and rescued his1:47:43nephew and rescued the king's goods and and they offer him a reward and he says I'm not going to take the reward and the reason for that is that he doesn't want to contaminate the ethical purity of his1:47:56actions he doesn't want to be paid he doesn't want it he doesn't want to benefit from doing he doesn't want to avoid some what is it exactly he doesn't1:48:06want to benefit inappropriately from doing the right thing it's something like that and so it's another testament to his character in a very complex Testament right because he's not a sin1:48:15he's not a good man in any simple sense I mean look what's just happened he's he's mounted and armed he's mounted and armed he's he's led an1:48:26army into battle and parked in and participated in the slaughter he refuses to benefit from it except to get back what was his1:48:35that's it he refuses to benefit from it except to get back what was rightfully his and in that way he maintains his covenant with God even to a shul a chit1:48:47I anything though never so smaller mean less thou should claim a share with God in the honor due to him this is from Matthew pool who was an English nonconformist theologian1:48:57commenting on that line even to a shoe latchet ie anything though never so meaner small lest thou should claim a share with God in the honor due to him to his blessing alone I do and I will1:49:07all my riches or lest thou should say Abram is enriched with my spoils and however he pretended kindness and charity yet indeed it was his covetousness that put him upon this work1:49:18after these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision saying fear not Abram I'm nice shield and I exceedingly and I exceeding great reward a vision1:49:29issue again [Music] well we went through that last week fear1:49:38not Abram I am thy shield and my exceeding great reward and Abram said Lord God what can you give me seeing as I'm childless toddlers and that's the1:49:48only thing that matters to a broom at this point and the steward of my house is this an easier of dem Damascus no kin and Abraham said Abram said Behold to me thou has given no seed and lo one born1:49:59in my house is mine heir and behold the word of the Lord came unto him saying this shall not be thine heir but he that1:50:09shall come forth out of thine own bowels should be nine hair so he gets promised the impossible once again and he brought him forth abroad and said now look towards the heaven1:50:18until the stars if thou be able to number them and he said unto him so shall thy seed be and he believed in the Lord and counted to him for righteousness1:50:30seeing that this is a covenant idea this belief because here's the belief it's1:50:40the willingness to act as if the world is constructed so that if you do the right thing the best possible outcome will occur it's a decision that's the1:50:52Covenant right it's a decision about how to live in the world because the evidence can't be there before you make the decision right and so you might hedge your best you know when when1:51:02Christ comes back in the book of Revelation to judge people because it comes back as a judge and virtually everyone gets cast out with the chaff and not saved with the wheat huh he says1:51:14something very interesting he appears in a vision with a sword coming out of his mouth it's a horrifying vision and he divides the the he divides humanity into1:51:23the Damned and the save or the dead yes the Damned and the saved he says something very interesting he says to1:51:32those who were neither hot nor cold I will spew you out of my mouth and and it's a it's a disgust metaphor right and1:51:42what it says is that the word punishment isn't waiting for those who committed to something and did wrong the1:51:54worst punishment is reserved for those who committed to nothing and stayed on the fence and that's really something too that's really something to think1:52:03about and it's also something I believe to be true because I see that stasis is utterly destructive because there's no1:52:12progress all there is is movement backwards there's aging and suffering and no progress and so did not commit to anything is the worst of all transgressions to commit means to put1:52:24your body and soul into something to offer your life as a sacrifice means that you're willing to make a bargain with fate and the bargain is I'm going to act as if I give it my all then the1:52:34best possible thing will happen because of that and to to not see the analogy between that and the the active faith in1:52:43God is to misunderstand the story completely and it has to be an act of faith because how are you going to know you can look at other people but that1:52:52isn't going to do it it's at Kierkegaard was very clear about this sort of thing there's certain sorts of truths that you can only learn for yourself through experience and that's of course why Abram also has to go out alone right he1:53:02has to leave this kenneth's it's an individual it's the individuation process like dying it's something that you do alone there's no way you can tell1:53:11what is within your grasp let's say unless you make the ultimate sacrifice and there's no way of finding out without actually making it and so that's1:53:20the sacrificial act right that's that's really active Abram being called upon to sacrifice Isaac and think about that is1:53:30Abram he's been doing he's been like breaking himself into pieces trying to progress forward through starvation and tyranny and war and deceit and the1:53:39potential loss of his wife and child lessness and like everything that can really befall you in some sense and finally God grants him Isaac when he's old it's impossible he gets Isaac his1:53:49son and then what has got to do next is say well you know that son that you've been waiting for so for so long it's like I'd like to see just exactly what you're made of1:53:58I think you should offer him up as a sacrifice and I mean it's a very barbaric story in a sense and maybe in more than just a sense but Abraham does1:54:09maintain his covenant he's willing to make the sacrifice he's made willing to make this is the thing he's willing to1:54:18make whatever sacrifice is necessary to keep his covenant with God intact and that's that and that's the decision well maybe it's no surprise that people1:54:28don't do that and he believed in the Lord and he counted it to him for righteousness and he said unto him I am the Lord that brought thee out of ur of1:54:38the Chaldees to give this land to you to inherit it and he said Lord God whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it and he said to him this is a sacrificial1:54:48story again taking a heifer of three years and a goat of three years in RAM of three years in a Turtledove and a young pigeon it's fairly specific1:54:57actually and he took all these and divided them and laid each piece one against another but the birds divided he not now there's a reason for that and I1:55:06don't know the reason for it and when the fowls came down upon the carcasses Abram drove them away and when the Sun was going down a deep sleep fell upon1:55:15Abram and lo a horror of great darkness fell upon him how did it mean he was afraid of the dark which is what I thought it meant when I first read it it1:55:24isn't what it means it means that he fell into a trance or something like that and then he was enveloped by absolute horror so that's how this story begins1:55:33and here's the commentary from Joseph Benson who was an English Methodist minister who lived in 1749 it was born in 1749 and when the Sun was going down1:55:44about the time of the evening evening oblation the washing for he abode by them praying and waiting till toward evening a deep sleep fell upon Abram1:55:53this was not a common sleep through weariness or carelessness and what a sloop is that's supposed to be sleep not a common sleep through weariness or1:56:02carelessness but a divine ecstasy that being wholly taken off from things sensible he might be wholly taken up with the contemplation of1:56:12things spiritual well it really makes you wonder what Abraham was up to in his campsite so he was participating in1:56:23something that enabled this experience and Lola or a horror of great darkness fell upon him this was designed to strike upon the spirit of Abram and to1:56:32possess him with the holy reverence holy fear prepares the soul for holy joy God humbles first and then lifts up echoes1:56:41of psychedelic experience and he said unto Abram know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs and shall serve them and1:56:50they shall afflict them for hundred years and also that nation whom they shall serve I will judge and afterwards shall they come out with great substance and thou shalt go to thy fathers in1:56:59peace thou shalt be buried in a good old age but in the fourth generation they shall come hither again to the iniquity of the amorite is not yet full1:57:10commentaries of Joseph Benson once again they shall come hither again hither to the land of Canaan wherein thou not art thou art the reason why they must not1:57:20have the land of promise in possession until the fourth generation is because the iniquity of the ammonites was not yet full the righteous God has desert1:57:29determined that the amorite shall not be cut off till they arrived at such a pitch of wickedness and therefore till it come to that the seed of Abraham must be kept out of possession so the1:57:38interpretation of the story essentially is that Abraham's descendants will end up enslaved in Egypt for a long lengthy period of time and eventually come back to the land of Canaan and it's1:57:48interesting to because this is part of Abraham's bargain with God and in this divine vision I mean he's been promised everything but it's a pretty tough bargain because you know when God is1:57:58pushed or reveals himself let's say he says look you're going to get your damned descendants you know but it's not going to be it's it's it's going to be a1:58:08tough journey they're going to be slain slaved for a very long time and eventually come back and you won't see it you'll be dead long before then and so it's a realistic promise in a sense1:58:19and you might say well Abram is so desperate to keep the faith that he's willing to read good into what isn't good but I think I think I don't think that's the right1:58:28way to look at it I think the right way to look at it is the people who wrote these stories were very realistic and they knew that even if things turned out well for you I mean we're still going to be real you know we're going to be some1:58:38fantasy it's like let's say you have a family that flourishes is people are still going to die they're still going to get sick they're they're still going to have they're still going to be alive you know with all of its suffering but1:58:48it'll be the but it'll be a life that's rich enough and complete enough so that it'll justify its its nature essentially and so and it came to pass that when the1:59:00Sun went down and it was dark behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between the pieces Albert Barnes American theologian commented on this1:59:10the oven of smoke and lamp of flame symbolized the smoke of destruction in the light of salvation they're passing passing through the pieces of the sacrificial victims and probably1:59:20consuming them as an accepted sacrifice or the ratification of the Covenant on the part of God as the dividing and presenting of them were on the part of Abram in the same day the Lord made a1:59:31covenant with Abram saying unto thy seed I haven't given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river the river Euphrates the key nights and the Kehna sites and the Cadman nights etc now1:59:43Sarai Abrams wife bear him no children and she had a handmaid wait a second I think we'll stop there I'm tiring out and it's just at its 929 so that's a1:59:55very good place to stop so yes [Applause] so so I should I should close properly2:00:09and just sum up so what happens here is that that Abram enters into a covenant with God to act in the world and the2:00:18action is an adventure story essentially and the adventures repeat and they're and they're punctuated by success and2:00:28sacrifice and re contemplation right and so it's this it's this journey it's the it's the hero's journey uphill I'm here there's a crisis I collapse i2:00:39reconstruct myself to a higher place and life is like that continually and that's the story of Abram and that's all contained though it's all contained and this is the thing that's so cool because2:00:48that is what your life is going to be like whether you plan out your life or not it's going to be punctuated like that maybe it won't go up maybe it'll go down the question is what sort of2:00:57container of you need to be in in order to tolerate movement up and down and that's what the story of Abraham provides it provides a it provides a2:01:06description of the Covenant that's like the Ark the Covenant in the Ark are the same thing right except the Covenant is the psychological equivalent of the ark and the Covenant is have faith in the2:01:19structure of existence and go forth that's the Covenant and that and the story is that's the best possible2:01:29solution that you have at hand all right so I'm going to make a request with regards to the questions which may mean2:01:38you have to reorient yourself in the line I would like the first two questions on each side if possible to2:01:47relate specifically to tonight's lecture and then I can and then I can address more general issues if that's if that's2:01:57okay so and I again I would like you to carefully speak into the mic so that the people who are watching can hear can you2:02:06hear me yeah I can I the story about Abraham as saying his wife was his sister you referred to that as him making a mistake2:02:16I'm not quite sure I understand how you're reading that as a mistake seeing as it was a very deliberate decision and it had a pretty good outcome for him and2:02:25he does the same thing a few chapters later yes this is true you see I don't I don't I don't feel that I have cracked that part of that2:02:35story properly now the reason I said it was a mistake is because it's clearly an act of deceit and in it and it does put the Pharaoh in a very awkward position not to mention sir I by the way are sir2:02:46how do you say that I don't know how to say that sir i sir i it's awry to begin with yes is that right sir I yes okay2:02:55and then it's Sarah and that so Abram means High King something like that and Abraham means father of the people and Sarai means princess and Sarah means2:03:04mother of the people it's something I have it exactly right I'll tell you next week but that's part of the name transformation the the it seems to me that at least in part it's an indication2:03:15of Abraham's willingness to use a suboptimal solution when driven to it by necessity I don't think it's a heroic2:03:25act to pretend that your wife is your sister now you know and and and maybe you might say well under the circumstances there was nothing else he could have done but it does seem it I2:03:36can't see how you can interpret it other than as a departure from the truth but I know that that's not all there is to it and it does seem to work out well2:03:45for him and my interpretation is that well if you're oriented properly in the world the grace of God allows you a few2:03:54necessary mistake something like that you have an alternative idea well why not what what is it about that2:04:05that because it's Abraham and it isn't reasonable to attribute mistakes to him or what is it because at least I think it says in the text that he's looking to2:04:15get out of a bad situation and he does whatever is the best thing that's available to him and not to mention as I2:04:24said he does the same trick a few chapters later yeah well maybe maybe it is the case that you know it's like a white lie issue you know you say well2:04:34it's a white lie acceptable I would say well the best that you can come up with is acceptable that that doesn't mean it's it's optimal though right like I2:04:45I'll give you a foolish example because it's the best that I could do at the moment but you know if you if you have a loved one who says does this dress make2:04:54me look fat the answer to that question is I don't answer questions like that that's the answer right because the other answer is the white2:05:03lie I mean at least in this context and that means that on the one hand you're maintaining the positive contract2:05:12between you and the person who's asking the question but then you're still sacrificing the truth within that so your your you're maintaining your2:05:21relationship with the higher order truth but sacrificing a lower order truth and that would be better than the reverse but it's not as good as not sacrificing2:05:30the truth at all and I would say that if you're maybe fortunate because sometimes it's a matter because you can be in a situation where all your choices are bad I've seen people in situations like that2:05:41I've probably been in situations like that and maybe that is what's happening in that stories every choice Abraham is in front of him is bad but I can't help but think that it's more than that it2:05:50means that if you're doing the best you can and it's not perfect it can still be good enough that's how it looks to me2:06:00thank you hello dr. Peterson you mentioned earlier there's been a pervasive problem of2:06:10nihilism and moral relativism and that that kind of be cured with a nice naive optimism that's grounded in fact and2:06:19what can actually be done to improve situations is there a way to communicate that message to a younger audience say teenagers in a high school environment which is nowadays a hotbed for this kind2:06:30of nihilistic morally relativist thinking great I'm glad you asked that so I'm going to tell you I was thinking about saying this at the beginning but I2:06:40decided not to but now I get to say it because I got this question so that's so cool um I I have plans and so his plan2:06:51number one I have worked with some people to design a website that will enable high university students to enter their course descriptions their2:07:02professors name the sub discipline and the university and an artificial intelligence agent will tell them if the course is postmodern neo-marxist2:07:11indoctrination not not only and I have made tentative arrangements with someone2:07:22to finance a advertising campaign for that site and so the goal is well to inform the consumer do you want to be2:07:33educated or do you want to be indoctrinated and happily you'll be able to use the site equally for both purposes right because if you want to if you want to take the the the courses2:07:46that I would regard as into oxidation then this will give you a way of ensuring that nothing that you get exposed to won't be of that sort so and then I'm going to make a video to2:07:57introduce that to university students and their parents and I'm going to outline what I think the universities are doing wrong is about 20 things2:08:06they're doing wrong and and there's seriously wrong things and I'm going to start by describing the utility of a university education in humanities2:08:16education because the humanities education makes you into the kind of autonomous individual that can go away from that can be independent and can communicate2:08:25and think and that has immense economic value not not just spiritual value and cultural value but economic value and so there's I don't want to tell people not2:08:35to go to university I want to tell them to go to university and grow the hell up and and learn to communicate and think and I want them to avoid the people who will take the spirit away from them and2:08:44so that's what that website is going to do I hope and the goal is to drop the enrollment in the indoctrination courses across the english-speaking world by 75%2:08:55within five years that's the goal so and then you ask that you ask more2:09:05specifically about high school students well we have this future authoring program that has been used for university students and it produces2:09:14about a 30% improvement in retention and we've tested several thousand University students anyone can use it by the way it's not for university students but it2:09:23was easy for us to test it's beneficial impact even if people only spend under 90 minutes on it it still has approximately that effect especially on2:09:32young men especially if they're ethnic minorities especially if they're not oriented towards a career and didn't do2:09:41very well in school and so that's really cool because it's really hard to design a psychological intervention that helps the people who are doing the worst most psychological interventions so imagine2:09:51there are people who are doing not so well and people who are doing well and you produce a psychological intervention what usually happens is the people who are doing well benefit even more right2:10:00but this seems to work for the disenfranchised so we're thrilled about that really and so we produced a version for high school students yes and so but we2:10:11don't have them look three to five years out into the future because they can't and they don't know enough you know it's hard for fully mature adults to look2:10:20that far into the future high school kids can probably manage three to six months and so we're going to have them concentrate on character development and and what they want for their from their2:10:30friendships and how they would like to orient themselves in school and to start thinking about the sorts of person that they would like to be and that never happens in schools2:10:39weirdly enough there's a guy named John Gatto who won the Teacher of the Year award in New York City and then in New York State and then stopped being a teacher by the way he wrote a series of2:10:50books about the education system that explained why students in pre-university education aren't taught to be autonomous2:10:59individuals it's very interesting what he's discovered historically but anyways we're going to market that probably to2:11:08parents and to university students themselves rather than to the schools because our experience has been that producing this sort of material directly for individuals works much better it's2:11:17much more efficient and so then students will be able to or their parents will be able to purchase the program and the students will be able to use it to design their own personality in a manner2:11:29that would make them thrilled to be alive let's say that would be the goal right yes2:11:39[Applause]2:11:51I'm gonna get you to turn it to put it down a little more heed excellent perfect yes yes yeah and I think I2:12:10specially the literature in developmental psychology I think bears this out but I think a huge part of learning is interaction and discourse and that seems very difficult in an2:12:20online setting even if it's through text I don't I don't quite see it it's the same thing and additionally I think there's a huge motivational factor that's difficult to arm it's difficult2:12:32to keep motivated when you're isolated and nobody else around you is pursuing the same goal so how would you dress though you're absolutely right on both counts um I would say that the idea of2:12:44an online humanities university is grandiose and it may not be possible and the reason for that is that and as you're alluding to we actually don't2:12:54understand what the university is we think it's lectures and exams but it's probably not it's certainly being2:13:04together with people of your own age as you start your life it's moving away from your household it's establishing yourself as a credible intellect right2:13:14it's it's picking a new group of peers it's all of those things and it isn't clear how that can be replicated online2:13:23now the people that I'm talking to are sophisticated enough to understand Marshall McLuhan's dictum that the medium is the message and so I think it2:13:32would be a mistake to attempt to duplicate the University online because you can't but so what we're concentrating on right now is not so2:13:41much content but infrastructure the question is we want to set up an educated education online that will be autonomously self-governing and2:13:51self-improving and the content in some sense were not so much interested in the Khan and as we are interested in the process by which people who generate good2:14:01content might be optimally rewarded and that's what we want to get right and that's probably a discussion that'll take a year or two years to to flesh out2:14:11we started to conceptualize what the system might look like but but to your point it isn't we're not taking lectures and2:14:21putting them online although obviously that's what I'm doing that that isn't going to make an online humanities University and we know that I think everything you said is exactly is it's2:14:31very accurate and also indicative of the high probability that something like this would sail so but well you know where we're going to try to be aware of2:14:40the pitfalls we're also going to I read this great book I would recommend this book it's a very funny book by a guy named John gall it's called system antics and it's a cult classic2:14:51systematics and it's about how systems really work and how they fail and it's a work of ironic comedy but it's quite brilliant and one of the things when one2:15:00line he needs it's made of a bunch of axioms and here's one axiom I just love this is the system does not do what its name says it does and so one guy worked2:15:09in Alberta Social Services when I was a kid about eighteen or so and I worked as a consultant and I one of the and I got2:15:18involved in projects that were above my pay grade I would say and I learned a lot about how how large bureaucracies functioned and I was asked at one point to update a report that had been made2:15:29the year before about what percentage of the spending of the Social Services Department actually went to the recipients of welfare and and social aid2:15:38in general and the answer was the system did not know and could not find out and they had hired a very expensive consulting firm to answer that question2:15:49the year before and I was asked to update it which was quite odd to begin with but then I did I went and looked at the consulting report and I went into the data and what I found was that none2:15:59of it was real but even more importantly there was no way of knowing whether it was true or false because the system had never been set up to calculate what percentage of its total spending2:16:09actually went to the recipients of social aid it just blew me away and then I thought and I was reading this book at the same time and I thought oh the purpose of the social services2:16:19department is to employ people in the social services department and I mean I wasn't being cynical about that it's like charity most charities you know it's like 90% overhead so what is the2:16:30charity do it runs itself now you don't want to be cynical about that because big businesses are the same most like even if they're running at a profit the profit is like five percent so the2:16:40business spends 95% of its time maintaining itself you know and it makes a bit of product and it makes a bit of profit but most of what it does is maintain itself so anyways2:16:51one of the axioms in that book that was one of them is the system does not do what it says it does so that's then you can face the system with a clear head and say okay well this thing isn't doing2:17:02what it says it's doing but it's probably doing something and the thing it's doing might be useful but we should figure out what that thing is so that's been really useful to me as a guide to thinking the other thing he said was if2:17:12you want to build a big system that works start with by building a small system that works and scale it and we've done that for example with the self authoring programs you know has built2:17:21small scale systems that are very robust with the hope that they'll scale and that's the same we'll do the same thing here is start with a small amount of2:17:30content see if we can reward see what I would like to have happen is you know there's a lot of people out there who are pretty intensely educated and some of them are really creative and so2:17:40imagine that there's a timeline imagine you could do a humanity since you imagine there's a timeline say of a thousand years but scalable then imagine2:17:49that that there would be lectures associated with the timeline at different levels of resolution so we might call for a lecture on the 3rd2:17:58century AD what happened in the 3rd century ad you've got half an hour to explain it you can explain it any way you want you can use animation you can use lecture you can use text you can2:18:08make a movie we don't care what you have to do is that's the topic that's the timespan that's the amount of time and then you can post it and so we could2:18:18generate content that way and let people experiment and then we can have people review the content as part of their generate questions about the content as2:18:28part of their assignments rate the questions as part of their assignments and rate the content and then if we charge people imagine you had to pay $502:18:37a month to enroll something like that maybe we would allow you when you first enroll maybe you get to use five dollars2:18:46of it as disposable income you can reward that to any creator you want but as you progress through the courses your right to determine where your money goes would increase as you became more and2:18:57more educated hopefully that way we would get some quality control built into it so those are some of the ideas that were that we're starting to play around with so the only one I'm consider2:19:06about is the motivation yeah what's that the motivation issue for individuals well then I'm not going to go into that because it would take too long but but2:19:16rest assured that we are thinking about that very hard as well we're going to build competition into it we're going to build cooperation into it we hope to build peer into relationships into it I2:19:26think all that's possible but but complex right because it's we don't know how to build an online education system really and but it would be fun to2:19:36experiment and see if we can figure out how to do it so thank you hi so I I2:19:48couldn't really zero in on any particular question so it's more of a family questions that I have about the nature and cultivation of conscience which was in a sense what this story2:19:59exemplified about Abraham why do you say that why do you think that the story exemplified the development of conscience of conscience specifically well going back to the2:20:10zigzag yeah right and the star how you have to keep okay so that's what you were referring to okay orienting yourself completely autonomously yeah on your own terms2:20:19right yeah okay okay so you we hit on some great there I think you know and this is something weirdly enough that I learned most particularly from the2:20:29Pinocchio movie which I spent a lot of time studying is because in in the Pinocchio movie Jiminy Cricket is an avatar of Christ essentially but it's2:20:38very because he's a bug that's the first thing that's kind of weird and because Jiminy Cricket is southern US slang for Jesus Christ among other things but and these things get aggregated in in great2:20:49mythic dramas like that and that's a great mythic drama but you know one of the things that really makes Jiminy Cricket different from Christ apart from the fact that Christ wasn't a cricket is2:20:58that Craig the cricket learns as he progresses right even though he's the conscience and so you'd think that he would be the infallible guide that isn't2:21:07how the moviemakers set it up but not so cool is that he is just as muddle-headed as Pinocchio at the beginning and he's a bit arrogant and puffed up too and so it2:21:17took me a long time to think that through and then I realized that well you you have the voice of you have the voice of culture in you you have the2:21:26voice of culture within you but it's old and dead and out-of-date and it's not fully articulated and updated and then what happens is that if you enter into a2:21:35dialogue with it and you hammer yourself against the world then you get hammered into shape and so does your conscience and so you both become elevated and so2:21:46well so anyways I think that's that's ridiculously cool because it means that your conscience you don't have an infallible guide but you have something within you that you could build into an2:21:56infallible guide if you cooperated with it and and said it so well so I think that's very interesting so that being said yes the picture that I have in my2:22:06mind of the cultivation of virtue in general it's kind of like taking a block of wood and trying to carve out a sphere out of it it'll never be perfectly round2:22:16but the more you carve right the rounder and rounder right that's successive approximation yeah well one of it's also like what do you call that compound2:22:25interest this is one of the things that's also and I think this puts you on the to those who more shall be given part of the curve it's like you know you2:22:36don't have to improve yourself very much each week to really improve yourself on the ridiculous amount in a year you know so you could make you could you could2:22:46you could Wow make your day 1/100 of a percent better than the day before not would do the trick if you were if you were constant about that that would2:22:57do the trick so that that's this successive approximation is you don't want to underestimate the utility of incremental progress man it's really kids deadly powerful so so let's say you2:23:09get to the you know the higher ends of the curve right you're like a pretty virtuous person let's say you even become a sage or something of the sort2:23:19and I mean one should you doubt your conscience like what are things that we should watch out for even when we got2:23:29great well that's yep okay um just just to get it out of the way right yeah I don't know how much this relates well it does2:23:39relate but Psychopaths for example the entire idea that they lack a conscience and that's why right that's what psychopathy is whether or not you agree2:23:49with that definition right but there's an issue of conscience again a play with psychopathy how can we the first2:23:58question doubt ourselves in a way that's warranted right regardless of how virtuous we've become and can you treat2:24:09a psychopath could they call fate a conscience okay so let we'll start with the first one part of the reason that that I believe that freedom of speech is2:24:18the canonical right let's end obligation right more importantly even obligation is that that's how you figure out if2:24:27you're wrong you know because so I said home and I think and I think and I think let's say but I'm like who am I to think2:24:36there's so many things I don't know that it's it's just there's the what I know compared to what I don't know is so miniscule that it's a preposterous act2:24:48just to say something okay so so no matter how much I sit at home and think I'm not going to fix that I'm going to be flat and then I have biases but my temperament and I have biases because of2:24:58my malevolence and I have biases because of my my gender my sex let's say since we're not so fond of that word2:25:07so Eva no matter how much I said home and think I'm still going to be wrong and malevolent so then what do I have to do is I have to talk to some other2:25:16people and I have to say this is what I think and it's going to be ugly you know because what the hell do I know but then2:25:29if I listen people will tell me why I'm wrong and lots of people have been telling me why I'm wrong like a lot and2:25:38it's hard you know it's hard but it's but I've learned something from it like I had this revelation let's say about2:25:47being yelled at by your father now I know that you can be yelled at too much by your father but it's like you're wrong man and so someone's yelling at2:25:57you and maybe they're only ten percent right but if you shut the hell up and listen then you can figure out where you're wrong and then maybe you can be2:26:06thankful for that and then maybe if you shut up and listen your father would quit yelling at you you know because he's wrong - what the hell does he know he knows how to yell at you and tell you2:26:16how you're wrong and he's throwing things out you add you that are probably not true but some of its true and you know if someone can tell you why you're2:26:25wrong they've given you a great gift because then you don't have to be wrong anymore and you might think well who cares if you're wrong but you know there's a line in the New Testament - is2:26:34if the blind lead the blind won't they fall in won't they fall into a ditch the answer to that question by the way is yes they will and so the reason that you2:26:44want to think is because thinking is how you like when you think you creative the fictional world that's an analog of the2:26:54world and then you make an avatar of yourself to act in that world and then if the Avatar dies you don't act out those actions right well so if you think properly then you don't have to suffer2:27:05and die and so if you can say what you think and people can tell you why you're wrong and you know to say what you think under extreme circumstances means that2:27:14you're going to say things that no one wants to hear because those are the things you don't know about those are the things that are conflictual and differ called it are going to be hard conversations man and you're going to be2:27:23wrong about them a lot if you don't get to stumble forward with your stupidity then you can't be corrected and so so there's no distinction between free2:27:33speech and thinking and there's no distinction between thinking and thriving and so those who want to inhibit free speech do not wish for people to thrive and I believe that so2:27:48thinking does not happen inside your head that's only the beginnings of thinking and it's this that we're doing here that's thinking you know so we have2:27:58to protect that psychopath I don't I say this I hope non naively also having2:28:08dealt with Psychopaths in my clinical practice and I would say now and then in my life I don't believe in Psychopaths I don't believe that we know enough to say2:28:18there are people born without conscience um I don't think the psychometric measurement of psychopathy is everything2:28:27that it should be I've been trying to model it bei in the Big Five domain I think now it's complicated because so I would say a psychopath the classic psychopath is likely extroverted2:28:37especially assertive disagreeable and unconscious and maybe extremely low in neuroticism so you can't frighten them but so that's a rare combination because2:28:49it's extreme on many traits right but that I don't believe that that means that someone with that personality configuration is doomed from birth to a2:28:58pathological existence because there's things about psychopathy that that the that the classifiers those who claim like correctly that the psychopath is2:29:07born in some sense can't explain it's like well what about the cruelty there seems to be a motive they're you know2:29:16they're passionless and they lack no they lack emotion well why are they cruel then for entertainment well but2:29:25then you have to explain the entertainment motivation like there's a failure in some sense with the classic psychopathy theorist to come to grips with the problem malevolence it skirted over and you2:29:36can't do that if you're talking about psychopathy it's like malevolence is the bloody issue here and so the other issue with the psychopaths is that he's2:29:45irredeemable right that's the idea I don't think we know enough to make such claims now and that doesn't I know the2:29:54psych office a literature quite well and I have great respect for their primary research is in the field I want to make that perfectly clear but we're talking at a different we're talking we're2:30:03approaching the problem from a different level of analysis here something like a spiritual level of analysis and I don't think that there's an easy easy translation from the descriptive2:30:12psychometric psychiatric approach to the spiritual level they don't match and I'm more likely to say let's not assume the2:30:22soul is doomed from birth right and I'm loathe to think that there are people born irredeemable although I do think2:30:31there are irredeemable people know the death penalty issues interesting in that regard you know because I've read a lot about really terrible people and I've2:30:41also read a lot about what really terrible people said about themselves and many of them wished for the death penalty and so it's absolutely clear2:30:50that there are things that you can do that deserve the death penalty but that doesn't mean that the state should have the right to impose it that's a different question so yep2:31:08in the previous lecture you mentioned the 2008 economic crisis and one of the very interesting themes that's emerged at many levels be at universities or economic policies this perceived culture2:31:18war specifically the idea of Marx versus milk and you've criticized postmodern the neo-marxist thought very frequently one interesting critic of the policies2:31:27of the EU specifically EC ECB and IMF during the Greek debt crisis was Yanis varoufakis the former greek Finance Minister and his criticism of MIL was2:31:36deal was Mills alleged contempt for the population and verify his comments on the type of capitalism that results in too big to fail he describes themselves as an erratic2:31:45Marxist to me personally is an example of someone whose position on the philosophical mooring of policy is interesting to compare and contrast with yours he certainly not your typical Marxist or2:31:55post modernist even though not really sure what that means but if you look at his work during the Greek debt crisis and his current work with diem25 he seems to be well reasoned well-positioned and and articulate now I2:32:05wanted to know if you had an opinion on that type of criticism of MIL or his taking of a position as a neurotic Marxist okay I would say I would say no2:32:16to the specifics of the question I don't think that I have that detailed expertise in order to answer the question at the level of analysis that2:32:26you where you formulated it but I have something to say that's more general about the set of phenomena that you described there's no doubt that2:32:37distribution is a major problem that capitalism contends with imperfectly at best and the distribution problem is the2:32:46pre de distribution problem right and it's something that Marx commented on which mostly in the monetary sphere is that money tends to accumulate in the hands of very few people it's like2:32:55there's no doubt about that now as we've discussed before the people in whom hands the money accumulates do turnover more than people say think especially in2:33:06in countries that are functioning me reasonably well and it's really important that that happens yes yes yes but that doesn't that doesn't solve the2:33:18problem of the fact that produced goods gravitate towards an extreme minority now they're also produced often by extreme minority which2:33:27is also a problem I would say then that the idea that capitalism is more prone2:33:36to that distribution problem than any other system I don't believe that to have been demonstrated at all and I2:33:46think that capitalism is actually pretty good at self-destruction except when that's interfered with and I think that's particularly the case in the United States where generally the2:33:56policy has been if you're an idle with feet of clay no matter how big you are you get to fail now that's being compromised severely in the last 202:34:07years and we're probably going to pay for that I think they really paid for that in Japan right where there is every2:34:16attempt to prop out that the gods that should have died so so fair enough for2:34:25the critique of capitalism that's not the issue the issue is do you have a better idea and if the idea is well we2:34:36could kind of do it marks suggested then you don't get to have that position and claim what should I say I haven't seen2:34:49any evidence that systems predicated on that set of actions have done anything but more harm than good thank you yeah and when will you be announcing the2:34:59monthly extension to the circuses as soon as I find out whether or not I can rent this theater in the fall yeah thank you we'll see you next week2:35:11you [Applause]0:00:00Biblical Series X: Abraham: Father of Nations
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:13hello everyone it's been a very strange day so I'm going to tell you about what happened and then I'll start the lecture0:00:23so I got up this morning and started to put my day together and then I tried to sign into my gmail account and it said0:00:36that it had been disabled because I violated the terms of service with Gmail and I thought well I didn't violate any0:00:48Terms of Service that I know of now I set up a new YouTube channel yesterday called Jordan B Peterson clips and so we made some technical changes and so I0:00:58thought maybe it had something to do with that and I had been shout out of Google one other time years ago so when0:01:07you get a shout out like that there's a little form you can fill out and so I filled out the form and I said that I had been shut out and that I didn't know0:01:19why and I sent it off and then I realized one of my staff members called me and said that she was locked out of0:01:28the YouTube account oh yeah the YouTube account is hooked to the gmail account so that meant that I couldn't get access to any of my youtube videos they were still up and online but0:01:38I couldn't get access to them I couldn't post last week's biblical lecture for 4 for example and so that was worrisome and made me suspicious and then about two hours0:01:50later or something like that I got an email from Google and they said that they had reviewed my request to be reinstated and that I had violated0:02:00Google's Terms of agreement or a Terms of Service and they weren't going to turn my account back on and I thought and they didn't say why they didn't say0:02:11anything I got there is no warning whatsoever about any of this they didn't tell me why and they didn't say why in the email response and I wrote them back and I said because0:02:21they said I could I wrote them back and I said this might not be a good idea basically and you might want to think0:02:31about it and then I twittered tweeted what had happened right I took screenshots and I tweeted and I contacted a whole bunch of journalists because it turns out that I know a whole0:02:41bunch of journalists and so and so then what happened then was that I got a call from the Daily Caller in the United0:02:52States I had done an interview with them last week which isn't posted yet and they interviewed me and within 20 minutes posted it online and so they0:03:02have a fairly big audience and so that was good and then somebody phoned me from Ottawa and I did a live radio show about that and that was good and then a number of other journalists contacted me0:03:12and I sent them the information but another one of my staff and actually my son emailed me and he said look you should hold off because maybe there's still a mistake here and I thought yeah0:03:23there might be it might be just a mistake but then why in the world did I email Google and they contacted me and they said they would not reinstate it and they didn't provide me with any0:03:32information so I contacted the other journalists and I said well you never know maybe this is just a mistake so let's hold off and then well I was about0:03:42half an hour later while I was trying to get into my I used this AdWords account that's Luke link to Google I don't run ads on my videos but I need the AdWords0:03:52account because it helps me add some little gadgets to the videos that I wouldn't otherwise be able to and I was I was playing with that the system came back online I thought well that's0:04:03interesting and lots of people had emailed me and twittered me and some people within Google and some people elsewhere and they were doing whatever they were going to do to help me get all0:04:12this material back up and running and so something worked my suspicions are that what worked was the publicity now so but maybe not you know and it's very weird0:04:22being in this situation because there has been a number of recent episodes where these larger companies Facebook0:04:31Google patreon not that it's a massive company but it's starting to become reasonably significant have decided on rather arbitrary grounds to shut down their0:04:41users and this is very ominous to me partly because we've we've turned our communications over to very large systems or very large systems have0:04:51emerged to mediate our communication right I mean there's lots of benefit to it so you don't want to get too cynical about it but we're blind with regards to the policies that regulate the the0:05:02actions the regulatory actions of these large organizations and that's really a bad thing and something else is even more ominous really ominous you know0:05:11it's highly probable that we're going to build political algorithms into our artificial intelligence and this sort of thing will be regulated by machines that0:05:20no one understands and that's a really bad idea and that's a really likely possibility so anyways I was all confused about this I thought Jesus0:05:29maybe I flew off the handle you know because I was sort of it was stressful man you know because I have like a hundred and fifty thousand emails in that account like that's a lot of emails0:05:39and it's all my correspondence for the last ten years you know so it's an archive as well as an ongoing email system I have a commercial email system0:05:48that I just set up three weeks ago with like six different email addresses now to try to organize my correspondence so I wasn't completely unable to communicate but my calendar was gone and0:05:58that's a bloody disaster because like I've got things scheduled out forever and I don't remember what they are I can't even remember what I'm doing in a day so much less in a month but I0:06:09thought maybe I flew off the handle and I was worried that I contacted the journalist too soon and you know but anyways it all worked out so then what0:06:18happened well just as I was coming to this lecture I stepped outside and there was a little package outside and luckily it wasn't a bomb there was a there's a0:06:27package outside nice little packages and we looked my wife and I looked inside it there was a couple of bottles of wine in there so that was nice and there was a little note and so I'm gonna read you0:06:36the little note because it's actually pretty interesting so so this person0:06:45said that they had finally tackled self altering sweets oh they seem to be happy about that but that's not so interesting except peripherally a friend on Twitter has contact with Google0:06:55engineers she said quote I spoke with some friends inside Google who offered to help and I did get contacted by quite0:07:05a few people at Google who said that they had been you know watching my lectures and so on and were happy about what I was doing anyways I spoke with some friends inside Google who offered0:07:15to help but they suggest he set up a back-up plan the teams are feeling significant pressure from advocacy groups and quote0:07:25I have at least four Google engineers who offered to speak up on his behalf but they know the team dynamics and unfortunately especially YouTube is an0:07:37SJW cesspool I hope this information is useful to you it's like yeah it's kind of useful alright so that was that was0:07:48part of what happened today and so anyways I still don't really understand it right because I don't know why it got0:07:57shut down and I don't know if anything I did got it turned back on and I don't know the reasons for it and that's also rather ominous it seems to me that when0:08:07I was thinking it through and was that I know I have a fairly what would you call it respectable YouTube following I don't0:08:17know if you'd necessarily call it respectable it's fairly large YouTube following and it seems to me that it would have been appropriate for Google0:08:28if they were going to shut down my account to tell me why I would think and also maybe look me up maybe especially after I emailed them and then maybe not0:08:39to have emailed me back and said no we're not going to reinstate you but we're not going to tell you any reasons that they didn't say they wouldn't tell me any reasons they just didn't tell me any reasons and then it also seems very0:08:50strange to me that it just all of a sudden went back on after two hours and so well so I don't know what0:09:00that may be more information will come to light over the next few days I hope that I didn't jump the gun but it's very0:09:09a very peculiar set of circumstances I thought it was kind of amusing actually that the video that they stopped me from posting today was the last biblical0:09:20lecture you wouldn't necessarily think that that would be the sort of thing that people would want to stop from being posted but we're in very very strange times so that was my adventure for today and0:09:32so I didn't you know I hate speakers who apologize to the crowd before they talk to them because you know if you're0:09:42speaking to people and they put all this effort into coming then you shouldn't tell them what a sorry and useless creature you are before you talk to them you know and ask for their forbearance0:09:52and forgiveness it's like it's a little you're a little late for that but I'm still gonna do that a little bit today because you know I wanted to spend all day preparing this lecture0:10:01I mean I've prepared it a lot before him but that rattled me up a lot and so I didn't prepare as much as I could have anyways we'll stumble forward and see0:10:11how it goes I I'm I'm I'm reasonably familiar with the stories now and so onward and upward so I'm gonna reiterate0:10:23this you know I've learned something I have this idea that it would be a good idea for young people and older people0:10:32citizens of the west let's say to learn more about their culture and their civilization right because it's a great civilization and it's it's it's taken a0:10:43lot of work to put together but I don't think that we really know you know I know a fair a bit about it although I wouldn't consider myself nearly as educated as a person should be but I'm0:10:54not too badly educated and but I tell you going through these biblical lectures verse by verse just makes me even more aware of how unbelievably0:11:05ignorant I am you know and partly for two two reasons like one is because I've been using this Bible hub calm place and I think I told you last week0:11:14but I wanted to reiterate it because it's important it's so interesting the way that they've set it up because you can go through the biblical stories verse by verse and then for each verse0:11:25there's a whole small font page of commentary from multiple sources and so you know not only is the Bible hybrid hyperlinked in the way that I discussed0:11:35in the first lecture with all the verses referring to not all the other verses but lots of them but it's I mean it's got its tendrils out into literature you0:11:44know direct commentaries on the text but also although all the literature that's been influenced by it so it's it's it's an unbelievably central and core text0:11:53and it's so interesting to read a book where every sentence has been commented on what really in volumes and then just to get a sense of that volume of0:12:03material you know how much power brain power there's been put into this and and to also understand how bloody ignorant like I'm so ignorant about this there's0:12:14all this work and and it seems that we've left it to decay in the dust and it's a big mistake man it's a big mistake because the people who are writing these commentaries like you know0:12:24a lot of its from the 14th and 15th and 16th century it's kind of archaic and it's and it's some of it's outdated and some of it you wouldn't agree with but if you read all the commentaries side by0:12:34side you know you get a pretty good blast of wisdom coming at you and like the thing about wisdom is it stops you from running face-first into walls you know it's not just there to to so that0:12:45you can talk to people at parties about what university you graduated from you know and it's there because the the information is unbelievably useful you0:12:54know one of the things that I've realized that I want to return to tonight because I've been thinking a lot about this idea of the arc you know and I think I mentioned to you last week that I'd figured out that there is this0:13:04idea that Noah was perfect in his generations and that meant that he has said his family in order wasn't just him but he had said his family in order and because of that when when the catastrophe came like it comes to0:13:15everyone he was able to withstand it because he had the support of the people who were near and dear to him and that's really important when things come along to lay you low like if you're alone and0:13:26the flood comes man goodbye to you if you've got 10 or 15 people supporting you in a tight Network you know and and your your0:13:35interrelationships with them or pristine and you can tell them the truth and they can tell the truth back to you it's possible that you might be able to find that thin way that will preserve you0:13:45when when when when you know the terrible things come knocking at your door and so there's this the idea of the ark is very very concrete in Noah it's0:13:56actually a structure that that he inhabits you know it's a concrete eyes almost like a child's story and and I'm not being cynical about that because there are some bloody brilliant Charles0:14:06to children's stories but you know it's really concrete eyes but then Abraham comes along and instead of an ark there's a covenant right now it says in the story of Noah that Noah walked with0:14:16God and and of course Abraham it isn't clear exactly did he's walking with God or before God which we'll get into later but you see I see this as part of the0:14:25increasing cycle psychologize ation of the sacred ideas that were acted out by archaic people so first of all it's0:14:34concretize in the form of a ship that actually sustains you when the floods come right it's it's very concrete imagery the sort of thing you might see in a movie but then with Abraham it0:14:44turns into a psychological covenant in some sense it's like a contractual agreement now it's a country it's a contractual agreement between Abraham and God but but that doesn't really0:14:54matter that I mean obviously it matters but it's that it's it's only it's only half of what's important about that the other half is that it's a contract and0:15:03you know one of the things that you do with your ideal let's say is you establish a contract with it you also establish like a social contract with0:15:12other people right that's what keeps society organized and so there's this idea that emerges in the Abraham stories of a sacred contract and that has the0:15:21same function as the Ark and what it does because what happens in Abraham we'll see more of this today is that he you know God tells him to go forward0:15:30into the world and we've we talked about that last week and he does that the encounters famine and the encounters tyranny and he encounters powerful people who want to take from him what is0:15:39his I mean god sends about world but it's not like he has an easy ride of it it isn't easy at all it's as hard as it can be but there's this consistent emphasis in the text and I0:15:49think it's something really worth attending to that if you maintain your contract which and that has that has to do with honesty and trust and truth and0:15:58all of those things if you maintain your contract and you have a good possibility the best possible possibility of making your way through the catastrophe in the chaos and I don't want to be naive about0:16:10this you know when I read young and I started to understand the idea of the hero archetype you know the idea that the human being is a is a force a logo's0:16:19force that can stand up against chaos and catastrophe and tragedy and evil and prevail I never did think that that meant that if you did stand up and tell0:16:28the truth that you would necessarily prevail right it's not it's not it's not a magic trick it's your best bet that's the thing you don't have a better option and so and that's what's that's what0:16:39that I see the idea is emerging in the Abrahamic texts it's like people are figuring this out that would be progressive revelation that's one way of thinking about it and you can think0:16:48about that religious terms but you can also think about it as humanity consulting itself right each individual talking to themselves which is what we do when we when we think and each0:16:58individual communicating with every other individual and gathering a body of wisdom that helps people or orient themselves in the toughest conditions0:17:07and it's an incremental process and I think that I really do believe that that's speaking purely secularly I do believe that that's what manifests0:17:17itself in the biblical stories right it's the dawning enlightenment of mankind something like that as we start to understand the principles by which we have to live in order to orient0:17:27ourselves properly in the world so and I also do believe and this is this is the thing that's the unspoken question is0:17:36like you don't you don't have any idea how rich and fulfilling your life could be despite its tragedy and limitation if0:17:47you stop doing the things that you know to be wrong it's a really grand experiment and you know one of the things that God tells Abraham Kahn's as as the story progresses especially0:17:58every time Abraham makes a sacrifice as God says walk with me and be perfect it's something like that and so the injunction is will aim high establish0:18:09this relationship with the highest thing that you can conceive of which you might as well do that because well what are you gonna do is to have this relationship with the most mediocre0:18:18thing you can conceive of or you're gonna establish relationship with the lowest thing you can conceive of people do that and I wouldn't recommend it it's a really bad thing and there's a lot of0:18:29pain associated with that and maybe you know there's the there's pain that can expand into a world destroying force down that route and there's absolutely no doubt about that so what is there0:18:39something superstitious and foolish about attempting to establish a contractual relationship with the source of all being I mean I I just don't see0:18:50that as a as an erroneous conception and you know it's not necessary perhaps to get lost in the details we can argue0:18:59forever about what God might or might not be but we could at least say that the concept of God is an embodiment of humanity's highest ideal right we could0:19:09at least agree on that and then you might say well is that real and the first thing I would say about that is there's a lot of things about the world we don't understand and the second thing0:19:19I would say is it depends bloody well on what you mean by real that's for sure and that turns out to be a very complicated question so okay so we left0:19:34Abram remember at the end last time he had just gone off to fight a bunch of kings and get his nephew back which seemed to be a pretty courageous act and so that brought a story to an end and0:19:45it's interesting I think what happens in the narrative is that there's a story so Abraham is somewhere and he goes somewhere else right that's the story and he has adventures along the way and0:19:55those adventures are usually the typical kind of adventure which is a riff in the structure of the story and exposure to a kind of chaos and novelty and then a0:20:04reconstitution of the of the mode of being so that's it's a classic story right you are somewhere you're a certain way you're moving forward something happens that0:20:13you don't expect it blows you into pieces it introduces chaos right you you face the drag and you get the gold or maybe the bloody thing eats you and the story is over and then and then you get0:20:24to where you're going but then the question is well what happens when you get to where you're going and that's a really important issue because one of the things that happens to people all0:20:33the time in their life is that they get to where they're going and then they don't know what to do right so for example you graduate from university it's like okay story over who are you now who are you0:20:46the next day and so so what happens is when you succeed then there's a success crisis and the success crisis is well I've run this story to its end now what0:20:57and that's exactly what happens in in the Abrahamic stories and they're punctuated by a period of contemplation and sacrifice so every time an Abrahamic0:21:07story comes to its end then Abraham makes another sacrifice and communes with God and then he figures out what to do next and that seems that seems right0:21:17it seems psychologically right because what you should do when your story comes to an end when you've achieved what it is that you want to achieve or perhaps when you're in terribly dire straits but0:21:27we won't talk about that at the moment when you've achieved what you need to achieve then the next question is okay well now I'm that person or I have that character what what do I need to do next0:21:38and some of that is always well what do I need to give up now what do I need to let go of so I can move to the next plateau right assume that your life is a hopefully a sequence of upward moving0:21:48what would you call them it's like Sisyphus except you're actually each time you climb up the mountain you get a little higher on the mountain that's something like that so it's Sisyphus0:21:58with an optimistic bent and and and maybe if you push the rock up the mountain properly and let it roll down then and if you do that right then it's okay every time you roll it back up it's0:22:08it's better in some sense I don't think that's unrealistic either and so well Abraham goes and rescues his nephew from0:22:17these two tyrannical kings that's very brave and he doesn't take any reward for it because his he's concerned it's just a manifestation of the right thing and then he has0:22:27another vision after these things that's the battle the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision saying fear not Abram I am thy shield and thy exceeding0:22:36great reward and Abram said Lord God what will I'll give me seeing I go childless and the steward of my house is this Alysia of Damascus and Abram said0:22:45Behold to me thou has given no seed and lo no one born what one born in my house is mine heir and behold the word of the Lord came to him saying this shall not0:22:54be thine heir but he that shall come forth out of the own tyne own bowels shall be done here and he brought him forth abroad and he said now look to0:23:03heaven and tell the stars if you're able to number them number them and he said unto Him so shall thy seed be and Abram believed in the Lord and he counted it0:23:12to him for righteousness and he said unto him I'm the Lord that brought thee out of ur of the Chaldees to give this land to you to inherit it and he said Lord God whereby shall I know that I0:23:22shall inherit it and then he does this sacrifice take me in effort a heifer of three years old and a she-goat and a Rabb and a Turtledove and a young pigeon0:23:31and then God comes down and well Abraham goes into a trance that's what it appears to be in the story and has a great terror and then God appears to him0:23:41and I'll just review this commentary again this is from Joseph Benson and when the Sun was going down that's about0:23:50the time when you wash up for the evening and he's he's praying and waiting towards evening a deep sleep fell upon Abraham not a common sleep0:23:59through weariness or carelessness but a divine ecstasy that being wholly taken off from things sensible he might be wholly taken up with a contemplation of things spiritual very strange very very0:24:09strange series of interpretations because it does seem that what happens to Abraham that he falls into some sort of revelatory trance and so when as I've0:24:20taken some pains to explain we don't really understand such things and and we can't rule out their existence because there's too much evidence that they do0:24:29in fact occur perhaps it's a technology that we no longer possess that's one possibility perhaps we no longer know how access these sorts of states of consciousness it's certainly possible0:24:39and lo a horror of great darkness fell upon him this was designed to strike upon the spirit of Abram and to possess0:24:48him with holy reverence holy fear prepares the soul for holy joy God humbles first and then lifts lifts up yeah well I think that's right too like0:24:57you know one of the experiences I've had in my life fairly commonly in their variety of different ways this is especially true when I was paying a lot of attention to my dreams which I did0:25:07for about 15 years I guess something like that now and then I would feel like I'd learned some things and had sort of consolidated them and then before I went0:25:16to sleep I'd think okay I'm ready to learn something else it's like and I didn't say that without trepidation and usually because usually when you learn0:25:25something you know it's not that Pleasant because you usually learn something about why you're wrong and the deeper the thing that you learned the more you learn about why you're wrong0:25:35and there's a death that's associated with that because then you have to let that part of you that's wrong die and that's that's real that's the sacrifice right and so you have to make a0:25:45sacrifice you have to be willing to make a sacrifice before you're going to learn something and the and perhaps your what you'll learn is in proportion to your0:25:55willingness to make a sacrifice and I really do believe that I do believe that as well because I also think that if you0:26:05commit to something that means that you don't do a bunch of other things right and so that's the sacrifice of all those other things you commit to it you set your sights on it if you really commit0:26:15to it and you get the sacrifice right so to speak then the probability that that thing will be successful vastly increases and I think that that's also not a naive or or a naive way of0:26:27thinking or a foolish way of thinking I my experience has been that that's the case and so back to the dream I mean I do think that we learn in trepidation0:26:37and that most of the time if if you have to be laid low before the new revelation can make itself manifest and I think that's also what happens to people often0:26:47in psychedelic experiences when they have a bad trip they don't get through the bad part of it and maybe that's because there's so much mess in their lives now I'm speculating but it's informed0:26:57speculation there's so much mess in their lives that the altered state of consciousness makes manifest that it's like a little trip through hell and but the mess is so complete and0:27:07comprehensive and all-pervading that there's no way they can get through it now if they could get through it and started to sort those things out then you know there would be perhaps what0:27:17would you call it a compensatory positive revelation at the end but the first thing is if you want to learn something is that you're going to0:27:26encounter well you have to figure out what's wrong before you you can figure out what wisdom you need next to guide yourself and that's no laughing matter0:27:36right and so I think that that's what the that's what this refers to I think that's the sort of psychological experience that that refers to I also0:27:46think we built this a little bit into this into the future authoring program you know I read this really cool paper once reviewed by this guy named Jeffrey0:27:56gray Jeffrey gray wrote a book called the neural psychology of anxiety man and that is a great book it is impossible to read it took me really it took me like six months to read it and the reason for0:28:07that is that he reviewed about 3,000 papers and they're all neurological papers and and and heavy psychological /0:28:16biological papers he actually read them all and he understood them and he synthesized them and then he wrote this book about the synthesis and so and he's0:28:26very very careful with this terminology and so to read the book you have to understand brain anatomy and you have to understand neural neural pharmacology and you have to end understand animal0:28:35behavior the whole literature on animal behavior not whole whopping dose of human psychology and cybernetics it's0:28:44like it's a vicious book but you really learn something when you read it if you go through it it by bit like it's it's it's had an overwhelming influence on0:28:53psychology even among people who haven't read it which is most of the people who cite it by the way and so but he said he outlined this real cool study maybe it0:29:03was a sequence of is about how to motivate rats you know and rats are a lot like us you know in positive and negative ways and you know biochemically and and0:29:15psycho pharmacologically they're very very similar and they have very complex social environments and you know they have hierarchies and they play and they laugh Jack panksepp Jaak panksepp found0:29:25out that routes laugh if you tickle them you can tickle them with like the end of a pencil eraser but you can't hear them laughing because they laugh ultrasonically like bats so you have to0:29:34record it and then slow it down then you can hear them giggling away when you tickle em so so which is you know you think oh you know spend $50,000 on a study demonstrating that rats laugh and0:29:44you think well wait a second wait a second that's a major-league study you know because he's outlined a ludic circuit that's a play circuit and yock banks have discovered the play circuited0:29:54mammals that's a bloody big deal you know if you get that by like rubbing rats with a pencil eraser well good for you so anyways so Great Auk Talaat about how0:30:05to motivate a a rat and you might have heard about BF Skinner you know he used food pellets to motivate his rats but what you don't know about Skinner is that those rats were starved to0:30:14three-quarters of their normal body weight so they would they would work for food and so Skinner's routes were kind of oversimplified but you can get rats0:30:24to work for food they don't have to be that hungry you can get them to work for food and they'll do all sorts of things they'll press levers and and they'll open our open doors and they'll solve0:30:33problems and you know they'll do all sorts of things and one of the things you can do to kind of measure how much the rat is motivated is let's say you've read him through a maze and he knows0:30:43there's some food at the end of the maze you can tie a little spring to his tail and see how hard he pulls when you open the door to the maze so that's because that's how much rat work the route is0:30:53willing to do so you can measure that or you can see how fast these skitters down the maze and you can get an estimate about the rats motivation and so then you might say well how motivated is a0:31:03hungry rat and the answer would be depends on how hungry is but there's another answer it also depends on what's chasing him when he's going after the0:31:12food so if you have a rat and you you have food over here and you often some cat odor rats hate cat odor and it's innate they never have to see0:31:22or smell a cat to be absolutely petrified by cat odor and so if you walked in some cat odor and then open the door that rat will zoom to that food0:31:31a lot faster than it will if it's just hungry so a rat running away from something that it doesn't want towards something that it does want is a very motivated rat and so one of the things we did with0:31:42the future authoring program that's germane to this idea of terror because there's a business idea in the old testament the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and it's a pretty harsh idea but but there's something0:31:53really useful about it because one of the things you see with people all the time is that they're maybe they're trying to stumble forward towards their ideal as poorly defined as it might be0:32:04but then they're afraid right they're afraid about what they might encounter and that stops them because fear does stop people it freezes you like a prey animal and so people move ahead but then0:32:14they get afraid and then they start moving ahead and so and that's not so good because negative emotion is a really powerful motivator so we're more motivated by negative emotion than0:32:23positive emotion quantitatively speaking quantitative quantitatively speaking you can measure that and that's I think because we can only be so happy but we can really be suffering and yet you know0:32:33so we have to pay more attention to the negative and that's bad because the negative can stop you and then in my clinical practice you know I often talk0:32:42to people who are trying to make a difficult life decision and and they are weighing out the costs and the benefits of making the life decision you know and one of the things I always talk to them0:32:51about is wait a second that's an incomplete analysis you have to weigh out the benefits and the costs of doing this and you have to weigh out the costs0:33:00and benefits of not doing that not doing it and that's not the same as the zero that you assume that you're starting with right because to not make a decision it also has a cost and0:33:11sometimes the cost of not making a decision is far worse than the cost of making a decision even if the decision is risky and so one of the things you can derive from that and this is very0:33:20useful I think is that this is also I think why it's so useful to contemplate your mortality so to speak as you're screwed no matter what you do0:33:30you know and that actually frees you is that you you you have power fade that has catastrophes and you have path B that has catastrophes and you don't get to have the no catastrophe path but you0:33:41get to pick which one and that's really something because if you know that there's terrible risk associated with everything that you do and don't do then you can afford to take some risks0:33:50because you're not you know this is all within the arc metaphor I'm still making the case that despite the fact that your life is essentially catastrophic you can0:34:00you can make a covenant with the highest ideal and that will take you through it the best way possible and I'm still making that case so so then you think0:34:11okay while I'm trying to make this decision I'm gonna go try to do something difficult and isn't that terrifying and then you think yeah but wait a minute what's really terrifying is not doing it0:34:20and then you think about the cost of not doing it so in the future authoring program we have people do this little meditative exercise which is okay just0:34:29think about your insufficiencies by your own definition right the way that you don't do what you know you should do about the things that you do that you0:34:38shouldn't do that you know you shouldn't do beyond a shadow of a doubt right there's some things like that and that that's bad habits and poor aim and all0:34:47of the resentment and hatred and aggression and unresolved conflicts and all those things that are demanding you and warping you and then think okay those things get the upper hand man they0:34:56get the upper hand and they take you the worst possible place you could go in the next three to five years what exactly does that look like and so you sketch0:35:05all that out and you think hey I don't want to go there and so the next time that a temptation comes up you think well I'd be a lot better for me if I didn't succumb to this temptation it's like that's kind of weak eh0:35:14you'd look a little better if you didn't eat like a cheesecake a day or something like that you know that's that's something but it's not the same as I'm0:35:23gonna have diabeetus and I'm gonna lose my damn leg in in in five years if I don't get my eating under control that's motivating and so then the temptation comes along and you think oh how about0:35:34no seriously how about no not just because a higher good would be obtained if I avoided it but because a0:35:43terrible catastrophe would be averted if I didn't and so well so you want to get your fear behind you right you want to get it behind you where it's pushing you0:35:52forward instead of in front of you where it's stopping you and you get your fear behind you pushing your for you forward by actually thinking through the consequences of not putting your life0:36:02together and the least of those is that you waste it and suffer right because you can suffer anyways man so you waste it and suffer that's a bad deal because maybe if you're gonna0:36:12suffer you could at least do something noble and glorious and upright and powerful and honorable and admirable and helpful and difficult you know that's0:36:22just so much better and maybe that's good enough so that you think hey you know little suffering it's basically worth it at least it's up WayForward you know at0:36:31least it's a way forward and he said unto Abram know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in the land0:36:40that is not theirs and shall serve those people and nail flicked them for four hundred years go ahead he's hedging his bets here a lot right he says to Abraham well go out0:36:49you know into the world and then he confronts him with a famine and he confronts him with the tyranny and with powerful people he wants to take his wife and then he loses his nephew and who he has a fight with many has to go0:36:59fight a war and now he you know he's reconstituting this covenant god says yeah you're gonna have mmm a nation is0:37:08going to come from you but they're gonna be slaves to tyrants for like four hundred years is it's like he's not the great salesman exactly but but the thing0:37:18about it is that the thing that I like about it is that it's realistic you know and you ought to think too because who knows why it is that the Bible exists or0:37:28why people wrote it but you know if they're gonna sell you something I don't know if this is the way to do it you know because unless you're a Salesman0:37:37who's sophisticated beyond belief because you'd think that if it was just a matter of controlling the masses let's say which is once a Marxist interpretation of religion or or providing people with a primitive0:37:48defense against death anxiety which is essentially the Freudian interpretation that you'd kind of make the deals that God cut with Abraham a little more on the positive and polished side0:37:57instead of making them a realistic offer constantly like they are that that's also that that that's part of the reason I think it is reasonable to treat the0:38:06Bible as literature it's it's more than literature it's something other than literature but you can treat it as literature and I think the reason that you can treat it as literature is because the characters are all complex0:38:16including the character of God Himself is complex and sophisticated it's not one-sided and it's it's paradoxical and incomprehensible at times but I think0:38:27good literature is like that because you know true art here's something about true art this is something I learned from young it's so smart he was so smart so he imagined that you inhabit the land0:38:38that you know conceptually and practically and then imagine outside of that there's that massive space of things that you don't know and even outside of that there's the space of0:38:47things that no one knows right so it's the known territory surrounded by the unknown that's the canonical archetypal landscape and the unknown manifests0:38:56itself to you and that's where new knowledge comes from but the question is how is that knowledge generated and it doesn't just leap from completely unknown to completely articulate it in0:39:06one move that isn't how it happens it has to pass through stages of analysis before it becomes articulable and the first stage of analysis as far as I can0:39:16tell is that you act it out so if something really surprises you the first way that you react to it your category is actually embodied too you'd like this that that's your first category it's not conceptual at all it's0:39:27embodied and then maybe you start to it like you're at home at night and you know something startled seeing you freeze and then it's dark and then your0:39:36imagination populates the darkness with whatever might be making the noise and that's the sequence it's like embodied response imaginative representation exploration articulation that's how0:39:46information moves from the unknown to the known and an artists are the people who stand on that imagistic frontier and they and they put themselves out into0:39:55the unknown and they and they they take a piece of it and they and they transform it into some mythological image and they don't know what they're doing exactly because they're guided by0:40:05their intuition if they're real artists otherwise they're just propagandists they have to be contending with something they don't understand and what they do is they make it more understandable you know and and then0:40:15people gaze at those artworks or the or they listen to the stories and then they start to become informed by them but they don't know how or why I was at the0:40:24Modern Art Museum Museum of Art in New York I'm afraid I don't remember which one unfortunately but I was in this amazing room you know it had all these0:40:35priceless paintings from the from the late Renaissance hanging in it you know each painting worth who knows a billion dollars maybe they're priceless bathing0:40:44so the room was it's a shrine and it was full of people from all over the world who are looking at these paintings you think well what the hell are these people doing coming to this room looking0:40:53at these paintings look whatever what are they up to one of them was a painting of the Assumption of Mary right brilliantly composed and there rose all these people looking at it and I thought0:41:02what are they doing they don't know what that means like why are they looking at that painting why is it in this room why does it cost a billion dollars why is that painting worth so much and the0:41:11answer to that is well we don't really know like it happened there are there sacred objects in some sense and we gaze at them in ignorance and wonder and the reason for that is that the unknown0:41:21shines through the Madison in partially articulated form and so0:41:33well that's the role of art and that's the role of artists you know real0:41:43artists real artists are contending with unknown right and they're possessed by it they have a personality trait openness that makes them do that they can't even help it and I've had lots of0:41:53creative people in my clinical practice so they can tell you the worst thing for creative people is to not be creative because they just die and it because it's it's it's it's like maybe you're a0:42:04tree with a few major branches you know that's your personality so if you're extroverted man you can't be cut off from people because you just wither and0:42:13if you're agreeable you have to be in an intimate relationship or you die you know if you're conscientious man and you get and you're unemployed you're just gonna eat yourself up because you have0:42:22to have a duty and you have to carry a load because you just can't stand it otherwise and open people have to be creative they have to be because otherwise they die they don't have any0:42:31vitality and so they're cursed with the necessity of putting a foot out into the unknown and making sense of it and then they're also cursed necessity of trying0:42:41to make a living while they're doing that which they can't because you can't it's almost impossible to monetize creative creative action as many of you who are creative will no doubt find out0:42:50it's very very frustrating it's not that creative action is were without value right because the creative people are entrepreneurs and the creative people revitalize cities and the creative0:43:00people make things magnificent and beautiful you think about what's happened in Europe over the last thousand years say two thousand years this amazing unbelievable collaboration0:43:10to make things so beautiful that they're they're jaw-dropping when you walk into them and you think about the economic value of that right I mean I think it's0:43:19it's either France or Spain that's the most visited country in the world it's one of those two I think there's more tourists in France than there are people most of the time and part of the reason for that is it's just so damn beautiful0:43:28you just can't stand it and you think what's the economic value of that it's absolutely incalculable and what's interesting too is that you build that0:43:38beauty in and then the farther away you get from it in time the more valuable it becomes right instead of decaying it has exactly the opposite0:43:47it's value magnifies and one of the things that I'm deeply ashamed of as a Canadian is that our sense of beauty is so underdeveloped we're so primitive0:43:56it's not even primitive that's the wrong word because you know I don't what it is it's it's it's second rate it's second0:44:06rate at least it's terrorto because people are afraid of beauty but the idea that art is the conservatives really have a problem with this in particular because conservative people tend not to0:44:16be that creative and it's a misty restaurant it's a mystery to me because they should be concerned with economic development and beauty is so0:44:25unbelievably crucial to economic development it just yells out at you you know so anyway so that's what artists are doing and so one of the things I would say is buy a damn piece of art you0:44:35know find one that really speaks to you and and buy a piece of art because you invite that into your life and it's it's a look-out if you do it if it's a real0:44:44piece of art because you'll also get a you know a little introduction to the artist and then that'll seep into your life and that'll change things like mad but it's really it's unbelievably worth0:44:53it because it it opens your eyes to the domain of the transcendent that's the right way of thinking about a real piece of art is a window into the transcendent0:45:02that's what it is and you need that in your life because you're finite and limited and bounded right by your ignorance and your lack of knowing and unless you can make a connection to the0:45:12transcendent then you don't have the strength to prevail and that's part of the Covenant that's part of the covenant with God and you can see that because you look at these magnificent cathedrals0:45:22that our civilization built over the centuries you know some of those they're still building this Sangre de Familia in in in Barcelona right and it's an0:45:33amazing building I think it's gonna take them like 300 years to build that you know people in the Middle Ages they'd start building a cathedral and they think yeah we'll be done this in 300 years you know you imagine the vision0:45:44that it took to invest in something like that we look at quarterly reports we can't think 300 years into the future to build something of that kind of remarkable remarkable what those0:45:56cathedrals are so they're they're perfect they're trees first right they're a forest right the Gothic cathedrals there they were forced and the sun is shining through the branches that's the stained glass and they're the0:46:06perfect balance of light and structure because they're representing something about the proper structure of being which is something like the proper balance between light and structure and0:46:16and they represent like the sacred tragedy of mankind that's why they're in the shape of a cross and they're open to the sky that's why they have a dome and0:46:25they're full of gold so that glitters because that's like the City of God you know and and and you you can see that0:46:34that integral to to our culture is the idea that beauty is one pathway towards God and it's in its saying if you can't0:46:43find another pathway then why don't use beauty I sure most of you do that with music because music is the one thing that modern people can't be cynical about thank God for that and being0:46:52fascinated by music because of that it it speaks meaning to people right even nihilistic punk rockers are so damn engaged with their music that they can0:47:01hardly stand it and you can knock on them and say look you know you're having a transcendent religious experience and they'll just tell you to off because that's0:47:11[Applause] cuz that's that's what punk rock0:47:20yourself to do but but that's still what's happening you know I mean it's still what's happening so okay so okay0:47:30so I got into all that because I was talking about about the Bible as literature you know and and and trying to and trying to lay out because we need0:47:40in our culture to justify the arts and you have to I don't want to do that by talking about high culture talking about something abstract and evanescent that's0:47:50the wrong way to go about it this is vital you know like one of the things that's really interesting about the University of Toronto is that the the one side of the campus where we are is0:48:00beautiful medieval cathedral and the other side is god-awful factory and you know and and that and the thing is the0:48:10attitude towards knowledge has paralleled that architectural transformation you know at one point the humanities let's say we're a sacred0:48:19endeavor and and so was the art of being educated in the university and that's turned into like mass factory and that's reflected in the architecture this isn't accidental none of this happens none of0:48:30this happens by random chance you know it's not like there's a conspiracy or anything because there isn't but that doesn't mean that these things aren't tangled together and the loss of beauty0:48:39in the universities is a catastrophe because without that beauty there's no call to higher being you know you this is also why I've mentioned to people0:48:50that they should clean up their rooms that's become quite the internet meme but I'm really serious about it because it's really hard to do that and I've been cleaning up my room by the way for about four months now because my life0:49:00was thrown into such a catastrophe and and also we were renovating and so but it isn't just that you clean it up you also make it beautiful and beauty hard0:49:09to make something beautiful and it's really worthwhile and what's really cool is if you learn to make something beautiful even one thing if you can just make one thing in your life beautiful0:49:18then you've established a relationship with beauty and then you can start to expand that relationship with beauty out into into the world like into other0:49:27elements of your life and that is so worthwhile it's just incredibly crazily worthwhile and that's an invitation to the divine you know you have to be daring to do that and people0:49:37are terrified of it people are terrified of color they paint their walls beige they're terrified of art they buy some mass-produced thing because they don't want anybody laughing at them for their0:49:46lack of taste and they would get laughed at because they have no taste but you have to well that's right because what do you know right you have to develop it and so you're gonna stumble along and0:49:55make mistakes to begin with and you're gonna show yourself because if you buy who I I think this is pretty and you know somebody comes over he goes hey what's up with you it's kind of hard on0:50:04yourself esteem but but it's a stunt you're stumbling towards the right you're stumbling towards the kingdom of God that's what you're stumbling towards0:50:14when you try to make an aesthetic decision and to put something in your life that's beautiful and it's unbelievably worthwhile to do that and you have to steer clear of the frauds and the con artists and all of that and0:50:24art is full of that of course because it's difficult to distinguish between the real thing and the fraud but but it's unbelievably worthwhile and so back to literature I'm telling you this0:50:35partly because I've been thinking a lot about the humanities and the arts and practically speaking because I know that0:50:44artistic types are also entrepreneurial types they're the same personality types and so it's very much worthwhile to make an economic and practical case for this sort of thing you study literature in0:50:54the humanities so that you can familiarize yourself with the wisdom of our civilization man you should do that because people have been working on this thing for a long time and it's rich0:51:04beyond comparison so why wouldn't you do that and you teach yourself to to read and you teach yourself to speak and you teach yourself to think and you teach0:51:13yourself to communicate and I can tell you if you can read and think and communicate you are absolutely 100% unstoppable and that's another thing0:51:24that's so interesting about humanities education that's at the core of the university it's like there's nothing more economically valuable than teaching people how to articulate themselves and communicate because they can identify0:51:34problems they can formulate solutions they can negotiate to consensus they they can negotiate on their own behalf on the behalf of others it's like absolutely no downside to it except that0:51:45there's a responsibility that goes along with it but it doesn't matter because there's no escape from responsibility you can either take it voluntarily or0:51:54you can take it involuntarily those are your options but there aren't any other options and so we need to understand the role of art and literature and and stop thinking about it as an option it's not0:52:03an option it's not an option what is it said man does not live by bread alone that's exactly right we live by beauty we live by literature we live by art and literally not0:52:14metaphorically we cannot live without it because life is too dismal and and and tragic in the absence of the sublime so and ourselves we have to be sharp so0:52:25that we can survive properly and orient the world properly and not destroy things including ourselves and so and so back to the Bible which I do think is a0:52:35reasonable it's reasonably construed as a piece of literature because it's deep and because the people who wrote it had at least one foot in the unknowable and they're trying to communicate what they0:52:45experienced in the unknowable to make it known and that's partly what we're trying to do in this series and what you're trying to do while you're listening and all of that and so good0:52:55for that and also that nation whom they shall serve I will judge and afterward they'll come out with great substance there'll be a period of tyranny you know0:53:05and there's a psychological truth to that too one of the things I learned from reading Nietzsche because you can learn a lot from reading Nietzsche that's for sure he he talked about the0:53:14Catholic Church you know Nietzsche is often construed as a great critic of Christianity and and he certainly was but he was no casual critic in fact I0:53:23think he was this sort of critic that you'd like to have as a friend because he was the sort of critic that said well here's the great things you've done and that you could keep doing but here's a bunch of really neat things0:53:32that you did that you really should stop doing and he talked about the Catholic Church and he said what the Catholic Church had done to the European mind in0:53:41particular was discipline it so that over a period of a thousand years thirteen hundred years fourteen hundred years there was this rule that there was0:53:51a conceptual structure within which you had to interpret everything and what that did was turn the European educated you European mind into a0:54:00systematizing cognitive entity and that once that systematizing cognitive entity had been established then it could free itself from those underlying disciplinary structures and go off and0:54:10do such things as produced the Scientific Revolution for example which required incredible systematic thinking and so Nietzsche had this really0:54:19interesting idea about freedom and he believed that slavery was an intermediary between the undeveloped individual and the free individual that you had to you had to submit yourself to0:54:30some intense disciplinary process for some period of time in your life before you could develop any true freedom and so you think maybe you want to learn to play the piano it's like that's not0:54:39gonna be any fun for a really long period of time right because you're really bad at it and there's a million things you have to memorize and you have to stumble around like a well like an0:54:49amateur and the same thing happens when kids learn how to read and some of them never get past that point and they never get to the point where they can enjoy reading but in order to put yourself together you have to put yourself in a0:54:58vise and allow yourself to be constricted and mangled even by the the thing that enslaves you but the goal should be that as a consequence of0:55:07submitting to the discipline that you become disciplined and then once you become disciplined you can emerge from the disciplinary structure as someone who is free and that's something that's0:55:16very much worth thinking about as well so that's Illustrated conceptually in this in this piece of literature let's0:55:26say because what what the psychological meaning of what God tells Abraham is that all people all people are subject0:55:35and I mean not equally obviously all people are subject to the tyranny that precedes freedom and that that ideas is repeated over and over in the old0:55:45testament it comes out most particularly in the story of moses right because of course that's the story of movement from tyranny where do you go from a tyranny it's an absolute catastrophe you go from0:55:54materi into the desert you know where you starve that's harsh that's what happens in the in the story of Exodus and so that's so interesting too because0:56:03what it means is that sometimes if you're going to move uphill the first thing that happens is you move down hill a lot and so if you want to escape from the straights that bind you0:56:14now you're not going to move forward and go up you're gonna move forward and go down and that's another reason this is also something that you talked about a lot is that you know on the road to0:56:23enlightenment you encounter all the things that you don't want to encounter first like all the weaknesses of yourself all the realizations of the tyranny of the world and the catastrophe0:56:32of nature and all of that and so you step out of your encapsulation you're ignorant encapsulation and its immediate plummet into something that's a desert let's say where everything is chaotic0:56:42and where you're wandering around without direction a real catastrophe so it's you know because one of the things you might ask yourself is that if enlightenment is possible then why0:56:52aren't people enlightened because if it was just a matter of going from a good place to a better place it's like well man let's just get at it it's no it's no problem right why would we ever stop doing that but it0:57:03seems not to be that it's that you're here and that's not good and it's unstable and you step out of it it's like down down to where you don't want to be and you have to contend with that0:57:13and then maybe you can start your struggle upward and so ever how God is telling Abraham this and he's also telling him that it's okay it's rough though and now and now shall go to thy0:57:24fathers in peace thou shalt be buried in a good old age but in the fourth generation they shall come hither again that's the Israelites the descendants of Abraham for the iniquity of the amorite0:57:34says not yet full God is going to leave the tyrants alone until they've manifested their fold here any for reasons that we don't fully understand0:57:46and it came to pass that when the Sun went down it was dark behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between the pieces all Albert Barnes0:57:55said the oven of smoke and lamp aflame symbolized the smoke of destruction which we've already talked about this catastrophe of of the initial stages and0:58:04the light of salvation they're passing through the pieces of the victims and probably consuming them as an accepted sacrifice or the ratification of the Covenant on the part of God as the0:58:13dividing and presenting of them were on the part of Abram in the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying unto thy seed I've given this land from0:58:22the river of Egypt to the great river euphrates now sarai abram's wife bear him no children and she had a handmaid an Egyptian whose0:58:32name was Hagar so this is a big catastrophe for Abraham especially in those times and perhaps now as much although perhaps people aren't as0:58:42conscious of it as they once were I mean for Abraham without a biological son there was no there was no there was no0:58:51vision forward into the future you know and I mean we don't really know what sort of time span over which these archaic people thought but the medieval people we already said could think 3000:59:01years into the future without without batting an eye and these people who were who were concerned about their descendants were obviously thinking about existence in a way that wasn't0:59:10just focused on their immediate existence right they were thinking about well their children in the grandchildren maybe their great-grandchildren maybe the whole society that that stemmed out0:59:19from them and that's that's smart you know one of the things I learned from Piaget at least in part was that his idea of the equilibrated state which he thought about as partly part of the0:59:29biological basis of the idea of moral progress it's something like that he was a very very smart Piaget and we said that the the proper equilibrated state0:59:38is one where imagine you have a family you've got five people in it and you're doing what you want and you're in your family what's good for you but you're doing it in such a way so that the other four members of your family agree with0:59:48what you do and that it also facilitates them doing what they want and what they should be doing and so it's a really tricky arrangement because it isn't just for you it's for you in a way that's for0:59:58them and you could also see that that would be something that would be a multiplier right because if you have everyone working voluntarily towards the1:00:07same common goal then you get a multiplying effect of that and then you might think well it's not just you and your family it's you and your family1:00:17today and next week in next month next year and ten years from now so you have to take the time span into account and then it should be you and your family in a way that works well in society and1:00:26then it should work well now and next week and next year and into the future it should be iterative all right that's like sustainability at something like the idea of sustainability and that's1:00:35that's I would say that's a reasonable way of conceptualizing the holy city it's it's something like that you know if you're trying to make it concrete it's like how1:00:44should you live your life well let's say you live your life in a manner that justifies its limitation and tragedy that's a good start but then let's say that it does that in a way that also1:00:53reduces the limitations and suffering of the people that you interact with and now and into the future well maybe there's a way to do that I mean a good1:01:02negotiation does that right because if you're negotiating with someone like your wife for example what you want is for her to agree with the negotiation and one of the things that Piaget said1:01:12which I think was brilliant brilliant he said if you take an equilibrated system a family let's say and a dis equilibrate it system so that would be one way or1:01:21let's say the father is a tyrant and everyone is operating under his whip and you put them in a head-to-head competition the equilibrated system will1:01:30out-compete the disequilibrium system because the enforcement cost is such that it will slow the system down you know because you'll get resistances from the people inside the system they'll1:01:40work in the system we'll be working at counter purposes to itself plus there's enforcement costs and so a tyranny cannot beat an elaborated system and I was really excited to encounter that1:01:50idea because when I encountered it I was also trying to figure out if there was some quantitative difference between the system say of the Soviet Union and1:02:00Maoist China and the systems of the West apart from just you know arbitrary world interpretation as the postmodern nihilists might have it if there was something fundamental at stake in the1:02:10terrible Cold War that we fought or it was just a matter of opinion you know when the PIA jetty intake was that well roughly speaking is that the1:02:19West was an equilibrated system no I'm perfectly equilibrated but reasonably equilibrate in that people were essentially even if they were slaves to some degree they were at least voluntary1:02:29slaves instead of involuntary slaves and that that was better the system was actually technically better and not just as a matter of interpretation so that's1:02:38a lovely thing to know and I think it's a really really solid really really solid idea I haven't been able to you know put crowbars under that idea and lift it up I think it's a good one so1:02:49now sarai abram's wife bear him no children so okay back to children muscle one of what one of the things that's worth thinking about with regards to reading these old stories because we're1:02:59so not we're very arrogant modern people i we look at these old stories and you think hey we've transcended all that superstition it's like don't be so bloody sure about that these people weren't stupid and so there's there are1:03:11ways that they viewed the world that we don't have anymore and one of them seems to be this concern for descendants because that just isn't part of our way1:03:21of thinking we have a very short-term way of thinking maybe it's it's not even one lifetime long it's certainly not multiple lifetimes long and it isn't clear to me at all that that's for the1:03:30best and you know the the constant complaint that the environmentalists generate some of which is justified in some of which is just anti-capitalist anti-patriotic nonsense that should be1:03:40cleared out of that entire conversation is that we need to take a longer view and consider more things in our purview when we act and like that fair enough1:03:49like do we really want a notion that has nothing in it but jellyfish because that's really what we're doing and we're doing it very very rapidly and the data on that are very clear and so you know1:04:00when you lift up your eyes and you make a connection with something that's transcendent then that should bring more of the world within your purview and and maybe that's concern for the endless1:04:09number of descendants that you might have might think - well you know if you're a successful person if you have a successful family god only knows how many people you will be the father of1:04:19right it's completely because you're a nexus right all sorts of things have come together in the cosmos to produce you and then all things sorts of things1:04:28manifest themselves from you you have no idea what your potential the potential consequences of your actions might be as they cascade across time right you have1:04:38no idea and so Abraham at least is concerned with these sorts of things and God seems to be concerned too because he promises Abraham that if he maintains the covenant that the most important1:04:48things that he needs will come to him and they're pretty serious about this so Sarai talks to Abram she's not very happy about the fact that she can't have1:04:58children she says behold now the LORD hath restrained me from bearing I pray they go in unto my maid it may be that I obtain children by her and Abram1:05:08hearkened to the voice of Sarai well that's not a very trivial thing I wouldn't think I don't imagine that that Sarah was sir I was very happy about turning her maid over to her husband and1:05:18potentially being usurped in the whole childbearing in the whole childbearing process not in the least but you know so it's also a major sacrifice on Sarai's1:05:28part there's no doubt about that and of course it's very difficult for us to talk about the ethics of the fact that Hagar was a more or less involuntary participant in this but that was the1:05:38times absolutely the case and of course slavery and indentured servitude is the way of mankind except in very very very very limited circumstances Carl Jung had1:05:48something to say about that to which I really liked he said that part of the reason that modern people have it's not the only reason there's the Industrial Revolution obviously but part of the reason that1:05:59modern people have been able to escape from the catastrophe of tyranny and slavery is because we've agreed to make ourselves our own slaves right so1:06:08instead of owning a slave you own yourself in a sense and so you trot yourself off to work and exploit yourself so that you can stay alive and maybe it's not something that you want1:06:17to do but you've taken on the role of slave in some sense in relationship to your own survival instead of forcing someone else to do it which is also something I think that's very noble about the West is that we're willing to1:06:28enslave ourselves as individuals and we're not we're not doing that to other people no we're doing it to some degree obviously because the society is imperfect but that's something that's very much worth thinking about1:06:38so Ann Abram hearkened to the voice of Saroyan and Sarai Abrams wife took Hagar her made the Egyptian after Abram had1:06:48dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife that's the other thing that been so interesting about doing this one1:06:57of the other things about doing this biblical series and it's one of the things that's so cool about Google despite the fact that they cut off my account you can find any piece of art1:07:10that ever existed on Google and so that's great so you know when I'm trying to illustrate these these lectures I type in Abraham Renaissance and then like I get1:07:20200 Renaissance paintings it's so great and then I can look at them and one of the other things that's so remarkable is that all of these the major themes of these stories have been illustrated by1:07:29people of spectacular mind mind expanding talent you know there's just this endless array of well look at that1:07:41I mean that's an amazing painting and so and there's and and of this there's there's dozens of paintings on this1:07:50theme and it's just another indication of how obsessed people you know this was the only book that existed for years and people were absolutely obsessed by it and produced all these amazing things1:08:00from it and we're in danger of losing that and that's a big mistake because it's magnificent a little humility would go a long way towards restoring it and1:08:10he went in done unto Hagar and she conceived and when she saw that she had conceived her mistress was despised in her eyes1:08:19so I Hagar was successful and like that was a hallmark of feminine success now and certainly then and so she started to1:08:30lord it over Sarai which seemed a little bit on the ungrateful side I would say because Sarai made a big sacrifice to allow Hagar to become Abraham's wife and1:08:40so a little bit of gratitude would have been an order I suppose at least that's how the story goes and Sarai said unto Abram my wrong be upon thee I have given1:08:50my maid into thy bosom and when she saw that she had conceived I was despised in her eyes the Lord judge between you and I and Abraham said unto Sarai behold thy1:09:02maid is in thine hand do to her as it pleases you and when Sarai dealt hardly with her Hagar fled from her face and the angel of the Lord found her by a1:09:11fountain of water in the wilderness by the fountain in the way - sure and he said Hagar Sarai's maid whence camest thou and whither wilt thou go and she said I flee from the face of my mistress1:09:21right and the angel of the Lord said returned to thy mistress and submit under her hands and the angel said I will multiply your seed exceedingly and1:09:30shall not be numbered for multitude and the angel said behold thou art with child and thou shalt thou shalt bear a son and shalt shall call his name Ishmael and Ishmael means God here's by1:09:41the way because the LORD hath heard thy affliction and he'll be a wild man his hand will be against every man and every man's hand against him and he should dwell in the presence of all his1:09:50brothers and she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her thou God seest me for she said have I also here looked1:09:59after him that cioth me wherefore the wall well was called beer-lahai-roi and that means the well have seized me and lives it's an interesting interlude1:10:09because you know Abraham God has established this covenant with Abraham and obviously things are going wrong in the household in a really serious way like a really serious way because well1:10:20he's now had a child by another woman and that the two women are not getting along and one is beating the other because of her insubordination and and1:10:29contempt and so she's so desperate she runs out into the desert where she's probably going to die and God comes along and says anyways to to to to Hagar1:10:41that her son shall as well be the father of Nations and so that's partly a reflection back on the power of Abraham's covenant right even though even though things are going terribly1:10:51wrong locally let's say the fact that Abraham has made this overarching agreement with God means that all of these catastrophes are taking place within a bounded space with an ark we1:11:02could say that's one way of looking about it and I do think I do think that that's right because it seems to me that you know if everything falls apart around you there's there's a couple of1:11:13things you're gonna want you're gonna want someone standing beside you that's for sure that you can trust you're gonna want your family around you and you want gonna want them to have your back1:11:22and you're gonna want to know that you didn't do some goddamn stupid thing to bring all hell down on yourself and if you're locking any of those when that1:11:31crisis comes there's a high probability it will flatten you and you won't be able to get up you know it does seem to me you can ask yourself this question when things collapse around you how much1:11:42utility is knowledge of your own moral virtue that's bad enough to be late it's bad to be laid load but to be laid low and to know that you were a1:11:51fault you were at fault for it and worse the things that you did that you knew you did that we're wrong brought you there then I think you have nothing to1:12:00stand on in that situation and that's also the circumstances under which I think you're more more likely at least to be abandoned by people around you so given that you know that the catastrophe1:12:11is coming right that the tragedy of life will strike you the question is well how do you fortify yourself against that and all obviously it's to some degree you do1:12:20that by being materially sensible and these old people in the test in the old testament these ancient people they weren't blind to the utility of having a good crop and some animals you know that1:12:30that's a that's an integral part of their life to take care of themselves physically but they're also wise enough to know that there's an element of moral1:12:39this what would you call it there's a necessity for moral integration that defends you against the catastrophe of existence even more effectively than1:12:50anything material and even more that the stability of the material things is more dependent on the integrity of your spirit than the integrity of your spirit1:12:59is dependent on the material things and I think the evidence for that is actually quite clear I read it read a very interesting book a while back called the wealth and poverty of Nations1:13:08that was written by a Harvard emeritus professor of history and one of the things that he claimed I liked it I thought it was very smart was that the only true natural resource is1:13:18interpersonal trust if you can set up a society where people trust each other then it will instantly become rich and he used the example of Japan which is a very conscientious society and very rich1:13:29society but the Japanese have no natural resources right none to speak of and yet they're rich and then you have countries like the Soviet Russia and and much of1:13:38South America where there's just natural resources that you know they're just like Venezuela just more natural resources than you know what to do with and the places are absolute catastrophes1:13:48absolute catastrophes of cynicism and corruption and so he attempted to document the relationship between default interpersonal trust1:13:58among citizens within countries and their their productivity in their GDP and their their standard of living and found a very very tight relationship and1:14:07and I like that a lot and I've got a story about that quickly that I think is very interesting I'll tell you two stories one sort of generic well I'll1:14:17tell you one personal first so one day I lent my car to one of my graduate students and he took it to Montreal this old Cadillac and mmm1:14:26he got it was a really bad rainstorm in Montreal and he was in one of the highways that are like set into the ground and there was like six inches of water and he was turning a corner hit1:14:36the brakes and skidded on the water and smacked it into the wall and on the corner of the of the bumper you know and so then he brought it back and he was very apologetic about it and and his1:14:46name was Matt Shane tell you that because Matt might hear this and I could shame him a bit for doing this 20 years ago you know and he's a professor at the1:14:56Ontario Institute of Technology I think now quite a successful one but anyways he brought the car back and I went and got it evaluated for damages it was like1:15:05$1,700 or something to repair it and or maybe more but it was almost as much as the car was worth I thought well I'm not gonna do that so I went online and I1:15:16typed in the part and if you do that you can get people to bid on sending you a used part from all over North America so that's kind of cool so there's all these1:15:25junk dealers have got together and they have this you know network of communication so you put in the car part and then they send you a bid and so this guy said well I'll send you the bumper1:15:34assembly which is the whole bumper and the lights for like 250 bucks and I thought yeah okay you could do that that'd be good so then I said yes and then he called me up about half an hour1:15:46later this guy from way down south he had a really deep sort of Mississippi accent he said wait a sec was that for the bumper or the bumper assembly and I said well it was for the bumper assembly1:15:56he said oh I thought it was for the bumper and then he said but that's ok I'll send it to you anyways I thought well that's pretty good so I said well thank you and then I hung up and then half an hour later he called me up again1:16:06and he said look I just went out and looked at that bumper assembly and there's a plastic trim piece on the side and it has a scratch in it and I thought I'd better tell you that just in case you1:16:15you didn't want it I thought wow that's so amazing it's like there's a miracle man it's like this guy he's somewhere in Mississippi I'm never gonna see him1:16:24again ever I'm never gonna have any contact with him like he made a bad deal right because the part was worth more than he decided to sell it to me forever but he stuck with his deal and then he1:16:34went over and above the call of duty he said well this part that I'm selling you to you for way less than it's worth is damaged so I thought I'd better tell you it's like man you got to recognize a1:16:44miracle when you see one that was a miracle so I said hey look it's thanks for calling man it's okay I can handle the scratch said the part needed and and1:16:53I got the car fixed and forgave Matt and you know it had a happy ending so so that's trust right because I1:17:02didn't know him from Adam and he's a primate full of snakes just like the rest of us and yet he was willing to simplify himself to the point where I could just take him absolutely at his1:17:11word and that meant we could trade even though we were strangers it's like man do not underestimate the utility of that and then there's eBay so when he Bay first started you know the idea was it's1:17:21not gonna work because you'll send me junk and I'll send you a check that bounces and that'll be the end of eBay right and so these escrow agents popped1:17:30up so you could ensure your transaction with them for like 10% of the transaction they would get the check and the goods and make sure that they were okay and then send them on or ensure the1:17:40transaction but what happened was the escrow agents didn't make any money and the reason for that was no one cheated now you think about how amazing that is1:17:49right you bring these people together across a whole continent they've never seen each other before they're never going to interact with each other again and this was before there were any reputation ratings on eBay and yet the1:17:59default transaction was you describe your goods honestly including their flaws you set a reasonable price I decide to pay you you ship the goods and I pay you and it1:18:10works and what happened was that eBay produced it produced a tremendous amount of capital that was previously frozen so frozen capital is when you've invested1:18:20money in something but the thing is no longer useful to you so the money is just sitting there free right so to speak and you can't get it1:18:29loose because well you've got attic full of junk how are you gonna get rid of that Oh II may and so all of a sudden all these things that were just junk became valuable and everybody got richer1:18:39and none of that wouldn't it would have happened without the covenant that we established between each other that's predicated on trust and so you might say that trust is the currency and currency1:18:49is trust because it's a promissory note right and if people lie then the currency gets to based very very rapidly and so the economy runs on trust and so1:19:00that's part of the overarching covenant so abraham makes this covenant with god1:19:09and he decides that he's gonna aim high and live a good life and tell the truth and that puts this boundary around him it's like a walled garden it's like a1:19:19walled garden and the inside there there's all sorts of things that are happening that are complex and difficult but outside there's a boundary and the boundary is well maybe things won't it's1:19:31like God says after the flood he says I'll never send a flood again that's part of the story and so there's an intimation there that no matter how bad things get they won't get so bad that1:19:40they'll be catastrophic but there's a but there's a coded to that which is that you have to maintain the covenant and we don't know what that means you1:19:51know because you know what you think it's pretty obvious that if you treat people well if you really think about it and you're not being naively optimistic1:20:00and like you know a nice good person with all the weakness that that that that that that intimates of your being1:20:11hard-nosed and sensible you understand that if you treat people if you trust people that's an act of courage if you're not naive right if1:20:21you're naive it's an act of stupidity because you might get bit and you probably will and if you're not even you get bit you will suffer for it it'll traumatize you but if you're not naive1:20:30and you know you can get bit then you might ask well what should you do with people and the answer is you should trust them and not because you're naive and not because they couldn't betray you1:20:39and not because you don't know that they could betray oh but because if you hold out your hand in trust then you're inviting the best part of that person to step forward and that won't happen unless you1:20:48take that initial step and that's courage not naivety and so to trust someone once your eyes are open that's an act of courage and that opens up the world you know when you might say okay1:21:06and so there's this idea in this story that you can withstand it a fair bit of the catastrophe of life by establishing the proper covenant and by acting in a1:21:17trustworthy manner and extending your hand to people properly and you might say well okay that's sensible I can understand how that would work and I can certainly see how the opposite wouldn't1:21:26work because you know if I have to be absolutely terrified that you're gonna betray me at every possible moment and we're in a negotiation we're not gonna get any work done man because I'm gonna1:21:36be figuring out what you're up to all the time and you're gonna be figuring out what I'm up to all the time and we're just not going to get anywhere you'll come and say you're gonna do something and I can just simplify you I1:21:45can say you're gonna do what you said you do I don't have to worry about you and then the same applies to me and then we can go do something and that's how we generate wealth so then you might say1:21:54well if what's the ultimate limit of that you know like we know that there's corruption in our society that people betray each other there's deceit and all of that and it causes things like the1:22:04periodic collapse in 2008 which was complicated but was partly engendered by corruption like what would be the OP side if we acted if we really determined1:22:14to act honestly what do you think it is that people would be able to do with the world if we stopped acting in a corrupt manner I mean what what's the like what1:22:23what is the ops I do you think we could could could how far back could we push aging do you think if we hit it hard for 50 years can we triple our lifespan it1:22:33wouldn't surprise me you know all these terrible diseases that beset the planet we could get rid of them there's no reason for hunger and starvation we make enough food it's like what would happen1:22:44if we stopped acting badly how much better could things get well you start locally I think you start with yourself and you start with your family but you1:22:54know there's intimations of the divine there's intimations of the kingdom of God and the covenant with God in the Old Testament it's like you think well we1:23:03speak secularly you think well that's an unprovable assumption it's like well we'll just hold on a sec what's the Assumption here exactly what is the operon for Humanity1:23:14I mean who's who's gonna say right who's gonna say especially in this day and age man there's so many things happening that you can't even comprehend them what could we do if we put all of our effort1:23:23into it well you can experiment with that because you can start in your own household you can start in your own room and you could make miracles happen in the confines of your own space there's1:23:33no doubt about that all you have to do is try you'll see that that happens it happens and people are writing to me and telling me that they're trying this and that that's exactly what's happening and so so we1:23:45don't want to be too cynical about about where we might be headed and Hagar bore Abram a son Abram called his son's name which hagar bear ismael who is by1:23:55tradition the forefather of several Arab nations and of Muhammad himself and Abram was four score and six years old when Hagar bare Ishmael to Abram so1:24:07that's the end of another story and then so that section ends and then again we have an encounter between Abraham and God who and Abram was ninety years old1:24:16and nine 99 years old the Lord appeared to them and said I'm the Almighty God walk before me and be thou perfect1:24:32Alexander McLaren who was a biblical commentator who lived in the early 19th century said this phrase walking before1:24:42God is not precisely walking with God because that's what Noah did right he says it's rather that of an act of life spent in continual consciousness of1:24:52being naked and opened before the eyes of him to have whom we have to give account I was pretty happy to stumble across that because it I mean I might have picked and chosen of course you1:25:02never know that whether you do that but it does seem in keeping with the narrative strain of the chapter right because what we've I bought this eye so far is that God is called Abraham and1:25:11said you know get out there in the world go go to where it's unknown go to where you're a stranger and get away from the familiar go out to the unknown establish1:25:20yourself and great things will come of it regardless of the proximal evidence great things will come of it and so I think that's what the walking before God refers to it's not like Abraham is1:25:30acting in certainty there's no certainty here that's the act of the leap of faith even because it does require a leap of faith for you to move into the world because the world is a catastrophe1:25:39self-evidently the world is a catastrophe and so there's there's there's every reason for you to assume that you should sit in your basement and1:25:49hide from it but that's that's not it doesn't help it doesn't make things better and the thing is perhaps you're not built for that you're not built to hide I don't think that people are built to hide I think it destroys them and so1:26:01walking before God in some sense means that Abraham is we could say is taking the lead he's the person that's going out there until the unknown God says well the great things are gonna happen1:26:11he's a little short on details that's for sure so the wait is still on Abraham and that's a good thing because it also that a noble's Abraham right that's the other thing that's so cool is that if God had just laid out the whole story1:26:21and and and you know brush the branches from Abraham's path while he was walking forward well then there'd be nothing for Abraham to do there'd be no nobility in1:26:30his own pursuit and this is another thing that we don't understand very well it's a really tough thing to understand it's like how much trouble would you want there not to be it's a weird1:26:41question right because you want to have something to contend with you want to have something that that forces from you the best that you have and so you have to have real problems it's something1:26:51like that would you dispense with all your real but you could just lay down on a bed have pablum infused into your mouth you know if all your problems were solved and so maybe you want difficult1:27:02problems that you can solve something like that because there's some I don't know what it is about it there's there's the overcoming and and the growth that comes along with that there's something1:27:11about the nobility of the enterprise you certainly see that when you go about having children for example which is you know the psychological literature is quite clear if if you do moment-to-moment comparisons of people1:27:21who have kids and people who don't have kids the people who don't have kids are happier and so psychologists who tend to get things wrong even when they make intelligent discoveries like that one1:27:31immediately some of them jump to the conclusion that because happiness is the goal that well there's something about children that you know make you unhappy1:27:40and that's not good it's like well wait a second and maybe that's the wrong metric it's like of course you're less happy once you have children because you have to worry1:27:49about them you know my neighbor down the street who's very smart woman said to me once you can only be as happy as your unhappiest child and which I thought it was really good you know that's really1:27:59smart but then it isn't well if having children doesn't make you happy the answer isn't don't have children it's like don't be so stupid about being happy that's the answer it's because1:28:08there's a nobility in the pursuit right and of course now you're responsible you know who you have a new baby you think especially if you're a new parent you think what the hell is this is what am I1:28:19gonna do with it you know it's like and then you're you're done for the rest of your life you never sleep properly again because you're gonna be worried about this creature that you have to take care1:28:29of and but like what the hell good are you if you're not doing that or it's something else equally difficult because you just you just haven't been called out yet unless you take on a1:28:39responsibility like that the idea that life is you know that happiness is the purpose of life it's like great for happiness man if it comes along you1:28:48should be thrilled that it's visiting you but the notion that that's that that's what you should pursue that's that's the weakest possible notion first1:28:57of all as soon as something terrible happens to you you're done it's like life is to be happy it's like well now you have cancer so how's that how's the happiness thing working out for you now1:29:08or maybe it's not you you know maybe it's your father that held a Alzheimer's disease or some damn thing and you know it's like it's a rare person that doesn't have some cat-tastrophe one one1:29:19person away from them it's like life is to be happy it's that's not right and and we can at least derive that from these stories that isn't what they say at all God's perfectly happy in this1:29:29stories to grant the people with whom he forms a covenant happiness and prosperity but there's never a word that that's the purpose that the rule is aim1:29:38high and get your bloody act together that's the rule and establish this contractual covenant with the ultimate ideal and that will see you through the catastrophes and that's a much more1:29:48mature way of looking at life as far as I'm concerned because all you have to do is have your eyes half open and you see that the fundamental reality of life is tragedy and suffering there's that's1:29:58inescapable the quest that doesn't mean that it it makes life unbearable or that it makes being something that shouldn't have existed right that isn't what it means1:30:08but it means that you have to contend with it and you have to get ready and the willingness to adopt responsibility for yourself and for others is is the1:30:17precondition for that and and then maybe if you do that properly then now and then you get some happiness you know you can sit at the end of the day and you have half an hour where your conscience1:30:26is clear and there's nothing that you need to be doing and you can relax and think you know that's all right things are okay and thank God for that and that's that's maybe where you get your1:30:35happiness so and that's something that's growing up man obviously and and to not know that and to not be taught that like1:30:45everyone should be taught that it's so obvious we should be taught that well and that's partly what these biblical stories do and I'll make my covenant1:30:54between me and thee and we'll multiply the exceedingly and Abram fell on his face yea and God talked with him saying as for me behold my covenant is with1:31:05thee and thou shalt be a father of many nations God says this alot taébem right it's almost like he has to remind him now and then and it's not surprising because he keeps going through these1:31:14unbelievable adventures you know that are really psychologically and socially shattering so it's a good thing that this reminder pops up in it and fairly1:31:23frequently but of course Abraham is also open to it and I think what does it mean you know I'll talk personally for a1:31:32moment I guess so I've asked myself a lot of questions in the last eight months man I can tell you that and I'm still asking myself a lot of questions and I've been conferring with a lot of1:31:42people I had lots of people who were helping me negotiate whatever the hell this is that's happening and you know I could ask them how it was doing and they1:31:51would tell me a bunch of things I was doing wrong and some things I was doing right and I could listen to them and I was asking questions all the time about how the hell I should manage this properly and you know what what I was1:32:03trying to do and what seemed to serve me properly was to figure out how to do it correctly that was the issue it's like I didn't really care what happened and I1:32:12guess I really don't care what and said but I do care if I do it correctly because I don't want to screw it up I don't want to screw things up and that seems to be a reasonable goal1:32:21for people I mean wouldn't you like that as a goal that you don't screw things up because you can't control - you know your life isn't fully under your control by any stretch of the imagination but it1:32:32might be nice to - not have your conscience eating at you saying look you know you had a big opportunity there and you mucked it up because you're weak and blind and you didn't listen that's no1:32:43good the cast the catastrophe is bad enough as I said without you being the bloody source of it and so well that's1:32:55Abram falling on his face I guess and also communing with God it's like you don't he wants to get it right he wants to get it right and there's these these1:33:04things that beckon and promise but but it's it's bloody easy to make a catastrophic mistake and he'll do that in your life you know and and maybe1:33:17humility is one of the things that can prevent that because you can look and you can think okay what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what can I do better how could I do this properly and then maybe you know you get you get you1:33:29get the intimation of the proper way to move forward and maybe that's what protects you when things are chaotic and and in strife and who knows what that's worth neither shall thy name anymore be1:33:41called Abram which means high king if I remember correctly but thy name shall be Abraham for a father of many nations have I made thee oh yes Abram for high1:33:50father look at that Abraham means father of a multitude and I will make the exceedingly fruitful and I will make nations have the productive right productive and that seems to be1:34:00something that's that's good to be I mean like one of the things that I've thought about deeply I thought deeply about death and the death of my family1:34:09members and about funerals and I thought about it partly because I had this weird experience once that I think I told you about where I took one of my clients to see an embalming which is very strange1:34:18experience and I had a chance to talk to the funeral directors you know because they have weird jobs you know there's this idea well the Freudian idea that1:34:27people saw for from this terrible death anxiety and there's a whole line of social psychological theory theorizing called terror management theory that's predicated on the idea that we defend1:34:36ourselves against death anxiety with our belief systems and like it's a puppet Ernest Becker's idea he wrote the denial of death which is a great book but there's a weakness in it1:34:45because you see some people who aren't like that you know like emergency room nurses aren't like that and palliative care nurses aren't like that my sister-in-law's a palliative care nurse that's a hard job right because you go1:34:56in there you're caring for people you have and they're in pain and they're in the last legs you're trying to make them comfortable and you have a relationship with them because how the hell are you gonna make them comfortable if you don't1:35:05and then they go and die on you and that just happens that's what happens every day right and what's weird is that people can be palliative care nurses it's like how do you figure that out1:35:14because people can actually thrive in the face of death strangely enough and like these funeral parlor directors they were interesting to talk to because that's all they do right they just deal with they deal with1:35:25death and grief all the time and it was very interesting talking to them because I talked to two of them they found their job extremely meaningful and I asked1:35:34them well you know does that what does that do to your life you know you're saturated with death and suffering and there and this is the same answer that I got from the palliative care nurse is1:35:44that it doesn't undermine your life it enriches it now who would guess that right I mean what the hell that just doesn't make any sense at all but what1:35:54it does is speak to human possibility because god only knows how tough you are you know I mean if you read history and you read about what people have done you think wow we're pretty tough people are1:36:04I read there is a shipwreck in the Antarctica hundred years ago is so and I1:36:14read the story it's not a biography if I remember correctly of the of the captain I might be wrong about that but I've got the basic story right well they had a1:36:24shipwreck in the Antarctica was then they were there for a whole year in the Antarctica you know and none of them died not one II didn't lose a single man1:36:33not one he kept their morale high and then they took this boat that was on the ship and they crossed like 400 miles of the roughest ocean the first frigid ocean in the world right1:36:43you don't go in that ocean and then they went to an island and they walked across the island across these mountains that no one else has ever climbed since and1:36:53they went to the city on the other side of the island they got a boat and went rescued their compatriots and everyone survived it's like endurance is the name of the1:37:02book you read that book man you think wow people are really tough you know and it's ridiculous so who knows how tough1:37:11you are and maybe you find out by going out to find out how tough you are right so you take on a challenge one that you think you can master just it's1:37:20just a bit beyond your grasp and you master it and then you're a little tougher and you think hey that worked out pretty well and so then you're more of a monster and then you go out and you find another challenge that's even1:37:30bigger and you think well maybe I can do that too and then all of a sudden you can and you get a little bit bigger and god only knows what the limit is of you and you find out by pushing yourself1:37:40against the world and of course that's what Abraham is doing and so see we're very pessimistic us modern people you know we're pessimistic about humanity1:37:51that's for sure dismal wretched planet destroying cancer on the planet right as the Club of Rome described us so pleasantly back in the 1960s you know1:38:01and and I don't know maybe we're ashamed of the Cold War maybe we're ashamed of all the destruction in the 20th century and the hydrogen bomb and and that you know the1:38:11continuing catastrophes of our societies and and were deeply ashamed of that and ashamed of ourselves personally but it's a hell of a thing to you know call us a cancer on the planet there's just no1:38:20excuse for that because what you do with cancer is eradicated and I don't think that that's a very noble motive personally and I think it says a lot1:38:31about the people who would use such phraseology that they would dare to conceptualize humanity in that manner but you know it would be nice if we could be optimistic and I think began1:38:41the problem with being optimistic is that it's naive so then the question is is there an optimism that's not naive and I think there is and the optimism that's not naive isn't just a a1:38:52visualization of how strong people can be so what the things that I tell people I told my students in my class in maps of meaning1:39:01here is a goal you want to be the person at the funeral of your father that everyone can rely on how would that be1:39:10you want to be the person who's broken and and and useless and adding to the misery in the corner and look I'm not making light of people's grief you know1:39:20I understand grief but who do you want to be when there's a crisis right do you want to be the person that everyone can turn to for strength it's like why the1:39:30hell not why know what that is a goal that would be a good goal because then if there's a crisis and there will be it won't be such a bloody crisis because there'll be someone there that can deal with it you know so when I went and1:39:42talked to these people that if you know whom I envisioned that I thought okay well this is something you have to contend with if you're going to be alive an adult you have to contend with death1:39:52and suffering and you have to be ready for it and you have to be there for the person because that's all they're gonna have and so there's a goal man and in1:40:03this time of nihilism you know it's what's the point of life people ask and and they're taught that at universities what's the point of life everything's interpretation humanity's a cancer on1:40:14the planet you know well how about no how about not that how about that there's something to us [Applause]1:40:39and I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant to be a god unto thee and to thy seed after thee and I will give unto1:40:50the into thy seed after thee the land wherein thou art a stranger all of the land of Canaan because of course Abraham went out into the land of strangers right but it says that he'll master if1:41:02he if he keeps his covenant he'll master the land of strangers that's a wonderful thing to know and I think a true thing you know because if you're dealing with1:41:12strangers I've dealt with lots of strange people in my life if I'm a clinical psychologist and that isn't to say that everyone that I've dealt with was strange because that's not the case but I have encountered some very strange1:41:24people and you know the way to deal with strange people is to you never lie to a strange person that's the thing1:41:33especially if they're paranoid you never lie to someone who's paranoid it will come back to bite you and if you're in an extreme situation with someone who's1:41:42very unpredictable the only thing you have that works is the truth that works I'll tell you a1:41:52little story this is in my book so I had this landlord in Montreal he lived next door to me and he was an exhales angels biker he'd spent a lot of time in prison1:42:01and his wife had borderline personality disorder and she committed suicide when I lived there and here's a rough guy and he was a québécois he spoke ul which I1:42:11could hardly understand and he didn't really know what to make of me and I didn't really know what to make of him but we got along you know I was very1:42:21careful talking to him as you might imagine but but I was it was very anyway we went over and my wife and I went over there and we had the spaghetti dinner one night and we sort of communicated1:42:32and I bought a poster from him because he made these wooden posters that had neon on them and that's how he made a living he'd kind of train self to be a bit of an electronics guy and so he made these things and he was1:42:41trying to quit drinking and we talked about that he was a lot older than me he was like 20 years older than me I was about 25 at this point and we got along pretty well but every now and then he'd1:42:52go out and get and drink and he could really drink you know like he was one of these guys who could drink like 60 beer and you think well no one can drink that much and you're wrong1:43:01I studied alcohol for like 10 years some of my subjects fathers drank 40 ounces of vodka a day and had been doing it for 20 years so you can drink a lot and he1:43:10could drink a lot and what would happen he was trying to not drink but he'd go out and go on a binge and then he'd be gone for like three days and he'd drink up all his money and then we'd hear him1:43:21out in the backyard howling at the moon with this little little ugly dog he had you know and he'd howling the dog would howl and he'd howl and the dog would1:43:30howl and and it was rather unsettling and made my wife nervous and and but worse you know now and then he'd come to1:43:40the door at like 3:00 in the morning eh and he'd knock on the door and he'd be standing there and I don't know how much experience you've had with rough guys1:43:50who are alcoholic and who were drunk but it's they can be upright and unconscious at the same time and so that was the1:44:00state that he was in you know he'd be just swaying and he'd asked me if I would like to buy his toaster or his microwave because he needed some money1:44:09to keep drinking and you know I didn't really want to buy his toaster or his microwave but when the exhales angel Jew all speaking 60 beer drunk okay but1:44:19while biker shows up at your door at 3:00 in the morning and offers you to sell offers to sell you his microwave huh the easiest thing is to say I really1:44:28need a microwave so so you know I bought the microwave and the toaster and some1:44:40other things but then but then my wife talked to me and she liked my landlord you know even though she was afraid of1:44:50him she liked him and and she said you can't buy any more any more appliances because it's not good for him and I thought huh that's an interesting1:45:01problem you know so what the hell am I gonna do about this because no I don't want to buy your microwave just doesn't seem to be the right answer at 3:00 in1:45:10the morning so so one time he took me out on his 750 Honda and he put me on the back of it he1:45:19wanted to show me his lair I guess his hangouts and I got his wife's helmet on but it didn't fit it just sit on the top of my head and he said I got on the bike1:45:28and he said if the cops chase us were not stopping and the way we went and we went to these like these bars downtown1:45:38on sound the road they were very rough places he got into like four fights that night because he was a rough guy you know and he's kind of punk guys would come up to him and sort of challenge him1:45:48and act stupidly around him and he was very skeptical and if you were acting stupidly around him for any length of time he just hit you because he felt that that's what you deserved and1:45:57perhaps he was right you know so so I had first-hand opportunity to observe him so anyways he sure enough about a week or two after we had this1:46:07conversation he showed up at the door gnarrk gnarrk gnarrk you know I open the door and they were standing there you know with his eyes kind of half closed and he was swaying and he had I don't remember what the1:46:18appliance was this time but he wanted to sell it to me and I said I know what all I can buy this I'm not gonna buy this1:46:28because I know you're trying to quit drinking and if I give you this money then you're gonna go and drink it up and it's not going to be good for you and1:46:37what else did I tell him I think I told him as well that this whole thing of him coming to my house at like in the morning was scaring my wife who1:46:46he liked and that it had to stop and believe me man I was thinking about what I was saying because he was watching me like a rough guy watches you and a rough1:46:57guy watches you like this he thinks if you say one thing that indicates contempt you're gonna bloody well pay for it and1:47:06so I was finding my words like you know I was crossing a swamp and trying to look for the for the rocks underneath the surface and I said what I had to1:47:16save Harry very carefully and he looked at me for about 15 seconds and that's a long time to be looked at at 3:00 in the morning and he left and he never came1:47:29back to sell me anything again and we got along fine but that's a good illustration of this issue with regards to truth and success in the strange land1:47:42because I was in the strange land when I was talking to my neighbor my landlord then and I managed to say what was true1:47:53carefully enough so despite the fact that he was a very violent person and that he was a very intoxicated person and that he had every reason to be1:48:03suspicious of me and we couldn't communicate very well and I didn't do what he wanted that he took it and he1:48:12left and there was no problem and life went on just fine after that and so we don't want to underestimate the utility1:48:21of establishing this bounded relationship with the ideal and attempting to live with some nobility in1:48:30truth while aiming at the highest ideal there's nothing about that that's anything but strengthening and positive1:48:40and it's exactly what you need to set against the catastrophe and uncertainty of life and as far as I can tell that's1:48:52what these Abrahamic stories are attempting to communicate so we'll stop there thank1:49:01you [Applause]1:49:20I have to make an announcement I'm going1:49:29to do a talk August 22nd I think not sure of the date but all I'll find out with GAD sod from Concordia and so and1:49:44with a with the next social worker named Serena Singh and with faith Goldie I think faith is going to be there as well so the tickets for that will go on sale1:49:54I'm not hosting this someone else is dealing with it but the tickets for that will go on sale within approximately a week and I'll post that on my I'll1:50:04probably make an announcement on youtube but I'll twist Twitter it Twitter it and all of that so and I think I mentioned to you guys last week that I would like1:50:14to continue this series but I think I'll do it once a month and I'll try to do it in this theater but I haven't got word from the people who run the theater that's the University whether or not1:50:24it'll be accessible but I'll figure something out and so oh hi Serena Serena is the person who's going to be hosting this it's August 22nd 7 to 10 p.m. at1:50:36Ryerson ok tickets go on sale Monday all right and then and then oh there's a special1:50:46freedom of speech edition of the Hemmingway's restaurant Jordan Peterson discussion group tonight so that's at 10 p.m. so you're all welcome to attend1:50:56that so that's 142 Cumberland Street ok so that's it for announcements I guess and then let's say for questions yes I was going to let you ask the first1:51:05question last time wasn't I ok so I will do that and so let's make sure again everybody to speak into the mic clearly so that the YouTube people can hear and1:51:15you know the ghostly YouTube people and so go ahead shouldn't I was quite impressed with your presentation last week and I wasn't quite sure where it1:51:25was going at one point and what neither neither was knowing and that's ok because at one point I I thought what you basically were talking about this is what I saw you're1:51:35embodying mind body and spirit and bringing it all together as one and you touch on it a bit tonight when you when you talk about truth this is where we need to go right and I know you see be1:51:44positive and all that and yeah that's right I agree it's scary what's going on right now however we have the power to stay in the positive what you talked about last week1:51:53you talked about using our intuition which I consider our higher self using consciousness and you made reference I can't remember exactly what you what you1:52:02said but you held your hand and you talked about emotions and bringing intellect on top and when you said emotions everything just lit up for me1:52:12because I'm thinking that's our heart chakra that's what combines our lower self our physical being the material stuff all the all the stuff that doesn't really motivate us with our higher self1:52:22I mean you talked about emotion I want to talk about the emotion of love and I find so many people are terrified it's a four-letter word I know but it doesn't have to be bad okay so I remember why1:52:32when I talked to you last week I wanted you to ask this question so okay so I've talked a lot in this lecture series about truth and know I think there's a1:52:44battle in the biblical stories all the way through between love and truth and in terms of their primacy and so and I've concentrated a lot on truth in my own thinking but I stay and it's hard to1:52:55talk about love because it's a word that people have mouths to death you know as soon as you start talking about love then people should just go into a different room and and not listen to you you know because it gets it can get1:53:05sappy and new-agey just like that and and I don't like that at all but but it still has something that has to be contended with and I think so I've been1:53:15trying to conceptualize let's say what this covenant might might constitute and I think the love part so here's this so you know there's this book by Goethe1:53:25called Faust and it's in two volumes first one and falls to logically enough one was written much later than the other and Faust basically sells the soul1:53:35to the devil for foreknowledge and the devil in Faust is mephistopheles and mephistopheles is quite a well-developed character and Bertha has Memphis dollies1:53:45say what he's about which is really quite cool so it's like the adversary of the world evil itself gets a chance to speak and make its case and Goethe1:53:56thought this was so important that he actually had Memphis Tov Lee's announced himself once in Faust one and then using the same words you know phrase differently again in in part two it1:54:07really struck me it really struck me and so what Memphis dolefully says is that the world is such a charter house of1:54:17suffering and destruction that it would be better if it never existed and so that what he's working to is to bring existence to an end because it is not1:54:27justified by its suffering that's like--that's it's an argument very similar to the argument that is made by Ivan camera camera radsolv1:54:38thank you thank and say you can't pronounce them or live with them you can but he basically he's an atheist and1:54:47does a very good job of detailing out the Atheist argument or it may be an anti theist argument and he's arguing with his his brother Alyosha who's a1:54:56monastic novitiate who was a very good guy but not an intellect Ivan's own intellect and a very powerful one and he basically tells le osha that the all of1:55:06the cosmos isn't worth the suffering of one child he tells this story about this and this Dostoyevsky took this from a newspaper about this parents that locked1:55:15their four-year-old daughter in an outhouse overnight and she screamed about it until she froze to death and so Dostoyevsky used that argument he tied that into Ivan's anti-theist argument1:55:26against le OSHA it's very very powerful argument The Brothers Karamazov is an absolutely mind-boggling amazing book I would highly recommend it and so that's1:55:37a Memphis awfully in perspective mr. Feeley in perspective perspective is that being itself is so corrupt that it shouldn't exist so then you think okay1:55:46well that fair enough that's a decent argument it's understandable but the problem comes when you try to implement that and what happens when you implement1:55:55it as far as I can tell you adopt out Memphis to aphelion attitude of bitterness and and destruction is that you make all the suffering that you're complaining about far worse I think that's what happened1:56:05at the base of things in the 20th century is that there was a powerful movement among human humanity to bring being itself to a halt1:56:14you know what culminated in the development of the hydrogen bomb and and the high probability for many of many periods of time that we were going to do1:56:23something permanent and fatal which seems like a bad idea it seems like a bad idea well so what's the opposite of the missed aphelion attitude and I think the opposite of that is what's presented1:56:34in the biblical stories in the guise of love and that is the wish that things would be good it's something like that1:56:43that's what love is I think is that it's the attempt to orient yourself towards making things better and it's predicated on something like a deep appreciation1:56:52for being despite its suffering and deficiencies and and maybe a decision that you're going to act to bring about things to move things towards the good1:57:02and I think that's the thing that sets the parameters of that of them it's it's the opposite of the Memphis to fillion attitude it's like to work towards the1:57:11betterment of being because you've decided that you're going to open your heart to existence something like that and it's within that framework that truth takes place I think his truth has1:57:21to serve something it had controls can serve truth but it has to be bounded inside something and I think that that's what it's bounded inside so what I was1:57:30going to refer to with that was David Hawkins real power versus force and he put it on a quantifiable scale all different emotions he called it consciousness and he put love at 5281:57:40Hertz he put shame at 20 I'm not sure if I've got these 100% right guilt I think at 30 fear at 50 and it shows you how far the people who were really knocked1:57:50down have to get to love and I'm thinking if we could quantified love on a term it means different things to everybody and rightly so but can we get to that frequency and if you look at the1:58:00sofas you know what you know the musical notes I'm afraid of I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you to stop if you would because I should I should go to another question thank you very much okay let's1:58:12[Applause] so you've been an educator through the1:58:21rise of the smartphone and my question basically relates to procrastination and tastily needless tastily specifically and given the unprecedented level of1:58:32distraction that we have in today's world I just wanted to get your perspective from a psychological standpoint on other than cleaning your1:58:41damn room what would you suggest to a student who's looking to overcome these things well I think with any let's call1:58:50it addictive process I mean email is powerfully addictive right hardly it's it's a slot machine and I mean that technically so when you1:58:59pull it's that's a variable ratio reinforcement schedule if I remember correctly and it's very addictive because if you pull on the slot machine1:59:08arm enough you will win and you never know which poll will reward you and so not only is that addictive it's very1:59:17hard to extinguish that and so emails like that because there's always something beckoning and now and then it's a jackpot and social medias like1:59:28that because you know people are posting interesting things and so well how do you overcome an addictive process and partly you do it by replacing it with1:59:38something better right so when people study drug and alcohol use they they often make an elementary mistake which is to try to figure out why people use1:59:48drugs and alcohol that's that's not a smart thing to wonder we know why people use cocaine cocaine directly stimulates1:59:58these systems that produce positive emotion it's like so there's no mystery there the mystery with cocaine is very very simple why don't people take2:00:08cocaine all the time until they die that's the mystery really because you can get isolated rats to do that so and and for some people alcohol has the same2:00:17kind of effect except it's mediated by opiates but more often what people have to do to get themselves out of an addictive process is to find something better to do to replace it and so I2:00:27would say the problem with the gadgets and I mean they're amazing things is that they interfere with they proximately interfere with medium to2:00:37long-term goals I would say and so I think the first thing you have to do to bring them under control is figure out what it is that their use is interfering with it has to be something important so2:00:47you think well I want to do something important what is that it could be personal maybe you want to have a relationship you want to get married you you want to have kids you2:00:57want to have a career that's meaningful you know you wanna have a life you you want to have an Abrahamic adventure and be the father of Nations let's say we can't be ratting away on your cell phone2:01:06in doing that and so I think I think part of it is to set your sights high and make a plan and figure out who you2:01:15could be and see if obsessive utilization of smartphone fits into that vision of nobility and it will partly2:01:24because they're they're unbelievably powerful communication devices but so so often it's it's for lack of something better to do and it also interferes so2:01:35that's about the best I can do with that [Applause]2:01:44hello dr. Peterson so you've been you've been talking with some of the conservative candidates for leadership this year any you talked with most all2:01:54of them right not all of them but a number of them yes you talked with Andrew though right yes I did yes so so something very interesting popped up in my Facebook feed so it was2:02:05a ad for the Conservative Party and it was suggesting that we thought you cut funding to public universities that2:02:14don't support free speech and yeah that was probably my fault yeah see precisely because because this is something you say in some of your Wilder moments you2:02:24suggest that we should cut the university's funding by 25% and let them battle it out for the remains and he's taken that you know his his platform but2:02:34now what you're doing is well you're well one of the things you're doing is you've created this website that identifies the postmodern lexicon and2:02:44helps people distinguish between postmodern courses and not and so people don't take them or take them if they want yeah yeah so that's it's it's it2:02:56would be interesting to know like what sort of malevolent postmodernist just study you meticulously and try to use all your knowledge of it anyway2:03:06so but but what you've said though you said that what we need to do is starve it out from the yeah look so yeah I do I2:03:15know where you're going so about two weeks ago three weeks ago I went up to northern Saskatchewan and my parents have a cottage up there it's way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and2:03:24there's no cellphone although we do have internet now which is you know probably bad and good but anyways I got to take a bit of a break which was good because I2:03:33haven't really been able to think because you know more broadly about will say what I'm doing cuz who they held I don't know what the hell I'm doing exactly this is a this is all very2:03:43strange and but but one thing I thought about I was out on the lake I was canoeing around and I thought I had thought about war you know because I was2:03:53very irritated I'm very irritated about what's happened to the universities and there's a hint of malevolence about it and I I'm not a fan of ideological2:04:03possession and I've been set back up on my heels a lot over the last eight months by the the onslaught of what2:04:15emerged when I said that there was words I wouldn't say and so it's put me into a defensive posture let's say and I had2:04:25been thinking in terms of war metaphors you know like this is a battleground and that there's a war going on an ideological war and I do believe that2:04:36that's true but then I was reading and I did this partly for this course I was reading the Sermon on the Mount and one2:04:45of the things that says is resist not evil and I don't know what to make of that line and so I was talking to a bunch of people about it and reading about it a2:04:55lot and trying to figure out what it meant and partly what it means is don't waste time right because when you fighting against something then there's something else you're not doing and then2:05:05I thought also when I was out there on the lake I thought well do I really want to be in a war because of war that's not that's not that's not that's not heaven2:05:14that's for sure it's really stressful and people get hurt and so I thought well maybe that's just the wrong way of thinking about it even though there's a battleground issue2:05:23here and I thought well wait a second maybe maybe the right thing to do in a situation like this and this is maybe2:05:32something that those on the alt-right might consider is that the right thing to do maybe is to outline a better way2:05:41rather than go up directly on the attack now that might be seem somewhat at odds with my idea of the website and perhaps it is somewhat a towards without I'm I'm2:05:52not sure about that but what I'm trying to do instead of conducting this like a war let's say is to conduct it like a movement towards something better and2:06:03and that would be better now with regards to cutting the universities funding I thought about that too and I thought wait a second that's not going to work out because it's inviting political2:06:12interference into higher education now the political interference might be of the counterbalancing kind because the evidence that the humanities in particular have tilted almost a hundred2:06:22percent to the left is overwhelming and so maybe some counterbalance from the right would set things more towards the middle but the problem is is when you2:06:31open up the door to political interference with higher education content you can't close the door again and so on reflection I thought that it2:06:41probably was a suboptimal idea and that would be better instead was to and what of this is what I want to do when I launch the website I want to ask students the students who will be using2:06:51it's like what do you want from university because here's here's your options you can you can come out ideologically possessed right you can buy this doctrine this pathological2:07:01doctrine and you can become bitter and resentful and you won't learn to communicate properly and you won't read the great works of civilization and you won't learn to think and write you won't2:07:12become Noble in body and spirit is that what you want or do you want the opposite do you want a real education and then I want to explain what that2:07:22means like I did tonight to some degree you know that there's absolute value in learning how to put yourself together and to communicate and to familiarize yourself with with with the classic2:07:32works of civilization and I want to offer that I want to do what I can to offer that as the proper alternative instead of staying in sconce tin this notion of a battle which is just I just2:07:43don't think it's the right metaphor so either in dr. Peterson I just want to say that I think what you're doing is absolutely miraculous it helps change my life and I'm sure at least raise your2:07:53hand if dr. Peterson has helped change your life so for the better or for the worse ask him to look at it well it's2:08:02about it's about 40 people maybe and that's miraculous you know and I think and and you're thinking is gonna be it's gonna be it's gonna be all over the2:08:11place in the Canadian election in two years and I think that God that's a horrible thing to go you better watch out for it buddy and uni and and and there's there's gonna be2:08:23a lot of talk about how how how andrew shears political message is gonna stem from yours and i think it's really2:08:33important that he he doesn't censor himself like other conservative politicians are doing and because i don't know we need to and unite under a2:08:43valid thoughtful articulate conservative voice and what do we have now we have we have trump that's what's you know we2:08:52don't have any we don't have any strong articulate male voices in our in our in our political discourse right now that's2:09:01what it's definitely time for you to develop one so looks like you're on the right path yes great belt it out man2:09:23okay so i'll try to be succinct I have two comments and one question okay first comment as you mentioned how you were prevented from uploading your YouTube video from last week yeah I actually2:09:34turned that lecture and I make pretty detailed notes okay I've got it it's my accounts reinstalled restored rien stored hahaha restored yeah and so2:09:46it's okay it's okay it's it's straightened out and I'm going to upload all the videos to a bunch of other sites and so this isn't going to happen again so but I appreciate that some lectures2:09:56and I do one okay yeah my second comment is about sort of kind of going into the commentaries of christian theologist over the centuries like you've done2:10:06yourself i just would like to encourage everybody to also look at not just Western Christianity but also Eastern Christianity like the Orthodox writings2:10:15there's a big difference between the two and that the Western sort of theology comes out of the Roman Roman law Roman2:10:24justice so there's a lot more of an emphasis on cannot justice and Christ came he died on the cross bar so there's that look kind of like legal payback mmm right whereas the Eastern2:10:35the Eastern theology is a lot more it focuses a lot more in love and on sort of the the positive aspects and if you2:10:46do read like the first four centuries of Christianity where there was no schism there's very little mention of like a sort of legalistic framework it's a lot more I don't know a per se or a more2:10:57heartfelt I guess so I think it's important that we also in the West look at the Eastern counterparts had the2:11:10center of this malevolence that you mentioned so like you know this whole thing about demonizing the opposition saying that they're they're heartless they haven't all of this and that I2:11:19perceive that as a lot of fake love and I think that we have to keep in mind what true love is sometimes it looks ugly like in dealing with psychiatric2:11:28patients maybe like other countries are not as liberal as Canada but the gate results are a lot more often you know psychiatric patients on on the road for example in Greece where I'm from so yeah2:11:40that's kind of my comment that we need to focus a lot more on what real love is I think and not just the the kind of love that he can put on a scale because I don't need to keep put love on a scale2:11:49so I've been talking and some of you know to this guy Jonathan pazzo who's a an orthodox Carver and he started a YouTube channel and he's talking a lot2:11:58about Orthodox issues and I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to Orthodox Christianity but from what I understand of it so far there's plenty to be2:12:07learned so yeah I'm Orthodox myself I just recently came back to my faith two years ago basically that was the original Christianity then there was the Schism2:12:17of 1054 between East and West because of the the conflicts that these new shamanic Christians have with the Pope and then after that you also had the2:12:27schism internally within the West between Catholicism and and the Protestants so that's kind of like the big difference said that Christianity actually came from the East so I think2:12:36that's why it's important that we look at the most ancient types because those were the ones that were closest to the original message so not my question2:12:46it's about atheism back you might hear a lot of times people criticizing anybody that has any sort of belief in a deity or God that you're2:12:56just somebody that has an imaginary friend yeah you know like the the Heavenly Father that you have to adhere to that you have no well of your own you2:13:05know then there's also like wouldn't the contrary argument be that okay so if I have a good relationship with my father and that's why I'm more likely to accept2:13:15a higher deity and I could I be that you as an atheist maybe you have conflict with your father and that's why you're adverse to kind of submitting to a2:13:24higher being that mechanically is your life well you're you're you're attempting a psychoanalysis of atheism2:13:33you know and and there's many factors that go into atheism I would say that you could make that case in some2:13:42situations but not in all I do think though and I think this is perhaps where your question is stemming from is that it's no fluke that at the same time that2:13:58one of the consequences of the death of God that Nietzsche announced back in the late 18-hundreds is the all-out assault on masculinity that's occurring in our2:14:08culture now and those things are associated and I do think that does have to do with a lack of faith in the masculine spirit and that's a very bad2:14:18thing because that's a bad thing for everyone obviously because women have a partially masculine spirit and they have2:14:27to put up with men and so to demolish that or to fail to nurture it which is certainly what's occurring is just a pathway to absolute disaster so yeah2:14:46Peterson so this is the type of question that you hate because it's in the category of white why you believe what you believe and it's a type of question2:14:55that makes you say if I have it right from the last time quote what the hell makes you think it's any of your business song right okay try to frame it properly okay and I'm asking this at2:15:04lecture 10 of 12 and after having listened to quite a few hours of you here and elsewhere okay and in so in your second interview with transluminal media you lay out a few things I have some quotes here I'll skip them for2:15:14brevity you get to the point where you're discussing the embodiment of the logos by christ as a historical figure and then you say quote is this2:15:23resurrection real did his body resurrect I don't know in today's lecture you've alluded to the fact that there are states of consciousness that perhaps we2:15:32don't know how to access anymore and let's say that I'm with you there let's say I'm with the idea that they're unknown there are unknown ways to get intimations of the divine that the embodiment of the logos is associated2:15:42with physiological transformations the upper limits of which are unknown and that we might currently classify as paranormal but to dumb it right back down to my level I'm asking about the2:15:52guy commonly depicted with long hair nailed to a cross until that is a doorknob and all of this goes to the heart of the question of literalism and religious interpretation it goes to the2:16:02heart of kind of you know what we're doing here at this lecture series are we examining the psychological significance of these stories or are we entertaining the possibility of these fantastical events I might be struggling with the2:16:11concept but I haven't been able to square away and reconcile those statements by you so the question is on the on the question of the resurrection of Christ why is your answer to your own2:16:20question I don't know instead of at the very least probably not2:16:30well you're definitely right about me hating that question well I called this2:16:43series to psychological significance of the biblical stories for a reason you know and the reason was that I'm partially qualified to talk about such2:16:53things when I step outside of that then I'm not where I should be I don't think2:17:05that see I don't think that this is I'm not gonna get this right I can't get the2:17:15words exactly right this isn't about what I believe personally it's partly because I don't know what I believe I don't know what I believe the world's a2:17:24very strange place I've had some very strange experiences in it I don't think it's helpful for me to step outside my2:17:33my jurisdiction and speculate precisely the easiest thing would be to say I2:17:43think I said what I had to say today I don't think that we know what the upper limits of human possibility are I don't know what that means metaphysically what2:17:53I do understand from the Gospels is that even the accounts of Christ's resurrection are complex and difficult to understand I think from reading you2:18:04in large part that you can make a very strong case for the symbolic meaning of the death and resurrection I think it does stand for the capacity of the human2:18:13logos to die and resurrect continually as it strives upward I'm not willing to say that that's all it means because I2:18:22don't know what everything means and I don't know about the fundamental metaphysics of being like I do believe2:18:31that it's accurate to construe being as a battleground between good and evil I believe that I believe that is the most accurate way of representing being2:18:41it's not the most accurate way of representing the object world that's not the same thing being is that set of experiences which we inhabit2:18:50and that's only partly objective and it's not obviously reducible to the material not in any straightforward way because we don't understand the material2:18:59substrate of being at all you know it's it's and when we do attempt to understand it say at the quantum level we run into mysteries that that baffle2:19:08the most the most intelligent of us and aware so I'm going to have to leave the question hanging but partly because partly because I don't know what I think2:19:19but partly because there has to be a line between what I believe and what what I can communicate you know what you2:19:30believe is beyond your capacity to articulate if you the most the deepest levels of belief and I can only share with you what I have actually come to2:19:39understand and there's things that I don't understand and that's definitely one of them I don't know how to draw a line between the symbolic significance2:19:48of the biblical events say the symbolic and psychological significance of the biblical events and the metaphysics that's underneath them and I think you2:19:57see the same thing in Jung because when Jung writes technically and formally he never talks about God he always talks about the image of God which is not the same thing the image of God would be2:20:07your subjective experience of God it says nothing about the objective reality of God because your subjective experience can't say much about objective reality but even in Jung you2:20:16get this mix you know sometimes it's psychological but then he he makes a metaphysical move and I think that reflected also his the limits of his2:20:25knowledge because Jung had profound revelatory experiences it was a very strange person you know and I I think so2:20:36I think what's best for me is to stay on the ground that I am competent on and to say what I can say about the psychology and to reach beyond that briefly when2:20:47it's necessary but other than that to leave it to hell alone till I understand it better assuming that I ever do so [Applause]2:21:05because of these lectures I've been reading the Bible and I'm obviously not finished but I'm fairly familiar with with how it goes and I've been thinking about two parts of it in specific which2:21:15is the story of Isaac and the crucifixion of Christ and particularly one of the things like that Christ says on the cross which is my God my God why2:21:25have you forsaken me and I've been trying to understand that because that's one hell of a thing for the Son of God to say and you think that would have been edited out yeah no2:21:34seriously it's like why isn't that gone you know it it it's it's very inconvenient yeah and in well we haven't you haven't2:21:43touched on the story of Isaac yet but there's this thing the cult typology which I'm sure you're aware of but basically the idea that what's going on in the Old Testament is sort of the2:21:52laying out of types for Christ and that Isaac is essentially a type of Christ because they have all these similarities and so I've been thinking about it in2:22:01that context and thinking about the parallels between them in between Isaac and Christ and one of the things I also struck me was mostly the differences between Isaac and Christ in the main2:22:11difference it seems to me is sort of a difference in direction of sacrifice so the sacrifices of Abraham Abraham sacrificing his son to God and then the2:22:20sacrifice of Jesus is God sacrificing his son to mankind and I've been trying to understand basically how that works and in relation to the new and Western2:22:32civilization for 2,000 years yeah well there is these transformations of sacrifice right that can so the next thing that happens in these stories is2:22:43that the circumcision circumcision starts to come in as a sacrifice and it seems to be something like the beginnings of replacement for sacrifice2:22:52of animals it's you know there's this the psychologize ation of sacrifice so first it's pure external and acted out and then it becomes something that's more conceptual like it becomes embodied2:23:02in the form of the circumcision and then it becomes more conceptual and that conceptual transformation keeps occurring and and it seems to well it2:23:11culminates to some degree in this idea of the sacrifice of Christ who's who's God his son to mankind but the sacrifice is much more complex than that right it's2:23:20also Christ sacrificing himself to God and and I think that the the issue there is something like well let's say you're2:23:31supposed to offer up the best that you have to God that's the sacrifice that's what happens with the high quality animals that that Abel sacrifices okay but there's something better than the2:23:41best that you own well what's that well part of it might be well the relationships you have with people are you willing to sacrifice them to pursue2:23:51the highest good well then are you willing to sacrifice yourself or your son like your son might be that's a2:24:00tough one I can understand the idea of sacrificing yourself better I'm still wrestling with this story of Isaiah obviously because that's such a complicated story and I do think it's2:24:09reasonable to think about it as a form of foreshadowing at least the way the Bible is set up of course people who aren't Christian would agree with that but that that's fine um the idea that you would offer yourself2:24:20as a sacrifice to God that seems to me to follow quite logically because well obviously you have nothing greater to give than the best of yourself right so2:24:29you sacrifice yourself to the highest good and that's part of the man that's part of the way in which humanity is redeemed that makes sense to me that just seems like for me that's that's a2:24:40pretty straightforward psychological truth the son issue that's that's a lot tougher thing to wrestle with because one of the things I was thinking with the with what Jesus says on the cross is2:24:53that one of the interpretations of that is basically that Jesus in that moment is human basically it's not this not right it's just Jesus the human right2:25:02but that always kind of felt a little bit like avoiding the question to me because you can't just pause it something like the Trinity and then say2:25:11oh but in this moment that doesn't go right that doesn't count so but if we think about it in that way of like the2:25:20difference in the direction of sacrifice and it seems to me that in the sacrifice whoever is making the sacrifice serve aims toward something so Abraham is2:25:30so reaching for the divine when he sacrifices when he's going to sacrifice his son and so though I mean maybe God is reaching toward the human and so that2:25:40would make some sense of that interpretation that Christ is only human in that moment right that that it's the sacrifice is accomplished and the reaching down is accomplished but I'm2:25:50still after a question what do I make of that because that's one I mean it's useful to have a problem like that because it gives you something2:25:59to think about right and something to study further and it's it's it's a it's a major it's a major problem I mean the whole issue of well we could say well2:26:08what's the relationship between the divine and the human which is obviously brought to the forefront and the idea of Christ right but it's a personal issue because part of the issue is what's the2:26:18relationship between you as a finite entity and the transcendent infinity that surrounds you well there's some relationship because here you are and2:26:27the transcendent infinity around you exists so there's a relationship the question is what is the relationship and and we don't know that and and and it's2:26:37dramatized in that story and so I mean partly the the reason that there's so much conflict and confusion in that2:26:47stories because it's trying to bring opposing things together right how can something be God and man at the same time it's just like the genie which is the root word of genius by the way the2:26:57genie is this incredibly powerful force that can grant wishes right but it's constrained in this tiny little space there's an intimation there that for2:27:08something to be real it has to straddle the divide between the finite and the infinite and that's what human beings do I think to some degree and that's dramatized in that story but it doesn't2:27:18mean that we understand it I mean you know that sometimes you're going to feel that way when you're called upon to make a sacrifice you're going to feel that2:27:27you've been betrayed by everything I mean the story set up that way right Christ is betrayed by tyranny he's betrayed by his best friends he's betrayed by his mortality like it's an2:27:38archetypal story because and he's innocent so the story can't be any worse that's why it's archetypal and I mean the story says to some degree2:27:47that under such conditions even God himself would have dealt it's something like that and that's a real that's a powerful idea it's a very powerful idea so that's the2:27:59best I can make out of that for now we2:28:09have to stop so will so convene again in a week thank you very much [Applause]0:00:00Biblical Series XI: Sodom and Gomorrah
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:15three difficult stories tonight and hopefully my plan is to get through all three of them so we'll see how that goes0:00:24so we're going to talk about the story of sodom and gomorrah and then the story of the sacrifice of Isaac which is an0:00:36extremely complicated complicated story and so we'll try to make some headway with that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is plenty complicated - all0:00:45right so what we established last week at least in part was this idea that the Abrahamic narratives are set up as0:00:54punctuated epochs I suppose in Abraham's life and we were hypothesizing that you know you set out a goal for yourself in0:01:04your life it's like a stage in your life you might say that and then when you run that goal to its end when that stage comes to an end then you have to regroup0:01:14and orient yourself once again and I was making the case that that's a good time to make necessary sacrifices you know0:01:25and part of that because as you move through your life you have to shed that which is no longer necessary and because0:01:36otherwise it accretes around you and holds you down and you perish sooner than you should and I think that's in0:01:46large part because if you don't dispense with your life as you move through it then the stress of all that undone business and all those unmade decisions0:01:55turns into a kind of chaos around you and that chaos puts you in a state of psychophysiological emergency preparedness chronically and that just0:02:05ages you and so it's necessary in some sense to stay light on your feet and also I think to renew your commitment to your aim0:02:17upward and I believe that that's what the sacrificial routines in the Abrahamic stories dramatized I said0:02:26already that these things are often first portrayed very dramatically and concretely before they become0:02:36psychologists and we'll see because one of the things that happens tonight as well in these stories is that when God makes his covenant with Abraham this is0:02:45the next part of the story it's also when the idea of circumcision is introduced into ancient Hebrew culture and others every bit of evidence that0:02:54other cultures were utilizing circumcision beforehand so it wasn't necessarily a novel invention of the0:03:03Abrahamic people but I see its introduction as a step on the road to the psychologize ation of the idea of sacrifice right first of all it's giving0:03:14up something concrete and then second it's signified by the sacrifice of a part of the body instead of for the sake0:03:23of the whole it's something like that it's dramatizing the idea that you have to give up a part of yourself for the sake of the whole and eventually well by modern times that becomes virtually0:03:32completely psycho psychological and it's in its essence in that we all understand perhaps not as well as we should but at0:03:41least well enough to explain it that it's necessary to make sacrifices to move ahead in life one of the themes0:03:50that I'd like to explore tonight in relationship especially to the sacrifice of Isaac is that you know once humanity had established the idea that sacrifice0:04:02was necessary to move ahead which is really it's a discovery of incalculable magnitude right the idea that the idea that you can give up something in the present and that will in some sense0:04:13ensure a better future is an unbelievable achievement it's equivalent to the discovery of the future it's equivalent to the discovery of the utility of work like its importance0:04:23can't be overstated okay so it took a long time for people figure this out animals haven't figured it out at all right we've figured it out and it's hard it's hard for people to0:04:32make sacrifices because of course the present has a major grip on you as it should because in some way you live in the present so anyways there's the twin problem of0:04:42getting the whole idea of sacrifice up and running and then figuring out exactly what it means but there's a problem that branches off that too or a two-fold problem so the hypothesis is0:04:52that sacrifice is necessary to ensure the that the future is safe and secure and productive and positive and all of those things ok so then then a question0:05:02immediate two questions immediately rise from that right one is well what's the proper sacrifice now we already talked about that a little bit with regards to Cain and Abel and one of the things we0:05:11saw was that Cain's sacrifice whatever it was was wrong and Abel's was right Noah's seemed to be right Abraham seems to be right there is0:05:20something about a sacrifice that can be correct there's something about a sacrifice that can be incorrect the question is what would be the maximally correct sacrifice so because that's an0:05:30obvious question to arise from the mere observation that sacrifice is necessary okay if you're going to sacrifice and it's necessary well how is it that you0:05:39would behave if you were going to do it really well if you're going to do it perfectly okay so that's question number one and then question number two might be well if the future can be better0:05:50because of the sacrifice and sacrifices can vary in quality then how much better could this set the future be if your0:05:59sacrifice was of the highest quality right there's a limit issue there and it the limit is something like well how good could your life be if you really got your act together and you gave up all the things that we're impeding you0:06:09in your movement forward if you did that forthrightly and and and with with integrity and with seriousness with with dead seriousness and you tried to set0:06:18your life right what is the upper limits with regards to how your life might lay itself out and I would say well we don't know the answer to that but I think that0:06:29like the idea of something like the City of God or the kingdom of God on earth or the re-establishment of paradise something like that is the answer of the0:06:39imagination to the court how good could the future be if sacrifice was optimized and those are archetypal questions right an archetypal0:06:48question is a question that everyone asks whether they know it or not because sometimes you can act out a question an archetypical estin is a question that everyone asks and an archetypal answer0:06:58is the answer that can't be made any better to that question so I can give you an example of that the reason that Christ's passion is an archetypal story0:07:07is because it's a kind of limit right it's the worst possible set of things that can happen to the best possible person so it's a story that constitutes0:07:17a limit it has nothing to do with the factual reality of the story that's a completely independent issue I'm speaking about this psychologically is that certain stories can exhaust0:07:26themselves in a perfect form and that would be the archetypal form so that's the territory that we're going to wander around in a little bit today and we'll0:07:35use the stories as anchors in thinking a lot about the Sodom and Gomorrah story because it has its classically associated with a biblical injunction0:07:44against homosexuality and that's often how it's read I would say in particular by the more fundamentalist end of the Christian spectrum and I've thought about that a lot because it's pretty0:07:53damn clear that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has something to do with sexual and propriety but I've really come to the conclusion and it's very little to do with homosexuality so we'll see how0:08:03that interpretation prevails as we walk through this tonight okay so we'll start with a bit of a recap from last week so Abraham's had had his last adventure and0:08:13he's 90 years old ninety nine years old actually the Lord appeared to Abram and said unto him I am the Almighty God walk before me and be thou perfect well0:08:22that's quite the command now Alexander McLaren who we talked about before it elaborated upon this slightly0:08:33and this is what he had to say it's this is not precisely walking with God the idea of walking before God it is rather that of an act of life spent in0:08:42continual consciousness of being naked and opened before the eyes of him to whom we have to give an account okay so that's that's an idea that's in keeping with the notion that what we're seeing0:08:53an Abrahamic story is the call to adventure of the of man of the typical person right because your life in some sense is an adventure and I0:09:03suppose the reason for that is that you're confronted by things that you cannot understand that you have not yet mastered there's a heavy price to be paid if you fail to conduct yourself0:09:13appropriately and there's a large reward to be gained if you conduct yourself properly and so that pretty much defines an adventure story and God calls to0:09:23Abraham and tells him to move out into the world to leave what he's familiar with to go into the strange lands of famine and tyranny and to find his place0:09:32and that works out quite nicely for Abraham and so what that also means is that because Abraham is doing that consciously at least according to this0:09:42interpretation that he's not naive in his in his determination to move forward you know I mean I've dealt with lots of people who have anxiety disorders you0:09:51know and one thing about people who have anxiety disorders is they are not mysterious to me I understand it's no problem for me to understand why0:10:00people have anxiety disorders or why they're depressed or why they have substance use problems the mystery to me is always why people don't have all of those things at once because everybody0:10:11has a reason to be anxious in fact we have the ultimate reason to be anxious because we know that we're vulnerable and we know that we're going to die and how you cannot be anxious under those0:10:20circumstances is a great mystery it's a massive mystery and the same thing applies with regards to depression and then the same thing applies to some0:10:29degree with regards to drug and alcohol abuse because I said last week there's plenty of reasons to drown your consciousness in alcohol that's for sure we could refer to the aforementioned anxiety depression not least and so and0:10:41the and the sorts of drugs that people are prone to take our chemicals that take the affective edge off the tragedy of life so so back to back to the issue0:10:55of fear being Abraham is self-conscious that's what this commentary says but the thing is as he moves forward despite that he's self-conscious and he knows0:11:04the danger but he moves forward despite that and that's actually the appropriate response in the face of actual non naive understanding of what0:11:13constitutes life like if you're naive and you move forward it's like well what the hell do you know you know there's no courage in naivety because you don't know what there is to stop you you don't0:11:22know what dangers you might apprehend but to be aware of what it is that your problem is so to be alert existentially let's say or to be fully self conscious0:11:32means that you're perfectly aware of your limitations and how you might be hurt and then to make the decision to move forward into the unknown and the land of the stranger anyways that's the0:11:41I would say that's one of the secrets to a good life and I can say that really without fear of contradiction I would I would say because the clinical0:11:50literature on this is very very very clear what you do with people who are afraid and to some degree depressed but certainly anxious is you lay out what0:11:59what they're anxious about first of all in in detail what is it that you're afraid of what might happen and then you decompose it into small problems hypothetically manageable problems and0:12:10then you have the person expose themselves to this thing that they're afraid of and what happens isn't that they get less afraid that isn't what the clinical literature indicates exactly0:12:20what happens instead is they get braver and that's not the same thing right cuz if you get less afraid it's like well the world isn't just dangerous as I thought it was you know silly me if you0:12:29get braver that's not what happens what happens is the other world am world's just as dangerous as I thought or maybe it's even more dangerous than I thought but it turns out that there's something0:12:38in me that responds to taking that on as a voluntary challenge and grows and thrives as a consequence and there's no doubt about this even the psychophysiological findings are quite0:12:48clear if you if you can if you impose a stressor on two groups of people and on one group the stressor is imposed0:12:57involuntarily and on the other group the stressor is picked up voluntarily the people who pick up the stress or voluntary voluntarily use a whole0:13:06different psychophysiological system to deal with it they use the system that's associated with approach and challenge and not the system that's associated with defensive aggression and withdrawal0:13:16and the system that is associated with challenges much more associated with positive and much less associated with negative emotion it's also much less hard on you0:13:26because the the defensive posturing system the prey animal system man when that thing kicks in it's all systems are go for you you know you're the gas is0:13:35pushed down to the are the pedals pushed down to the metal and the brakes are on you're using future resources that you could be storing for future time right now in the present to ready yourself for0:13:44emergency so there's there's there's nothing simple or trivial at all about the idea of being called to move forthrightly forward into the strange0:13:54and the unknown and there's a real adventure that's associated with that right so that's an exciting thing which is part of the reason why people travel and then also to see yourself as the0:14:04sort of creature that can do that is willing to do that on a habitual basis is also the right kind of tonic for I hate this word for your self-esteem you0:14:14know because the self-esteem has nothing to do with feeling good about yourself as I already mentioned there isn't necessarily reason why a priori you should just feel good about yourself but0:14:23if you can view yourself acting in a courageous and forthright manner and encountering the world and trying to improve your lot and and and taking0:14:32risks you know in a non naive way well then you have something that you can comfort yourself with at night when you're wondering what the whole damn point of is of your futile and miserable0:14:42life and so and that's necessary because it's often the case that you wake up at 4:00 in the morning or at least sometimes the case that you wake up at0:14:514:00 in the morning when things haven't been going that well and wonder just what the hell the point is of your futile and miserable life you have to have something real to set against that0:15:00it can't be just rationalizations about how you know you're a valuable person among others even though that's true that's not good enough you need something that's more realistic to set0:15:10it against that an observing courage in yourself is definitely one of the things that that that can help you sleep soundly at night when when things are0:15:19destabilized a little bit around you so back to the covenant God tells Abraham me make my covenant between me and D and0:15:29will multiply the exceedingly and Abram fell on his face and God talked with him saying as me behold my covenant my contract is with thee and thou shalt be a father of0:15:38many nations neither shall thy name anymore be called Abram but thy name shall be called Abraham for a father of many nations have I made thee an abram0:15:47means High father and Abraham father of a multitude and I'll make thee exceedingly fruitful and I will make nations of thee and Kings shall come out0:15:57of thee and I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant to be a God unto0:16:06thee and to thy seed after thee and I will give unto thee and thy seed after thee the land wherein thou art a stranger all the land of canaan for an everlasting possession and I will be0:16:16their God I love that line really the line about the land where you are a stranger you know and everything that happens in the Bible almost everything0:16:25that happens in these more archaic stories in particular is laid out geographically the metaphor is Geographic so you move to a land that you haven't yet occupied maybe that's0:16:35full of strangers and then the land is what's granted to you but it's perfectly reasonable to think about this from the perspective from a more abstract perspective it's much more relevant to0:16:44modern people with our incredibly complex societies you know it's definitely the case that if you go into the land of the stranger which is exactly what you do when you try out any0:16:54new endeavor right when you start a new job or when you start a new educational enterprise or when you start a new relationship doesn't matter you're out there in unexplored territory like the0:17:03physical geography is the same but we don't live in in the physics in the spatial world only we live in the temporal spatial world and what that means is that the same place can be0:17:14different at a different time and maybe it can be completely different and so if you're in your house but you have a new person in your house while your house is new for all intents and purpose because0:17:24the territory surrounding that new person is the territory of the foreigner essentially and the same thing happens to you when you start a new job and you'll find that when you start a new0:17:33job especially if you stretched yourself a little bit beyond your zone of comfort that you very much feel like an imposter right when you're first there and then the question is well how do you master0:17:43that and the answer to that seems to be well it seems fairly straightforward if the place that you're in has any degree of possibility if it isn't inhabited by demons so to speak0:17:52the best way to act is to lift your aim upward an attempt to get your act together and to tell the truth and to live a meaningful life and to do difficult things all of that and that is0:18:02the best way of mastering a new territory and you know I all probability the degree to which you're able to act that out is precisely proportionate to0:18:11the degree to which you're going to become a master in that territory and not sort of thinking having a lot faster than people think you know it's it's really quite remarkable how fast you can0:18:21move forward if you can establish yourself somewhere and prove yourself useful assuming that you're around people to whom proving yourself useful0:18:31actually matters like I know perfectly well that you can end up in an employment situation where you're punished for your virtues right in which case you should just get the hell out of there and really really you get out of0:18:41there and you go find somewhere where if you work hard and do what you're supposed to do you're actually going to be rewarded right because that's not a workplace that's hell and you should0:18:51just leave there so and God said unto Abraham thou shalt keep my covenant therefore thou and thy seed after thee in their generations this is my covenant0:19:00which he shall keep between me and you and thy seed after thee every man child among you shall be circumcised that's a mystery they're like why that particular0:19:10right what's dramatic I mean it certainly it certainly affects a man where he's most concerned to be affected there's something like that and so it's0:19:19it's a sacrifice that has a certain I would say a certain degree of unforgettable 'ti that would be the first thing and a certain degree of pain and threat that goes along with it so0:19:28it's not nothing that's the thing now you can argue and I think there is an argument a case to be made about whether or not in the modern0:19:38world circumcision is a reasonable is something reasonable to inflict on infants I don't want to have that conversation at all but I don't think0:19:48that's relevant to this particular issue because we're talking about something different we're talking about humanity's attempt to reconcile themselves to the0:19:59fact that something has to be given up in order something else to happen and to try to really work through that idea and to make it into a psychological reality and0:20:08so far what we've seen in the biblical stories is that when you make a sacrifice it's not really something personal or psychological right it's something external and dramatic you give0:20:17up something that you own you don't give up something that you are or that's part of you and it's actually more of a sacrifice to give up something that's a0:20:26part of you or something that you are than to give up something that you own I mean it's a subtle distinction between because in some sense the distinction between what you own and what you are is0:20:36subtle right I mean it's not overwhelmingly subtle but but people identify with their possessions and they need to because otherwise they wouldn't care for them and they need their0:20:46possessions in order to live so their possessions are in some sense integral to them but this transformation here of an act that was external and associated0:20:56essentially with possessions to something that was actually at least part of the body brings it much closer to it brings it much closer to the to the to the individual as a psychological0:21:06reality it's something like that and you shall circumscribe is circumcised the flesh of your foreskin and it shall be a token of the Covenant betwixt me and you0:21:16it's also a permanent marker you know and I've read a fair bit about practices like tattooing and body scarification you know which is those are very very0:21:25common practices right they're human universals actually no matter where you go around the world you mean you see a couple of things first of all almost without exception people wear clothing0:21:34and sometimes it's relatively minimal clothing but but it's and often it's more decorative than protective but it's almost inevitably clothing and the other0:21:45thing that you see is that people do scarify and tattoo themselves and they do that in some manner to catalyze their identity right they're trying to transform themselves from a generic0:21:56person in some sense to a person that's been designed by their own hand it's something like that they're it's a marker of developing identity and some0:22:05of it seems to be catalyzed with pain you know that modern people who tattoo and I'm not saying that I'm in favor of tattooing because actually I'm not but0:22:14that but that my own particular bias and if you have a tattoo that's fine with me I'm also not saying that there's anything wrong with it0:22:23but one of the things you do see what we the people who have it to tattoo do report is a couple of things is that the pain is actually necessary and that the0:22:33pain is actually something that seems to establish something like a memory so well it's a memory because of the pain because you plenty well remember things that hurt but it's also a memory because0:22:43it's actually etched on you right it's not something that you can just abandon and forget and so a circumcision is exactly the same thing it's like you don't forget it because it's part of you0:22:52and so it makes a good token for a covenant and so that seems to be the rationale here from from speaking from a psychological perspective it's to0:23:01indicate as well that the the damn thing that's happening is serious and I think also that was the case with the earlier sacrifices of animals it's like modern0:23:10people don't do this like you don't know how serious you would take a vow if you sacrificed a goat in your backyard you know it's actually a very dramatic thing to do you know you think about it as0:23:20primitive and perhaps it is archaic and and and no doubt it is but it's also to take the life of something and to spill its blood that's no joke that's something you remember especially if you0:23:30haven't done it before and we actually don't know what we would need to do in order to take some things seriously you know because we all do things like make new year's resolutions about how we're0:23:40going to be better people and we don't do it and the reason for that at least in part is because we don't know how to make the sacrifice sufficiently bloody0:23:49let's say so that we remember that it's necessary right we don't take it with seriousness we don't think I should quit smoking because I'm going to die and we0:23:59don't think through what that means like coughing your lungs out for three months in a hotel bed well your entire family is like a half repulsed and horrified0:24:09and sorrow stricken at the fact that this has happened far too early you know we won't make that real enough to make it serious and serious and without that seriousness we won't do it so there's0:24:20something to be said for rituals of seriousness and I think this is one of them and he that is eight days shall be circumcised among you every man0:24:29child in your generations he that is born in the house or bought with money of any stranger which is not a dice seed this is from Charles John Ellicott who was bishop of Gloucester the fitness of0:24:39circumcision to be a sign of entering into a covenant and especially into one to which children were to be admitted0:24:48consisted in its being a representation of a new birth by putting off the old man and the dedication of the new man unto holiness it's like a baptism that's0:24:57right that's that's what's that's what's echoed there and of course baptism is returned to the pre cosmogonic chaos because that's what the water indicates and return to this source of life and0:25:08and then the renewal that comes along with it so it's the it's it's it's a sacrificial idea in some sense that if there is to be a new you that the old you has to dissolve has to return to the0:25:18solution from which it emerged initially and to reconstitute itself and so there's an echo of that idea here the flesh was cast away that the spirit0:25:28might grow strong and the change of name and Abram and Sarai was typical of this change of condition they had been born again and so must again be named and0:25:37though women could need be admitted directly into the could not indeed be admitted directly into the Covenant yet they shared in its privileges by virtue of their constant annuity to the men who0:25:48were as sponsors for them and that Sarai changes her name equally with her husband well you could make a case and and anthropological observers have made this case to that women undergo a0:25:59sufficiently a set of sufficiently radical psychophysiological transformations merely as a consequence of being part being feminine in nature0:26:08such that the additional rituals of transformation that might be necessary for men aren't necessary and one of those might be menstruation because0:26:17that's a pretty dramatic transformation and there has been some indication that circumcision is like a male it's like the male equivalent of menstruation0:26:26something like that because of the blood that's involved and because of the locale and then of course the same thing is the case with women when they give birth because that's a particularly dramatic thing as I just witnessed0:26:36because my daughter just had a baby this week so thank God for that [Applause]0:26:49recent investigation this is from the Cambridge Bible for school and colleges which if you want to read it is only 58 volumes recent investigation is not0:27:00tended to support the theory that circumcision has any connection with primitive child sacrifice nor again that it took its origin from hygienic motives apparently it represents the dedication0:27:11of the manhood of the people to God in the history of Israel it has survived as the symbol of the people belonging to Jehovah through his special election this corporeal sacrament remained to the0:27:21Israelite when when every other tie of religion or race had been severed the0:27:34other thing that that I read about in relationship to this idea of the multi-generational covenant had something to do because God told Abraham0:27:43to include all of the people of his household into this covenant and and that that that really meant that he was establishing it a territory of ethics0:27:53around them like the ark except the psychological equivalent of the ark right so it was it was a spiritual or psychological or ethical territory that0:28:02everyone who was of that household was required to occupy or obliged or perhaps privileged to occupy and there was also an injunction to Abraham with regards to0:28:13his children which was that as he had established a covenant with God which we could say is something like his decision to to aim as high as possible and to0:28:22live properly as a consequence it's more than that but it's something like that that he also was under the supreme moral obligation to share that with his with0:28:34the other men in his family especially as children and so and so I think there's also a call here to adopting a sacred the sacred responsibility in0:28:43relationship to children that has to do with ensuring that they understand how to take their place in the world and I think that that's0:28:53definitely something very much worth considering especially given the emphasis in the Noah's story in the story of Noah that Noah had his that his0:29:04generations were perfect right as I said before it wasn't merely that he had walked with God that he had perfected his own relationship with the divine let's say with the transcendent0:29:13and I want to make that concrete which is a strange thing to do with the transcendent I mean people ask me all the time about what I believe and of course0:29:23that's what I'm trying to explain while I'm talking but but but and and many people of course are skeptical about the0:29:32idea of anything transcendent and and and say transcendent and eternal but0:29:41that can also be addressed from a psychological perspective because I would say well if you have an ideal of any sort how is that not transcendent it0:29:52transcends you that's the first thing and it doesn't exist in reality it exists in a place of possibility and believe me man we treat places of0:30:01possibility as if they're real because people will call on you you know about your possibility in your potential they'll say to you you're not manifesting your full potential and you0:30:11might say well what do you mean by that potential it doesn't exist it isn't here now you can't measure it or weigh it you can't get a grip on it and they'll say0:30:22don't rationalize you know perfectly well what I mean when I'm talking about your potential and so we could and you do and everyone does and everyone knows exactly what that means and so that's a0:30:32metaphysical reality that will immediately accept as real and also castigate ourselves for not fulfilling and others to like because you're just0:30:41not happy when the people around you especially if you love them don't fulfill their potential you really feel that something has gone wrong and so there's a transcendent reality and potential and then when you hypothesize0:30:50an ideal that you might pursue which you always do if you pursue anything right because to pursue something means you don't already have it you're pursuing0:31:00something that doesn't exist you're probably not pursuing something that's worse than what you already have because why the hell would you sooo it right that's completely counterproductive so in in the mere fact0:31:11of your pursuit you you pause it a transcendent reality that you can that you can that you can journey towards0:31:20that's more valuable than the reality that you have now that's predicated in some sense on something like an eternal Verity or an eternal truth it partakes0:31:29in the ideal and so we have an relationship with the transcendent and you might say well that doesn't mean you have to personify the transcendent say0:31:38as Jehovah you know the God the Father but there's also some damn good reasons for doing that because one of the things that I've realized thinking through this0:31:49covenant idea and also the sacrifice idea is that the idea that the future is a judgmental father is a really really good idea you know because you think0:32:00about what the future is in part I mean the future is however the natural world is going to lay itself out over the next endless amount of time that isn't what I mean I think more about your future now0:32:11mostly your future is the future that you're going to negotiate with other people but they're going to be other people in the future and some of those people are going to be you in the future0:32:20and family members in the future and so what's happening right now is that if you make the sacrifices properly then you're actually pleasing that future set0:32:30of people and that future set of people is definitely going to serve as a judge that's exactly what it does that's precisely what it does and so you might say well it was the brilliant0:32:40imagination of mankind that hypothesized that the best way to think about the social group including the family but also including you as your future self0:32:50was to consider that you live in relationship with a future father who's a judge it's like yes that's exactly0:32:59right now is it right right or is it psychologically right well it's at least psychologically right and you know one of the things I've learned about the0:33:08biblical stories is that to say that they're psychologically right doesn't exhaust the ways in which they're right but it at least gives rational modern0:33:20people who are skeptical properly so a better way of getting a grip on them so and the uncircumcised0:33:29man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised that soul shall be cut off from his people he had broken my covenant so it's a serious contractual relationship now I was thinking about0:33:40how to understand this and I remembered this old story which I'm going to read to you about a monkey so there's an old impossibly apocryphal story about how to0:33:49catch a monkey that illustrates this set of ideas very well first so goes the story you have to find a large narrow neck jar just barely wide enough in0:33:58diameter for a monkey to put his hand inside and then you have to fill the jar up with rocks so that it's too heavy for the monkey to carry away and then you0:34:07scatter some treats around the jar that are attractive to monkeys and close to the jar and then you put a few of those treats inside the jar and so that's the0:34:17first part of the trick and then the second part of the trick is the monkey comes along and gathers up the treats and then puts his hand in the jar and grabs the treats that are in there but it's narrow necked and so once the0:34:28monkey puts his hand in there and grabs the goodies then he can't get his hand out of the damn jar and so then you can just come along and pick up the monkey and like too bad for the monkey rights like he shouldn't let go of what he had0:34:39so that something terrible didn't happen to him but that isn't what the monkey will do because he can't sacrifice the part for the hole and there's something0:34:48about the circumcision story that's about that it's about sacrificing the part to save the whole and I mean there's an echo of that in the New0:34:57Testament if I remember correctly I believe it's I believe this is correct although it might not be where Christ tells his disciples to pluck out their0:35:06eye if it offends them seems like a very dramatic you know piece of advice but it's it's partaking of the same idea which is that now if there's something0:35:17holding you back we'll see this when we get to the story of law - if there's something holding you back even if it's beer to you you have to let it go you0:35:26seriously have to let it go because there isn't anything more important than progressing forward and cheap sympathy cheap empathy cheap0:35:35nostalgia none of that is sufficient none of that will work because the consequences of not putting things together immediately are dire and0:35:45there's no time to wait and God said unto Abraham as for Sarai thy wife thou shalt not call her name Sarai but Sarah0:35:54shall be her name my princess that was suraíh Sarah is mother of Nations and I will bless her and give thee a son also of her yea I will bless0:36:03her she will be a mother of Nations kings of people shall be of her then a hebrew ham fell on his face and laughed and said in his heart shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years0:36:13old he's got a lot of doll I would say I mean there's God talking to him any laughs you know but that's okay that's he's a courageous guy and that's what people are like and and shall Sarah that0:36:24is 90 years old bear and Abraham said unto God oh that Ishmael might live before thee and God said Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed and thou0:36:34shalt call his name Isaac and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant and with his seed after him and as for Ishmael I've heard thee behold I have blessed him and will0:36:45make him fruitful and will multiply him exceedingly 12 Prince's shall he beget and I will make him a great nation now what does this mean this is this is a0:36:54miraculous story in some sense right because well Sarah it's what the Isaac want or what Abraham wants most is to have a son but it looks like it's pretty much impossible and I I0:37:03think what the story is attempting to indicate is something like god only knows what will happen to you if you put0:37:13your house in order certainly things that you do not currently regard as possible will happen and the more you0:37:22put your house in order the more things that you regard as impossible will happen and it might be the case that if you put your host together sufficiently0:37:31things that were of miraculous impossibility would happen to you well and there's no way of knowing until you try it but there's no way of being sure0:37:41that it's not the case unless you do and my experience has been that I don't mean just personally I mean that0:37:51the world is a remarkable and mysterious place and the relationship between the nature and structure of the world and your actions is indeterminate they may0:38:01be more tightly related than you think and I don't know how to square that with the fact that well you're obviously in a mortal body and constrained by all sorts0:38:12of serious constraints and none of that none of that can be trivially overcome0:38:22and I don't really understand how there can be that seriousness of mortal constraint and the infinite potential that also seems to characterize human0:38:31beings all at the same time but then I don't really understand anything about the nature of reality so that's just one more mystery to add to the pile so but0:38:42my covenant I will establish his Isaac which share a Sarah shall bear unto thee at the set time next year and he left off talking with him and God went up from Abraham and Abraham took Ishmael0:38:51his son and all that were born in this house and all that were bought with his money every male among the men of Abraham's house and circumcised the flesh of their foreskin in the selfsame0:39:00as God had said unto him that must have been an interesting conversation that's I mean really this is what God told you0:39:09to do it like okay and Abraham was ninety years old and nine when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin0:39:19and Ishmael was thirteen years old when he was circumcised in the cell same day was Abraham circumcised and his son and all the men of his house ORN in the house and bought with money0:39:28of the stranger were circumcised with him all right so that's the renewal of the Covenant that's the next part of the story that's the circumcision that's the0:39:38circumcision story and as I said it seems to indicate to me something about seriousness of intent something about the responsibility that Abraham0:39:49determines to take for everyone that's part of his household the psychological increasing psychological transformation of the idea of sacrifice the necessity0:39:59of doing something memorable and the the what would you call it the end the utility of rekindling the aims0:40:09of your highest values when you come to the end of an epoch in your life when you have to take stock again right you take stock of yourself that's really what that phrase means to take stock is0:40:19to take stock of yourself and to decide ok well what should move forward in time with me and what should be let go as if it's Deadwood and the more Deadwood that0:40:30you let go of and burn off when you have the opportunity the less it accretes around you here's something interesting about forest fires you know people have been trying to prevent forest fires for0:40:40a long time especially that damn bear smokey right he's trying to prevent forest fires and so because forest fires burn up the forest and that can't be good but here's0:40:49what happens if you don't let forest fires burn is that well forests collect a lot of dry branches right because tree branches guy0:40:59and wood falls on the forest floor and collects and so the amount of flammable material keeps increasing with time and0:41:09that's not so bad if it's wet but if the amount of flammable material is increasing and it gets really dry and then it burns then you have a real0:41:18problem the forest fire can burn so hot that it burns root does pop soil right off in which case you don't have a0:41:27forest at all anymore you just have a desert and lots of trees are evolved to withstand forest fires of a certain intensity and some won't even release0:41:36their seeds unless there's been a fire and so a little bit of fire at the right time can stop everything from burning to the ground and that's also a really0:41:46useful insight a metaphorical insight into the nature of sacrifice right it's also a lot easier to let go of something when you're deciding to let go of it0:41:55because you've decided yourself that it's you're done with that it's a weak part of you it needs to disappear you do that yourself it's much better and much0:42:04easier than it is if it's taken away from you forcibly in which case you're very much likely to fight it these other there's another interesting thing here a0:42:13motif that runs the entire Bible it's a very very powerful motif and it's partly associated with this idea of walking with or walking before God and you know0:42:24in the New Testament Christ says something like thy father's will be done and he means that that will should be done through him and so I can't I won't0:42:35build a state that's exactly right but it's something like this you know a lot of what people regard as their own personalities and and are proud of about their own personalities aren't their own0:42:45personalities at all they're useless idiosyncrasies that differ them differentiate them trivially from other people but they have no value in and of0:42:56themselves they're more like quirks I remember once I was trying to teach a particularly stubborn student about how to write and she had written a number of0:43:07essays in in University and got universally walloped for them and the reason for that was she couldn't write really at all she was really really bad0:43:17at writing and so I was sitting down with her trying to explain to her what she was doing wrong and she was being0:43:26very annoying about it very recalcitrant very very unwilling to listen that was a pearls before swine thing you know and at one point she said it I can write0:43:36perfectly well this university professors just don't like my style and I could see all my hands creep towards her neck yeah well then I'd be funny if0:43:48it wasn't true but was also true you know and I thought what the hell's with you you can't even write and you think you have a style and normally do you0:43:57think ya know not knowing how to write is not0:44:06a style that's the other point right and so you know she she instead of humbling herself which was necessary and okay right cuz she was a new University0:44:15students like of course you don't know how to write when were you gonna learn in school I don't think so so she had0:44:27this you know this this this style issue and it it just it just didn't go anywhere at all and so now let's see I lost my train of thought and telling you0:44:36tell me all those jokes oh yes in terms of above letting things burn off yeah well so she was proud of her insufficiency that's arrogance right0:44:46that's not humility it's self-deception and arrogance to be proud of your insufficiency that's a very foolish thing and that means to cling to the parts of you that are dead okay now there's this idea that runs0:44:57through the Bible I think as a whole that okay I'll tell you another little side story here I was reading about0:45:07Socrates today and I was reading about Socrates trial you know he was tried by the Athenians for corrupting for failing0:45:16to worship the correct gods and corrupting the youth of Athens by like teaching them stuff and asking them questions you know which is great way to corrupt people and so he knew the trial0:45:28was coming and Athens wasn't a very big place only on about 25,000 people everybody knew everybody everybody knew who the powerful guys were and everybody including Socrates knew that the trial0:45:40was a warning do you like get out of town right we're going to put you on trial in six months and the potential penalty is best got0:45:49that it's like so so Socrates had a chat with his compatriots and they were contemplating fair means and foul to set0:45:59up a defense for him so that he could or to leave so that he could not be tried and put to death and he decided that he wasn't going to do that and he also0:46:09decided that he wasn't going to even think about his defense and he said why this is quite an interesting thing he said why0:46:18he told one of his friends that he had this voice in his head a daemon a spirit something like that0:46:28that he always listened to and that that was one of the reasons he was different from other people because he always listened to this thing it didn't tell him what to do but it told him what not to do it always told him what not to do0:46:38and if it told him not to do something then he didn't do it if he was speaking and the little voice came up and said no then he shut up and he tried to say0:46:47something else and he was very emphatic about this and he said that when he tried to plan to evade the trial or even to mount his own defence the voice came0:46:58up and said no don't bother with it and he thought well what would he what the hell do you mean by that like there's a0:47:07trial coming and I'm going to be put to death and well he eventually concluded that he was an old guy you know the next0:47:1610 years he was in his 70s perhaps the next 10 years weren't going to be that great for him he got a chance maybe the gods were giving him a chance just to bow out you know to put his affairs in0:47:26order to say goodbye to everyone to avoid that last descent into catastrophe which might have been particularly painful for a philosopher and to and to walk off the world on his own terms0:47:37something like that the point I'm making with that is that Socrates attended to this internal voice that at least told0:47:47him what not to do and then he didn't do it and of course Socrates was a very remarkable man and we still hear about him today and we know that he existed and all of those things and so back to0:47:57the back to the walking with God idea you know as you elevate your aim you0:48:08create a judge at the same time right because the new ideal which is an ideal you even if it's just an ideal position that you might occupy even if it's still0:48:18conceptualized in that concrete way that becomes a judge because it's above you right and then you're you're terrified of it maybe why you might be afraid when you go0:48:28start a new job right because your this thing is above you and you're terrified of it and it judges you and that's useful because that's the judge that you're creating by formulating the idea0:48:38tells you what's useless about yourself and then you can dispense with it and you want to keep doing that and then every time you make a judge that's more0:48:47elevated then there's more useless you that has to be dispensed with and then if you recreate an ultimate judge which is what the archetypal imagination of humankind has done say with the figure0:48:58of Christ because if Christ is nothing else he is at least the archetypal perfect man and therefore the judge you have a judge that says get rid of everything about yourself that isn't0:49:08perfect of course that's also what Abraham that's also what God tells Abraham right he says to be perfect to pick an ideal that's high enough and you0:49:17can do this the thing that's interesting about this I think is you can do it more or less on your own terms you have to have some collaboration from other people but you don't have to pick an0:49:26external ideal you can pick an ideal that fulfills the role of ideal for you you can say okay well if things could be set up for me the way I need them to be0:49:35and if I could be who I needed to be what would that look like and you can figure that out for yourself and then instantly you have a judge and I also think that's part of the reason people0:49:44don't do it right why don't why don't people look up and move ahead an answer is well you know you start formulating an ideal you formulate a judge it's0:49:53pretty easy to feel intimidated in the face of your own ideal that's what happens to Kane vs Abel for example then it's really easy to destroy the ideal instead of to try to pursue it because0:50:03then you get rid of the judge but it's way better lower the damn judge if it's too much like if your current ambition is crushing you you know then maybe0:50:12you're playing the tyrant to yourself and you should cap down your ambitions not get rid of them by any stretch of the imagination but at least put them more reasonably within your grasp you0:50:22don't have to leap from point one to point 50 and one leap right you can do it incrementally but I really like this idea I think it's a profound idea that0:50:31the process of recapitulating yourself continually is also the process of it's a phoenix-like process right you're shedding0:50:40and all those elements of you that are no longer worthy of the pursuits that you're that you're valuing and then I would say the idea here is that as you0:50:51do that you shape yourself ever more precisely into something that can withstand the tragedy of life and that0:51:00can act as a as a beacon to the world that's the right way of thinking about it maybe first to your friends and then to your family it's like it's a hell of a fine ambition and there's no reason0:51:10that it can't happen you know every one of you knows people who are really bloody useful in a crisis and people that you admire right those are all you can think of all those people as you0:51:20admire that you admire us partial incarnations of the archetypal Messiah that's exactly right and the more that that manifests itself0:51:30at any given person then the more generally useful and admirable that person is in a multitude of situations and we don't know the limit to that but people can be unbelievably good for0:51:40things you know it's really something to behold so that's what God tells Abraham okay so the next story is about Abraham0:51:49and these angels Ames will show up on his doorstep and this is part of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah but I don't think as I said this story is generally0:51:58read as if it's about homosexuality but I don't think it is here I think it's about two things primarily one is how do0:52:08you treat the strange so the strangest strange things and strange ideas and strange people and strangers right it's all about it it's0:52:17that which is not you it's like the strange lands that God asked Abraham to move out into how do you interact with this strange and here here's one0:52:28possible rule because you could say to yourself well what what do I want to make friends with more where do I want to be more comfortable do I want to be more comfortable with that which I0:52:38already know and so that would be the circumscribed territory that you've already mastered or do I want to be comfortable with all those things I don't know and then the right answer is0:52:50that you should want to be comfortable with all those things that you don't know because there is a bloody lot of things that you don't know and if you can be a Sojourner among what you don't know well then you're so0:53:00protected because well you're going to go lots of places where you don't know and you're going to be able to manage it so you want to be you want to be that person that can act where they don't0:53:09know and so also what happens with with Abraham well he's at home and these0:53:19angels show up now we don't know whether they're angels or men precisely because well as this part of the story reads as0:53:29the Lord appeared to him in the plains of Mamre and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day so he's not a visionary state by the by all appearances and he lifted up his eyes0:53:38and looked and lo three men stood by him there's real ambivalence in the story about the men are the three men are the three angels are the two angels in God0:53:47it's all mixed up in the story so we won't clarify that we'll leave it ambiguous and I think the ambiguity is important because you don't know who the stranger is when you encounter them and0:53:58it depends on whether you're thinking about it in the normative manner or if you're thinking about it in the transcendent manner because with each0:54:07person that you meet well they're just a person that's one way of thinking about it and and then they're the person that you know or they're the person as they choose to reveal themselves to you and0:54:17people keep themselves shielded but then they're also something of great metaphysical potential right and you might say well do you believe that and I0:54:26would say well yes you believe it because you expect a lot from people generally speaking and are not happy if they betray you but more importantly our0:54:35entire culture is predicated on the idea that each person has an indefinite intrinsic worth and I'm not talking about self-esteem I'm talking about something like the what would what would0:54:47you say it the implicit presupposition in our legal structure that no matter who you are even if you're a murderer even if you're a condemned murderer that0:54:56there's something about you that's of transcendent value that has to be respected by the law by the law and by other people right and so that's that's a remark net and you might say well0:55:07do I believe that and answer that is well yak it out because you follow the law and it's not an easy thing to pull out of the law it's kind of the idea that you have intrinsic natural rights and you don't pull that out of our law0:55:18man without having the whole thing fall down and I think the whole idea that you have intrinsic natural rights is predicated on something like the biblical hypothesis that human beings0:55:29have a logos nature and that we are involved in the speaking forth of being and as beings who are involved in this0:55:38speaking forth of being there's something about us that has to be respected by ourselves in relationship to ourselves by0:55:47ourselves in relationship to other people but even more strangely by ourselves in relationship to even to criminals even to vicious criminals you can't remove that transcendent element0:55:57and that's that to me that's also a mirror a miracle of conceptualization because who the hell is going to think that up right even the most vicious of0:56:07murderers has a touch of the transcendent that needs to be respected of all the ideas that are unlikely that's going to top the list and of course without that you you have a very0:56:17barbaric legal system right because no one is protected as soon as you make a mistake then you're in the Damned then you have no rights whatsoever and that isn't what happens in the West which0:56:26isn't an absolutely amazing thing so anyways Abraham is a master of the stranger that's one way of thinking about it he0:56:37knows what to do when strangers come along and he opens his he opens himself up to them and I would say he does that we know he's not a naive guy Abraham0:56:48right he's no weakling a couple of stories ago he took a big army and you know went and harassed a bunch of Kings and took his nephew back he's he's a0:56:58tough guy and so if strangers show up and he welcomes them it's not because he couldn't do otherwise he could certainly do otherwise and it's not because he0:57:08isn't aware of what people can be like he's perfectly aware of what people can be like but he determines to take a particular attitude towards them and that is to welcome them and so and why0:57:19would you do that and I think the answer to that is you hold out your hand entrust to someone and you evoke the best from them if that's their to be0:57:30given so it's an act of courage it's like it's it isn't me meeting you exactly not exactly it's more like the0:57:39transcendent part of me making a gesture that allows the transcendent part of you to step forward and that happens all the time it happens all the time in0:57:48normative discourse you know this perfectly well because sometimes you can have a real casual conversation with someone that just goes nowhere right it's just shallow as can be or now and0:57:57then you can actually make contact with someone right and you're both I would say enlightened and ennoble by the conversation and that's a de we would call that a deep conversation first for0:58:08some reason because we made a deep connection whatever that means it means well it certainly means that it's not shallow we're not sure about what these metaphor means but it means that it0:58:18reaches deep inside of you it's something like that you make direct person-to-person contact and those sorts of conversations are replenishing that0:58:28that's the right way to think about it they genuinely are and I think that's because they provide you with that bread that's not Material bread and that's the0:58:38information that you need to to thrive and to put yourself together and so it does matter how you meet someone and it does matter how you treat them when you0:58:47first meet them and it's amazing I've learned to do this at least in part partly because I'm a clinical psychologist I've learned how to talk to people very rapidly and I have the most0:58:56amazing adventures with people in cabs and when I travel because I'll talk to them directly right away and they'll tell me the wildest stories and show me the craziest things because I'm actually0:59:06interested in what they have to say and I'm not afraid well I'm somewhat afraid but I'm not I'm not sufficiently afraid to have that stop me and I'm acting on0:59:16the presupposition that the person has something of great interest to reveal and that's a very useful thing to know too because one of the things that's0:59:25really cool about people and you really learn this as the clinical psychologist is that if you can get people talking they're so damn interesting you can hardly stand it you know because they have0:59:34these idiosyncratic experiences that are only theirs right they're only theirs personally no one else could tell the story and that's the kind of stories that you want to hear and when they tell0:59:43you those stories you learn something you didn't know and so what that means is that you can treat the landscape of strangers as an endless vista of places to learn things you didn't know and if0:59:54you know enough so that you're satisfied with your life and everything has ceased to be a tragedy around you well then you could be comfortable in your circumscribed domain of totalitarian1:00:06knowledge let's say but if you're if your life is insufficient and you're suffering more than you want to and everything isn't what it should be then you need to look where you haven't1:00:15looked for what you don't have and then you can look outside beyond you and then you can make friends with what you don't understand and that's a huge part of1:00:24what this story is about because what happens is that Abraham welcomes the men God angels and treats them very well and1:00:33reaps a tremendous benefit as a consequence and then well then the story reverses and we end up in Sodom and Gomorrah where the same angels sojourn1:00:42and they're treated terribly and all hell breaks loose and so that's what the story is about it's not fundamental now there's a there's a sexual impropriety thing going on that I'm also going to1:00:53delve into but I don't think that's the critical issue in the story the critical issue in the story is how do you act in the face of the stranger you know1:01:03there's a statement in the New Testament Christ says something like when you when you do something to the least of people you do it to me him right and that's a1:01:16very difficult statement to understand too but it's something like it's something reminiscent of the requirement1:01:26to keep the idea of the transcendent reality of the person in mind at the same time you keep their proximal reality in mind to have to have your1:01:35mind in two places at the same time when you're talking to people you know I learned from a friend of mine in1:01:44Montreal who is very socially sophisticated in some ways whenever went in whenever he went in to us always like going shopping with him1:01:54and whenever he went into a store and he talked and he had an interaction with a clerk the first thing he would do is have an interaction with the clerk and1:02:03he wouldn't have an interaction with the role of the clerk he'd like look at the person sort of take stock of the fact that they were there and then asked them something genuine about their job or1:02:14their store how they were doing like going to a conversation right away and he didn't get personal about it because that can be intrusive right you have to1:02:23be very sophisticated to do this but he did indicate to the person that he was there at least in part for the good that1:02:33could be done between them it's something like that and then the person would be ridiculously helpful you know and and so then you know if people1:02:45mistreat you you see this with antisocial kids it's a very tragic thing to see because if you're an antisocial child by the time you're about 4 you're very hostile and distrustful to people1:02:55and so you'd like a growling puppy and if you're a growling puppy you can not to get petted you're more likely to get kicked and if you're a growling puppy and you get kicked and you have even1:03:05more reason to grow and that's sort of the story of antisocial kids if they're not well socialized by the time they're four and they're more on the aggressive side then they alienate themselves from1:03:15the community and all they get is rejection well and then they look at the rejection and they think well to hell with humanity you know and you wonder1:03:26they think that but but the part of the catastrophe is is that they get what they evoke and I'm not saying it's their fault precisely but it doesn't matter1:03:35that's still what happens and so you might ask yourself if you're not getting from people what you need there is some possibility that you're not approaching1:03:45especially if this happens to you repeatedly across people and this is a virtual certainty if it happens to you repeatedly across people especially if you have the same bad experience with1:03:54people it's not them it's you I would say three is the limit if something happens to you once you1:04:03write it off if it happens to you twice it's like you open your eyes but you write it off but it happens to you three times it's probably you or it's the rest1:04:14of the world better it's you because you're not going to change the rest of the world and he lifted up his eyes and looked and lo three men stood by heaven1:04:23when he saw them he ran to meet them from the tent door and bowed himself to the ground and said my lord if now I have found favor in thy sight pass not away I pray thee from thy servant let a1:04:33little water I pray you be fetched and wash your feet wash your feet take the dust from your feet extract yourself out1:04:43from your journey write and sit and I'll fetch a morsel of bread and comfort ye your hearts and after that you can pass1:04:53on for therefore are you come to your servant and they said so do as thou hath said and Abraham hastened unto the tent into the tent unto Sarah and said make1:05:02ready quickly three measures of fine meal knead it and make cakes upon the hearth powerful call to hospitality here and abraham ran unto the herd and fetched a calf tender and good and gave1:05:12it to a young man and he hasted to dress it and he took butter and milk and the calf which he had dressed and said it before them and he stood by them under the tree and they did eat some1:05:24commentary from here Hebrews 13 to be not forgetful to entertain strangers for thereby some have entertained angels1:05:33unawares this is a commentary from Matthew Henry with a nonconformist minister and author cheerful and obliging manners in showing kindness are1:05:43great ornaments to piety though our condescending lord vouchsafe has not personal visits to us yet still by his1:05:52Spirit he stands at the door knocks when we're inclined to open he deigns to enter by his gracious consolations he provides a rich feast of which we partake with him this is from1:06:04revelations 3:20 behold I stand at the door and knock and If any man hear my voice and opened the door I will come in to him and will sup with him and he with me well a hyperlink nature of those1:06:17quotes is quite obvious there's 10 or 15 things being said at the same time right one is a reference to the idea that if you ask for something it will be given1:06:26to you right it was a very strange idea but I like that idea a lot and I believe my in my experience that has been true if it was that I wanted what I was1:06:36asking for because that's the real issue right because the question is if you want something what does it mean to want it and what it means is to sacrifice1:06:46whatever is necessary to get it because otherwise you don't want it and so there's an equation here and I'm not claiming its ultimate accuracy but the1:06:56equation is something like you don't want it unless you're willing to sacrifice for it and if you don't want it you're not going to get it because you're scattered but if you do want it1:07:08and you make the proper sacrifices then god only knows what might happen and that's a see one of the things I really like about the existential philosophers1:07:18is their emphasis on personal responsibility you know that many of them had an emphasis on the role that people had in shaping their own destiny1:07:29the exists for the existentialists and I think this was a consequence of the religious substructure of philosophical thinking it was self-evident that life1:07:38was tragic and bitter but and then fair enough but that isn't where it ended the the next issue was well there are better1:07:47in ways better and worse ways of dealing with that and the better way of dealing with the fact that life is tragic and bitter is to pause it the self you could1:07:58be and live authentically in relationship to that and then the next issue and something is something Kierkegaard talked about particularly when he talked about the necessity of1:08:08being a night of faith is that the thing is and this is I think part of the light part of life that's the intractable adventure no one can take the adventure1:08:18of life away from you that that's they can't deal with good advice for example because no one can demonstrate to you that if you straight yourself out a name it what you want and1:08:28make the proper sacrifices that your life will turn out in the manner that you might want it to turn out it isn't in anyone else's purview to make that judgment the only person that1:08:39can possibly figure that out is you it's something that can't be stolen from you I would say it's your destiny it's a destiny that cannot be stolen from you and you can forego it you can say well1:08:50I'm not willing to put in the effort because what if I fail well first of all if you don't put in the effort you will fail because life is hard and it takes1:08:59everything out of you to do it properly so you will fail and if you make the proper sacrifices you might fail that's1:09:08why I like the ambiguity and the story of Cain and Abel because we're never really told why God rejects Cain's offerings there's hints that Cain maybe isn't doing as good a job as he should1:09:18and he certainly gets bitter about it but there's no smoking pistol it doesn't say well Cain is a bad guy he made terrible sacrifices so God rejected him you never know1:09:27Cain might have been working pretty damn hard and things still didn't work out for them and I think that ambiguity is appropriate in the story because that imbued ambiguity is in life it you'd be1:09:38a fool to say that everything always works out for everyone if they just do things right I mean I think that's a very that's a very careless thing to say1:09:47given how much tragedy and catastrophe there is in the world and how much of it seems to be undeserved but that still has very little bearing I think on on your own individual adventure and the1:09:58necessity for the necessity for opening1:10:09the door to who you could be and the necessity to do that seriously and I do believe and I think I think that's why this most impossible of verses you know1:10:19knock and the door will open why that's believable is that I have never met anyone who couldn't1:10:29hypothesize a better them in some manner all they had to do was ask it's like well how could you be better I think well here's three ways it's like it's no1:10:40problem right you can think about that no time cloud maybe it's small ways but you can almost always at least think of something stupid that you're doing that you could quit and so that means that1:10:50you do have this it's a strange thing in people that we have this built-in capacity to pause it a higher self and then to move towards it and maybe maybe that's part of where the religious1:11:00instinct really came from speaking like really reductionistic ly like as a materialist as an evolutionary psychologist we we have this notion of the transcendent ideal right that it1:11:10seems to be pervasive across cultures well maybe that's the ultimate manifestation of the human proclivity to be able to pause it an ideal at all and to move forward you pause an ideal okay1:11:20that you need that to move forward well if you can pause it an ideal why can't you pause it the ultimate ideal well if you can then instantly you've got a religious1:11:29sensibility instantly and so maybe that's the kind of puzzles like as a biologist what the hell is the basis of the religious instinct because the idea1:11:38that it's mere superstition like we can just dispense with that that's wrong it's a human Universal you can evoke religious experiences all sorts of ways1:11:47so we're not going to play that game there's there's some reason that that instinct exists and this the first thing to do with it is to try to reduce it to something that's biological and leave it1:11:57at that not to mess with the metaphysics but it certainly could be the case that it's the ultimate extension of our capacity to posit an ideal and we also might say1:12:06well that's good enough because well the ideal moves you forward it fills your life with meaning there's no doubt about that because it is in the movement towards your ideal that life's meaning1:12:16is to be attained and then the question is well how much meaning is there in moving forward towards an ultimate ideal well more meaning even though it's more difficult how much well that's the open1:12:29question behold I will stand at the door and knock and if any man hear my voice and open the door I will come in to him and will sup with him and he with me that's a pretty good deal and the angel1:12:42said unto Him where is Sarah thy wife and Abraham said Behold in the tent and he said I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life and1:12:51lo Sarah thy wife have a son and Sarah herded in the tent door which was behind him now Abraham1:13:00and Sarah were old and well stricken in age and it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women therefore Sarah laughed within herself saying after I am waxed old shall I also have1:13:11this pleasure my lord being old also well she's kind of skeptical about the whole angel man God having a child at a hundred thing and and and and well write1:13:23and so rightly so and the Lord said unto Abraham why did Sarah laugh saying shall I've Asura T bear a child which I'm old1:13:34is anything too hard for the Lord at the time appointed I will return unto thee according to the time of life and Sarah shall have a son then Sarah denied1:13:43saying I laughed not for she was afraid and he said nay but thou didst laugh and1:13:58the men rose up from thence and looked toward Sodom and Abraham went with them to bring them on the way I'm gonna make1:14:10a small detour and talk to you about this idea of potential again because it's really I've really thought about it a lot I think music speaks of potential like I think music speaks of potential1:14:20bursting forward it's something it's something like that and that's why it's so deeply meaningful and and it's this continual pattern revelation of the next1:14:30wonderful thing that might happen it's something like that so there's that and people find that deeply meaningful and then there's the idea that we all have1:14:40potential that isn't realized but that we regard that potential even though it's not realized as real which I can't get my head around at all it just1:14:49doesn't make sense and then although everyone acts that way and everyone believes it because what you act reflects what you believe and you make judgments about yourself and others1:14:59based on those beliefs and their deep judgments so the idea that you believe that there is such a thing as human potential I think I think it's undeniable if you act at all if you expect things1:15:09of people at all then you're demonstrating your commitment to the idea of potential but then I wonder if there's something even deeper going on because we are very materialistic modern1:15:19people and there's great power in that obviously I mean we've obtained great control over the material world for1:15:28better or for worse but we do have a tendency to think of the world purely as a material structure and isn't really obvious to me that the world is exactly a material structure it seems to be to1:15:39be something more like constrained potential you know because everything is a certain way but everything that is a certain way could be a multitude of1:15:49other ways in almost an infinite multitude of other ways and the degree to which something that is could be a multitude of other ways is dependent a large part on how you interact with it1:15:58right even with materials that we're very familiar with we continue to discover new properties and put them to use it's like things are1:16:07things are compacted into their material form but that doesn't exhaust what they are especially not in relationship to other things and so it seems to me even1:16:17if you can't replace the materialist perspective with the perspective that it's better to construe the world construe being as if it's made of1:16:26possibility rather than the world as if it's made of matter it's at least useful to have that as an additional viewpoint is that because you could say well the material philosophy is very useful as a1:16:36tool for obtaining certain sorts of benefits which it clearly is but then this more metaphysical perspective which i think is more accurate in some ways that the world is a place of potential is also an1:16:47extraordinarily useful way to approach the world and and it's practically useful you know what we talked last week a little bit about doing something as1:16:56simple as trying to organize a room it's it's by no means obvious how much potential there is in a room right there's a very large amount of potential1:17:06in any given room tremendous amount of potential especially if it's connected with people I think maybe an inexhaustible amount of potential and maybe there's an inexhaustible amount of1:17:15potential everywhere and we just don't know how to get access to it well that's certainly true and it's certainly true to some degree we don't know how to get access to all1:17:24the potential of our children for example or ourselves or our loved ones or it or or the people that we know so well so I think the this story is trying1:17:36to hammer that idea home to which is don't be so sure that it's impossible or maybe don't let the assumption that's1:17:45it's impossible stop you from going forth into the world that would be and that's a that's a what would you say that's like an inoculation against nihilism and I'm for a long time I1:17:56understood nihilism very well I could I could understand its rationale associated with the tragedy of life associating with suffering and evil1:18:05associated with the observation of finitude and the arbitrary and unjust nature of the world but the more I thought about it the less I've come to1:18:14believe that there's any excuse for it whatsoever and I think the reason for that is that it forced all the effort it four stalls the ability to discover for1:18:24yourself maybe there's no reason to be so goddamn hopeless except that it's easier to be useless now on a not believe me I'm not making that case I'm1:18:35not saying that that's what's besetting people who are clinically depressed for example that's that's not my point clinical depression is a terrible thing1:18:44there's lots of reasons to be rendered to be to be tossed into a catastrophic condition that isn't what I mean I mean that kind of cynical arrogant rational1:18:55hyper-intelligent nihilism that throws the world away as if it's of little use before it's been properly engaged with1:19:05better to engage with it and see what happens and better to make the assumption that if the world isn't returning to you what it is that you need then either you're not doing it1:19:17right or you've conceptualized what you need badly why not at least open yourself up to that possibility right because you1:19:27could be wrong hopefully if you're suffering this is a great thing to know hopefully if you're suffering you wrong because if you're suffering and1:19:37you're right then there's nowhere to go so it's very useful to find out whatever errors you might be committing another thing that's really interesting about the Jews in the Old Testament it's a1:19:47remarkable thing every single time they get flattened by God it's always their fault they never say the world that God1:19:58created was corrupt and God is evil they never say that no matter what happens right no matter what catastrophe occurs when they have every reason to at least put that hypothesis forward they don't1:20:09they say we erred we walked off the path it's our fault and that's hard you know because it puts1:20:18all the weight of human capacity on the human being that's very hard but the outside is it gives you the control it1:20:27opens up the door that it opens up the possibility that you could be the person that could set it right if you would just let go of what's in your way whatever that is and the men rose up1:20:44from thence and look towards Saul to man Abraham went with them to bring them on the way and the Lord said shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I'm about1:20:55to do seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great mighty nation and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him I guess God is talking to himself1:21:05here or maybe he's talking to the angels but I think he's trying to make a decision for I know him that he will command his children and his household1:21:15after him and they shall keep the way of the Lord to do justice and judgment that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he has spoken of them and the Lord1:21:25said because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great and because their sin is very Grievous I will go down now and1:21:34see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it which has come to me and if not I will know well1:21:44we don't know what's happened in Sodom and Gomorrah but we know that God's got wind of it and that that's not good and we know that sin means to miss the mark and so we know that whatever1:21:54has happened in Sodom and Gomorrah means that something about the natural ethical order of things has been seriously violated and there's a strong intimation1:22:04in the Old Testament which I think by the way is completely correct that if the proper order of being is violated and that's something like the balance1:22:13between chaos and order say if the proper balance of being is violated then all hell will break loose and one of the1:22:23things I can tell you from reading a very from reading a very comprehensive set of myths from around the world is that that's a conclusion that human1:22:33beings have come to everywhere stay on the goddamn path and be careful because if you start to mess around and you1:22:42deviate especially if you know that you're deviating things are not going to go well for you and that idea is everywhere and I think it's right I1:22:52think the idea is right because there aren't that many ways of doing things right and there's a lot of ways of doing things wrong and if you do things wrong the consequences of doing them wrong can1:23:01be truly catastrophic you know one of the things I learned from reading Viktor Frankl first but then Alexander Solzhenitsyn who I think did a deeper1:23:10job was that and vaclav havel thought the same thing that these people were very much trying to understand what happened in places like Nazi Germany and1:23:21in the Soviet Union so schnitzel school like our Capello's caligo is a particularly good analysis of what happened in the Soviet Union and his conclusion and it's a 20 100 page1:23:31conclusion and it's like hammered home with a hammer it's it's a book that everyone should read you know assuming that you can read a 20 100 page screen because that's basically what it is you1:23:41know first of all what he does is document just how terrible things were in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 and no matter how terrible you think they were unless you know the1:23:51stories they were a lot more terrible than that and they were terrible personally because everyone lied they were terrible in families because two1:24:01out of five were government and farmers they were terrible among friends because no one could tell each other the truth they were terrible socially because the whole system was corrupted ban on slave labor1:24:11and they were terrible philosophically because the doctrine of man upon which the state was founded was hopeless and nihilistic and and they were murderous1:24:22destructive and genocidal it's like they got it wrong at every single level of analysis simultaneously and the question1:24:32is why and Solzhenitsyn's answer and to some degree Victor Frankel's answer as well and vaclav havel and I would say also Nelson Mandela and Gandhi they all1:24:41they all ended up in the same conceptual sphere and the answer was because individual people lived crooked lives because individual people swallowed lies1:24:52and spoke them and didn't stand up for the truth and the corruption that spread from each individual pulled the entire state mechanism into that corruption and1:25:02made everything into hell you know there are other theories obedience right that's kind of the Milgram idea from that it's easy to make human beings OBD1:25:11obedient to people in authority and I've explored that idea quite a bit with regards to what happens happen for example in the Nazi concentration camps yes you can set circumstances up so that1:25:22people are likely to be obedient to orders that are pathological there's no doubt about that and yes sometimes that's indicative of the weakness of1:25:31their character but that's not the issue and the idea that what happened in Nazi Germany was because a population of good people listen to a tiny minority of bad1:25:41people that's a really that's really not a good theory the the the Nazi ethos was there at every single level of the1:25:51social organization right right from the personal right from the personal right from the familial all the way up to the leadership it was the same thing all the1:26:00way up and all the way down and the same thing in the Soviet Union and so well so1:26:11if you miss the which is apparently what the people of sodom and gomorrha did their sin was Grievous than they risk destruction and1:26:21I just cannot see how after the 20th century anyone with any sense could possibly not see that as true and I1:26:32think that there's a line in the Old Testament you know that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and I can tell you one of the things that frightened me badly was the realization1:26:43from reading Souls nets and and a variety of other things that I was reading at the same time that Dostoyevsky as well because he makes the same point he said that a human being is1:26:53not only responsible for everything they do but for everything that everyone else does now you know that's crazy and he was an epileptic and a mystic and that's a crazy thing to say1:27:02but it's also there's something about it that's true because if you were better the people around you would be less worse than they are and if you were good enough you don't know how much better1:27:11the people around you would be and so there's this idea too you know that Christ took the sins of the world unto himself that's a complicated idea that I1:27:22wrestled with that one for a very long time but I think I figured out at least in part what it means it meant that it's something like the1:27:31realization of complete humanity you see to take the sins of the world unto yourself is to realize that is to1:27:41understand the Nazi concentration camp guard because that person is human and so are you and so if you can't see you1:27:51in that then you don't know who you are and if you can see you in that well then you've started to take the sins of the world onto yourself because you've1:28:01actually started to take responsibility for those terrible things you know I think it's the motif of the the motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington we1:28:12must never forget that's close and I think well you can't forgive you can't remember what you don't understand you will forget what you don't understand1:28:21and the question is what are you supposed to remember about the Holocaust historical event that six million people1:28:30died that's not what's to remember what's to remember is that's what people can do and you're one of them and if you don't understand that you1:28:41could do that then you don't know who you are1:28:54so God's making a case here he's making a case that the people of the Sodom and Gomorrha have sinned and it's making a large racket that even God has heard1:29:03about that's a very common mythological motif by the way that the sins and and and and what would you call it the sins1:29:13and noise of humanity can read such a clamor that even the gods hearin and are forced to intervene that comes all the way from the Mesopotamian creation story1:29:22so anyways it's logical yeah their sinning okay well so what well no not so what it means that God's offended and that everything is at risk that's what1:29:32it means it's like that's a something worth taking seriously and the men turned their faces from thence and went towards Sodom but Abraham stood yet1:29:42before the Lord and Abraham drew near and said will thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked this is a very interesting part of the story um friend1:29:53of mine took me to task the other day when I was writing about portraying the Old Testament God is pretty harsh and judgmental and the New Testament God is sort of all loving which he isn't1:30:03because there's the whole Book of Revelations thing but um but I got that partly from reading Northrop Frye but going through the Old Testament more detail I realized that that's that is1:30:13too low resolution interpretation and that God who's dispensing a fair bit of harsh justice in the Old Testament it's1:30:22also someone who can be negotiated with weirdly enough and that's what happens here you know Abraham has just been told that whatever's going on in Sodom and Gomorrah is seriously not good and that1:30:32God's going to do something about it and he takes it upon himself this is an act of mercy to to ask God to be a bit more judicious right it's like okay you're1:30:41gonna wipe out the city well bad things are happening there but you know there's probably a few people in the damn city that aren't completely corrupted by what's going on there of course that's an open question you1:30:51know because it's an open question for example how many people were there were in Nazi Germany who weren't completely corrupted by what was going on in Nazi Germany and the same thing could be said about Mallis China and the same thing1:31:01could be said about the Soviet Union it's like well perhaps there was a person somewhere who didn't and at some level what was happening but you know the whole issue of willful1:31:12blindness certainly springs to mind if nothing else anyways Abraham decides to intercede with God on behalf of these people who are going to be destroyed he says will1:31:23thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked perhaps there be 50 righteous people within the city will you also destroy and not spare the place for the1:31:32fifty righteous that are there that be far from thee to do after this manner he's kind of reminding God that he's a good guy as far as I can tell to slay the righteous with the wicked and that1:31:42the righteous should be as the wicked thought before from thee should not the judge of the earth do right and the Lord said if I find in Sodom fifty right he1:31:51seems a bit taken aback here to me if I find him Sodom 50 righteous within the city then I will spare the place for their sakes and Abraham answered and said behold now I have taken upon me to1:32:01speak upon the Lord unto the Lord which but I am but dust in ashes possibly there shall lack five of the fifty1:32:10righteous will thou destroy all the city for lack of five and he said he said God said if I find there forty five I will not destroy it and Abraham spoke unto1:32:20him yet again and said he's kind of sneaking up on God here huh her adventure there shall be forty found there and he said I will not do it for1:32:29forty sake and he said unto him oh let the Lord not be angry and I will speak possibly there shall be thirty found1:32:39there and God said I won't do it if I find thirty there and Abraham he seems really to be pushing his luck by this point says behold I have taken upon me1:32:49to speak under the Lord possibly there shall be twenty found there and God said I won't destroy it for 20s sake and he said oh let the Lord not be angry and I1:33:01will speak yet but this once perhaps ten shall be found there and he said I will not destroy it for 10s sake and the Lord went his way and as soon as he had left1:33:11communing with Abraham and Abraham returned unto his place well there's two ways you can read that part of the story one is that three let's say you can1:33:20bargain with God even if you're kind of annoying about it so that's kind of interesting the second is that even if there's a1:33:29minority of good in a place that isn't good it won't be slated for destruction that's kind of a good thing and the third is a minority of good in a place1:33:40can keep it from being destroyed and that's a really good thing too and I believe that as well I think that good is more powerful than evil naivety isn't1:33:51but I think that good is and I think that in a place that's corrupt a minority of people who stand forth against the corruption can prevail now1:34:07you know I think I think one of the best examples of that again was all Alexander Solzhenitsyn because he was in the terrible work camps when he wrote his1:34:16book he memorized most of it which is not an easy thing to do when it's 2,100 pages long and set in very tiny font he memorized most of it and then he wrote1:34:25it and it was one of the things that brought down the Soviet Union you know was published in the 1970s first of all in wet in the West and the1:34:35first thing that happened at least initially was that the communism as an ethical system lost absolutely all1:34:45credibility whatsoever among anyone who was even vaguely educated immediately upon the publication of The Gulag Archipelago he pulled the moral slats out from underneath it and the book was1:34:55definitely one of the reasons there were many but was definitely one of the reasons why the rotten system crumbled and fell without a war and that's a1:35:04great example of how one person can take on a tyranny and prevail so and he's not the only person who did that sort of1:35:13thing because well Gandhi did the same thing I mean I don't think the English were the Russians but you know things were not so good in India and what1:35:22Gandhi did in India under the influence by the way of Leo Tolstoy was also a remarkable example of a single person1:35:32intervening in a catastrophe and and and and setting it far more right than it could be so and there came two angels1:35:43to sought him and evening and lot remember Lauda's Abraham's nephew sat in the gate of Sodom and laud seeing them rose up to meet them and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground1:35:53and he said Behold my Lords I turn in I pray you into your servants house and tarry all night and wash your feet and ye shall rise up early and go on your ways1:36:02no he's Abraham's nephew and can spend acting in exactly the manner that Abraham does he shows hospitality to these people and they said no no we'll1:36:11stay in the street all night and he insisted he pressed upon them greatly and they turned in unto him and entered into his house and he made them a feast1:36:20and baked unleavened bread and they did eat but before they lay down the men of the city even the men of Sodom compassed the house round both old and young all the people from every quarter and they1:36:31called him to Lord and said unto him where the man which came into thee this night bring them out to us that we may know them well that's the part of the story1:36:44that's been used as a diatribe let's say against homosexuality because to know is to engage in sexual intercourse and the1:36:56inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah we're willing to care the strangers out of Lots house and use and abuse them as they see self fit right and so what are1:37:07they doing well they're violating the principle the principles that govern appropriate conduct with the stranger and maybe the stranger is something you shouldn't mess with because you don't1:37:17know who you're messing with so that's like warning number one well they're violets are under violating the essential principles of hospitality and then there's the sexual thing here I1:37:26think is isn't the sexual thing here is something more like the absolute danger of immediate gratification sexual1:37:36included outside the constraints of any civilized structure whatsoever right because that's his uncivilized behavior as you could possibly hope for1:37:45right strangers come into your city they're in the house of someone who's part of your city they're being shown hospitality a mob shows up and says four1:37:56come over man we're going to do whatever the hell we want to them and it's not going to be good and if you get in the way things are going to go even worse1:38:05for you so so that's what it seems to me to be it's completely dysregulated behavior its behavior that's outside the1:38:17confines of any civilized structure whatsoever it's an indica it's an indication that the entire the social structure of the entire society has1:38:27collapsed so that there's nothing left for the inhabitants to do except to engage in the most brutal of immediate gratification and destruction well so1:38:41what does Lott do I pray thee brethren do not do so wickedly behold now I have two daughters which have not yet known man let me I pray you bring them out1:38:51unto you and you do to them as is good in your eyes only unto these men do nothing and therefore for therefore came they the under the shadow of my roof1:39:01well it's hard to know what to make of that you know I mean doesn't exactly seem like the advisable thing for a lot1:39:12to do and but I think at least what it is is an indication of the degree to which he took the solemn vow of1:39:24hospitality seriously and I think that's the idea that the story is trying to promote1:39:36and the angel said stand back oh and the men said stand back and they said again this one fellow came in to sojourn to talk to us and he will need to be a1:39:45judge now we'll deal worse with him than with them and they press sore upon the man even law and came near to break the door maybe what lot thought was something1:39:55like well we're done like we're all done but this mob and perhaps I can spare some of us and they press sore upon the1:40:08man even Lawton came near to break the door but the man this is the angels put forth their hand and pulled a lot into the house to them and shut the door and they smote the men that were out the1:40:17door of the house with blindness both small and great so that they wearied themselves to find the door so they were so corrupt that they were blind and1:40:26could not see now even to find the door and the man men said unto lot hast thou here any besides any family members son1:40:35in law and thy sons and thy daughters and whoever thou hast in the city get them out of the place for we will destroy this place because of the cry of them is waxing great before the face of1:40:45the Lord and the Lord has sent us to destroy it and lot went out and spake unto his sons in law which married his1:40:55daughters and said up you get out of this place for the Lord will destroy the city but he seemed as one that marked unto his son and sons-in-law when in the1:41:05morning arose than the angels hastened blood saying arise take thy way for ninety daughters which are here lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city and while he lingered lingered the1:41:18man laid hold upon his hands and upon the hand of his wife and upon the hand of his two daughters the Lord being merciful unto them and they brought him forth and seven without the city so he1:41:29still this is an indication of the danger of not acting with appropriate haste when the time has come I mean law it's already seen what happened he saw1:41:39that the men came to his door he saw that they were murderous rapists he saw that the angels took them out and he still1:41:49isn't to leave that place and so I guess one of the things that this story requires people to ask themselves is are1:41:59you in a place that's so bad that you should leave or when are you in a place that's so bad that you should leave and if you are in a place that's so bad that1:42:09you should leave then the time to leave is now because there's no time to waste and it came to pass when they had1:42:18brought them forth abroad that he said escape for their life look not behind you neither stay thou in all the plain escape to the mountain lest thou be consumed and Lord said to them oh not1:42:29not so my lord behold now they serve and have found grace in my sight and now have magnified thy mercy which thou has showed me into saving my life1:42:38but I cannot escape to the mountain lest some evil take me and I die behold now there's a city near to flee unto and it's a little one which means maybe it's1:42:47not big and corrupt like Sodom and Gomorrah oh let me escape thither is it is it not a little one and my soul shall live Matthew Henry said Lord linger he trifled thus many who are under1:42:57convictions about the spiritual state and the necessity of a change defer that needful work and he said unto him see1:43:07I've accepted the angel and he said unto him see I have accepted the concerning this thing also that I will not overthrow this city for the which thou has spoken the small City hasty escape1:43:16thither for I cannot do anything to thou be gone hither therefore the name of the city was or that's where Lord went the Sun was risen upon the earth when Lord entered into Zoar then the Lord rained1:43:27upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven and he overthrew the cities and all the plain and all the inhabitants of the cities and that which grew up on the1:43:36ground but his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt1:43:46no nostalgia for catastrophe I think that's what that means is that when you leave what's not good you wash the dust1:43:57off your feet and you don't look back and that's a very harsh lesson this is echoed a bit in the New1:44:07Testament the idea of the necessity for immediate action these are some of the harsher words that Christ said this is1:44:16from Matthew 8 Christ is addressing a multitude and asking people to follow him and a disciple comes up to him and1:44:25says Lord suffer me first to go and bury my father seems like a perfectly reasonable request but jesus said unto him follow me and let the dead bury1:44:34their dead this is from Matthew 12 well he had talked to the people behold his mother and his brethren stood without1:44:44desiring to speak with him and one said to him behold thy mother and my brethren stand without desiring to speak with thee but jesus answered the one who was1:44:53telling him and said who is my mother and who is my brothers for whosoever shall do the will of my father which is in heaven the same as my brother and1:45:04sister and mother well what does all that mean it means that there's no excuses1:45:13whatsoever for not getting up and getting at it that's what it means and it means that it even means that when1:45:23people are beset with a catastrophe like let's say the death of their father that they are prone to use that as an excuse for not going about the business that1:45:33they should be going about because they can say to themselves well I would accept and accept there's always good reasons I mean believe me there's always1:45:42good reasons for not doing what you should that's for sure the reasons pile up day after day to not do what you should especially because you're you're aiming at things in the future you can1:45:51put them off and definitely right because of the demands of the day but these stories they say a variety of things you know in especially in1:46:00combination they say when you leave somewhere terrible do not look back there's no nostalgia that's that's the letting the dead parts of yourself go1:46:11and then if you're going to follow the good there's no excuse not to do it and that it means no excuse whatsoever under any circumstances and then it's taken even1:46:21farther with regards to familiar relationships it is you can't even let them stand in your way and I think that's all true and I think I've seen1:46:30virtually all of that in my clinical practice like there's no excuse whatsoever for not getting at what it is1:46:39that you should be doing and I think there's something else that's going on here especially in the New Testament stories which is even made may be worse which is it's absolutely reprehensible1:46:49to justify you're in action with a catastrophe that extracts mercy from other people right there's a tricky tricky game that's going well of course1:46:59I can't do that look at the terrible thing that's just happened to me it's yeah okay I understand you're absolved of any necessity to move forward because of your current catastrophe it's like well1:47:10actually you're not and it's rather rude of you to use it as an excuse and it's certainly counterproductive and Abraham got up early in the morning to the place1:47:20where he stood before the Lord and he looked towards Sodom and Gomorrah and toward the land of the plain and behold and lo the smoke of the country went up as a smoke of a furnace and it came to1:47:34pass when God destroyed the cities of the plain that God remembered Abraham and sent lot out of the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in the which lot dwelt and lot went out1:47:43of Zoar and dwelt in the mountain and his two daughters with them for he feeler feared to dwell and Zoar and he dwelt in a cave he and his two daughters and the firstborn said unto the younger1:47:52our Father is all and there's not a man in the earth to come in to us after the manner of all the earth come let us make our father drink wine and we will lie1:48:01with him that we may preserve the seed of our father and they made their father drink wine that night and the firstborn went in and lay with her father and he perceived not when she lay down nor when1:48:12she arose and it came to pass on the morrow that the firstborn said unto the younger behold i lay yesternight with my father let us make him drink wine this night also and gold out in and lie with1:48:22him that we may preserve seed of our father and they made their father drink wine that night also and the younger arose and lay with him perceived not when she lay down nor when1:48:32she arose thus were both the daughters of log with child by their father well1:48:41it's like the story you know the story is outlined the catastrophe of sodom and gomorrah essentially the ethical catastrophe of sodom and gomorrah the1:48:52dissolution of the civilized constraints that should regulate all behavior and then the city is destroyed but there's an echo of it afterwards right because laud had lived in sodom and gomorrah and1:49:04what happens to him even after his escapes is that he gets tangled into an incestuous web and so I think that1:49:14that's a it's not foreshadow its post shadowing if there's such a thing it's an echo of what it's an echo and a reminder of how terrible whatever it was1:49:26that was happening in Sodom and Gomorrah was that even after escaping the iniquity still remained well that's a1:49:42pretty good place to stop we got through two of three stories so that's not too bad next week I'll talk about the sacrifice of Isaac and see if I can get into the next1:49:53stories as well and next week is the last lecture except I talked to the theater people and it looks like I'll be able to rent the theater once a month at1:50:03least for the next four months so I'm going to do that and I'll announce when I'm going to do that and I'll continue doing this probably as long as you'll1:50:12continue to come and listen [Applause]1:50:23[Music] I could tell you something cool that1:50:33happened to if you want so some of you may know that there was a memo leaked at1:50:42Google how many of you know about that Wow law to you so a colleague of the man1:50:53who released the memo got ahold of me yesterday and said that the man who wrote the memo wanted to talk to me so I1:51:03interviewed him today I made a YouTube video out of it we went over his memo which was scientifically accurate in my estimation and so I'm going to release1:51:13that hopefully tonight so we'll see how that goes1:51:24he got fired last night eh right he got fired for perpetuating gender stereotypes he told me today that his1:51:33last performance review he had been given superb which is the top few percentiles of the employee distribution1:51:42at Google right perpetuating gender stereotypes I went through his document I don't think he said a single thing that wasn't substantiated by a fairly1:51:53dense scientific literature not to say that the scientific literature is necessarily a hundred percent correct because it never is but certainly to say that he was not merely spouting out1:52:04misogynistic and ethnically biased opinion quite the contrary so we had a nice discussion about that today and hopefully the discussion will continue1:52:14so all right questions hello well it's1:52:23great I mean look a couple of things about that I mean my my daughter has had a catastrophic life in many ways a lot of1:52:32things went wrong with her physically really bad things and this went perfectly so like thank God for that1:52:43so then and then the other thing is I love kids you know now infants well you know it's not that I it's not infants1:52:53are cool and interesting but I'm not sure exactly what to do with them you know but once they're about six months old and then from then on like I love1:53:04having kids around so I'm thrilled about the fact that this has happened so hooray you know hooray so thanks for that so more as an aside but what you said1:53:15about not pushing aside the things the day kind of made me think of Nikes motto just do it yeah I thought cool but um my1:53:24question was that when you were talking about circumcision being a contractual relationship between sacrifice and1:53:33compared it to a girl having a period that didn't make a lot of sense to me but also it seems to me that it being a1:53:43sacrifice requires some form of willingness basically from the one have extreme precision they don't necessarily1:53:52want to put forward what you did you said you specifically didn't want to address as two infants not having any1:54:01choice in the matter but more in the context of it being a sacrifice how does that I think I think that's how a modern person would see it and I think that1:54:10there's some I think there's some utility in that but but it's it's it's an incomplete incomplete to some degree you know because one of the things that happens with God neighbor ham is that1:54:20God tells Abraham that he has to take care of his family his children now the question is exactly how do you take care of your children and the answer is1:54:29sometimes you make decisions for them now you might say well be better if they could make the decisions for themselves and that's actually the case so you1:54:39might say well I won't bring my kids to church because it'd be better if they could make the decision for themselves that's what I did with my kids you know but I'm not so sure that was a good idea1:54:49and the reason I'm not so sure it was a good idea was because there are a bunch of things they didn't learn now the degree to which a parent should1:54:58exercise control over his or her child is indeterminate but I guess the hope is that you exercise the minimum amount of control necessary to maximize the1:55:08child's probability of success and that certainly requires adopting responsibility for making decisions as well because the child can't make decisions you know you can't just let1:55:18the child lay there and make decisions right there's that's just not going to happen and so you might say well Abraham has no right to impose something like circumcision on his children and because1:55:30it and the and because it's a sacrifice it's something that they should be doing themselves but the problem with that is that Abraham also has no right to abdicate his responsibility to his1:55:40children in the name of some hypothetical mercifulness and those two things have to be balanced well just according to the story Abraham got the1:55:50balance right because of course he's made this covenant with God now exactly what that means in people's day-to-day lives well that's a harder issue but I would say I think in the modern world1:56:03people err on the side of I don't know I think they're more likely to err on the side of taking insufficient responsibility for their children1:56:13letting them be free in ways that aren't productive that's how it looks to me often because they're afraid of their children so that's about the best I can1:56:25do without dr. Peterson I was recently I've1:56:35recently started reading maps of meaning and there was something in the introduction to that story that I found particularly the introduction that you wrote before you went and tell them that1:56:45I found particularly compelling I guess the part when you're talking about the split that developed in your psyche when you were you know yeah all your yeah I1:56:55think he talked about it one of the earlier lecture I talked about it a little bit today yeah a little bit today as well yeah you said something in that paragraph there that what you said was1:57:06you have to earn the right to identify with an idea yeah certain ideas for sure than ideas for sure so basically my question is how should a young person1:57:16such as myself who doesn't have a whole lot of life experience like be able to like read literature and psychology and interact with you know the wisdom of1:57:25culture and then incorporate it into a structure that still authentically their own well look I think the way you ask that question means that you're actually1:57:34doing a pretty good job of that well I well I mean I mean that because that was a very carefully formulated question and1:57:44it was obvious that you were actually looking for an answer instead of trying to tell the audience a bunch of things that you knew which often happens with questions right and it's alright often1:57:54it's very annoying for the audience to be subject to questions like that right because it's a form of1:58:03because it's a form of manipulation it's like well I'll cap this off with the question but actually it's a speech so so I would say you probably already know1:58:13the answer to that and but then I could elaborate on that a little bit is like there are a lot of books that people have historically regarded as great you1:58:23might as well start by assuming that they're at least greater than you right and then and to approach them with that frame of mind because even if there's1:58:34much in them that perhaps is no longer relevant often less than people assume there's much in them that will be of extreme benefit to you and then with1:58:45regards to making them yours the kind of wisdom that you get from great books is practical wisdom and you act it out and so then what you do is you try to1:58:55incorporate what you learn into your life into your practices and then if you incorporate it into your life and your practices you build a bridge between you1:59:04and the great idea right because you figured out how to manifest itself in the conditions of your own life that's something like making the archetypal personal which is which is the right1:59:15thing to do right it's the proper thing to do because that expands your life upward and outward and in Nobel's you and brings you up as well but so1:59:26humility is part of it it's like approach these books as if they have something to teach you and then it's humility again in the second places1:59:35don't take the ideas to yourself until you live them there'll be lots of time for that and besides you know even as a1:59:44young person it's not like you have nothing to say but the only things that you have to say are your things to say and it's not necessarily that easy to1:59:53figure out what they are but as I said you did a fine job of that when you asked the question so I think I think as far as I can tell you already know what to do so good do it read everything2:00:04great you can get your damn hands on hello dr. Peterson so a lot of your work2:00:17a lot of your lectures recommend the audience tackle life with a lot of attention and intention and you know in2:00:28my kind of personal gateway drug to philosophy has been more Eastern philosophy and like the bug hood gita and the work of Alan Watts and tower's2:00:41Calvinism and what I've noticed I may be wrong but this is a common theme in Eastern philosophy which is more passive2:00:51non action don't make as many plans I wonder how you reconcile that in how you2:01:01are reconciling that because you mentioned earlier in previous lectures that you've read the TEL teaching how do you reconcile those two different views2:01:13well I think first that the daodejing in particular isn't about inaction it's about minimal proper action and it's2:01:23also about minimal proper action after a tremendous amount of sacrifice right so the sage that's speaking forth in the2:01:32Dao de Jing has already let go of almost everything that he needs to let go of and a tremendous amount of what you're2:01:41reading in the Eastern philosophies is predicated I think at least in part on the idea of sacrifice there's lots of things that you're grabbing on to like the monkey you know with the jar that's2:01:52actually causing your misery and so sometimes letting go is the right way of moving ahead but to me that ties into this idea of sacrifice so now whether2:02:03there's more than that whether there's more intentionality in Western philosophy and less intentionality in Eastern philosophy I'm not exactly sure one way of mediating between those two2:02:14was was formulated at least in part by Carl Jung he pointed out that the archetypal figure for what the last died at 32 and so to some degree that2:02:26outgoing extroverted let's say nature of the West is a consequence of its2:02:36youthfulness in some sense it's useful ethos and that the East Buddha died at a fairly ripe old age and even in the2:02:47Hindu practices if I remember correctly for many Hindu temples there's a lot of erotic sculptures an idea is something like it can't get past the damn erotic2:02:57sculptures it's not time to go into the temple but it's more than that it might also be that if you're young it's not time to get past the erotic sculptures so maybe maybe there's a moving forward2:03:08into life in youth and a letting go in in the latter part of life and that's well that was Jung's way of mediating2:03:18between those two traditions I think they're tightly aligned with regards to the importance of sacrifice it frequently is the case that it's your2:03:27desire Maya let's say your desire that's causing your suffering right and so there's an emphasis in Buddhism even2:03:37more than in Taoism I would say on letting go letting go of what's making you miserable and but do you remember the thing about Buddha is that he got2:03:48enlightened under the bow tree right he basically stepped into the City of God he stepped into nirvana and he could2:03:57have stayed there but he chose to come back because he decided that he had a responsibility to rectify suffering in2:04:06the rest of the world that it was not sufficient for him to be enlightened well everything else was left in a state2:04:16of insufficiency and suffering and so I wouldn't call that inaction you know it's a I've made the mistake myself it's2:04:27in action versus non action I actually had to look up that's that good that's well not - really the daodejing does a very good2:04:36job of distinguishing between those two because non-action is the minimum necessary action to keep the balance between order and chaos proper right at2:04:48the end in the egg and the Dao de Jing is very very emphatic about this you detach and you watch and when it's time2:04:58to intervene you intervene minimally without a lot of arrogant self propagandize ation and you tap and if2:05:08you do that properly you hardly have to do it at all and it's as if you're doing nothing and there's this great wisdom in that book I really like the Dow teaching2:05:18it's it's a remarkable document and I've seen managers who were like that who are really good at running their company who did nothing Lauren but and what they did2:05:29well but that but first of all they set up people to replace them because they're Dirk idea was well if I'm a really good manager then this place could run without me there's a real2:05:39humility in that let me just kind of wandered around the place talking to people and if there was a bit of a problem then they just you know turned2:05:48the knob the tenth of a degree and the place ran smoothly and it was as if they were doing nothing and what they were doing was detaching so they weren't2:05:58being buried by their current concerns they were watching to see what was going on and then they were minimally interacting and that worked like a charm2:06:10so I think that the I don't like the idea that all religious traditions are the same because that just makes them into like a gray mass but I don't see2:06:20that there's any difference there that can't be bridged I think as you look into the details the bridge has become more clear2:06:31[Applause] I'll get you to speak into the2:06:41microphone especially when you're saying self-deprecating things let everybody hear you okay I much my pleasure what's2:06:54happened what's happened to you as a consequence yeah yeah well our view seeing it that way anyways well mainly2:07:03on I've had I've had whatever you say right it's something I thought but not had been able to articulate right so it's been very helpful in that regards2:07:12and kind of saving a lot of time no yep good good good good my main question is actually on something you said a couple lectures ago it was something along the2:07:22lines of a family um so I think I'm like god that's the history of your family2:07:31kind of like the sims or your family something like that yeah be awed you're facing it all the time yeah what's uh how can you stand on that one well2:07:44there's this idea in the Old Testament that your sins might be visited unto your family seven generations down seems kind of harsh but you know when you're2:07:56confronting maybe your father's tyrannical yeah but you know maybe his father beat the hell out of him and maybe his father's father was a vicious2:08:05alcoholic and he just bloody well don't know how far back that goes and and that means also you don't exactly know what you're dealing with right to some degree2:08:15you're dealing with your father but only partly what you're dealing with is the pathological paternal spirit something like that and it's better to think about that way because it becomes an2:08:24existential issue at that point you know so you could say that while the father has two components and I mean this psychologically speaking there's the2:08:33Great Father that's beneficial and protective and that that organizes society and teaches you how to speak and has produced all these wonderful things and then there's the tyrannical2:08:42oppressive part of the father just like there's the terrible part of mother nature that's destroy than the benevolent part of mother nature that's wonderful and productive2:08:51and you're stuck with that right you're stuck with having to mediate between those opposing forces just like you're stuck with the adversarial part of2:09:00yourself and the heroic part of yourself and it's up to you to set those things right otherwise they propagate into the future and it isn't it straightforward2:09:10thing to say how to set them right there's quite a good movie about that oh now I will Magnolia which I really love2:09:20it's by Paul Anderson if I remember correctly I hope that's right it's a beautiful movie and it's about this part of it's about this kid whose father's really pushing him to be a superstar at2:09:30a at a crucial right he's a genius kid and the kid studies this guy named Charles fort you don't understand this2:09:39movie if you don't know this because you got to know about Charles fort to understand Magnolia Charles fort was this weird old guy who got rich with an inheritance when he was like 20 and2:09:49spent the rest of his life in libraries looking up impossible things and documenting them impossible things that couldn't happen from a scientific perspective that were well attested to2:09:58by multiple observers and he produced this news paper called the 14 times which still runs anyways in magnolia magnolia begins with this guy who falls2:10:09out of a building and then is shot by a woman who misses her husband with a rifle as he falls and I think she's she's charged with murder and the street2:10:18names have something to do with the deaths and his fall and all of that happened and then in the movie there's a rain of frogs and there are rains of2:10:27frogs from time to time sometimes they're frozen sometimes they're rains of fish sometimes they're frozen it's like what the hell how does that happen happens quite frequently as it turns out there's a rain of frogs in the in the2:10:38movie magnolia and this little kid see what happened to him is that he's on stage and he ends up peeing his pants because of the pressure basically and2:10:49humiliates himself and then there's this rain of frogs which he kind of takes as a sign from God and then he goes to his father even he's like eight years old2:10:58this kid and he says you have to stop to be and he's dead serious about very careful not being you know what would2:11:07you call insubordinate nothing like that he decides that that's coming to an end right now and you have to make those decisions in your family because2:11:16otherwise things propagate down the generations right and every family is rife with pathologies of one form or another and you can learn from that and2:11:25refuse to push it forward and that's part of I think what you do when you when you when you shoulder your2:11:34existential burden because everyone is the beneficiary and the victim of the tyrannical father just like everyone is the beneficiary and the victim of mother nature and of themselves and so you lock2:11:45horns with that and straighten it out one way or another and you don't move it forward to the next generation so and maybe you detach it a bit from your2:11:54parents too because god only knows what combination of catastrophes culminated in their particular forms of pathology2:12:04so good enough2:12:17so this week we've had the Google thing there was the YouTube thing that happened last week what's going on with censorship and what2:12:26should people do about it if you're in a workplace and pathological things are happening this is easy I can tell you how you know if pathological things are2:12:35happening at your workplace or they're happening with you one of the two but you can straighten that out if you're being required to do things that make2:12:46you weak and ashamed then stop don't do them like one of the things I learned from Solzhenitsyn and2:12:57Frankel was that systems go terribly under out of control when people don't stop them when they're going mildly out2:13:07of control you know when you might say I should just keep my goddamn head down and shut up it's like maybe you should like that's not bad advice you know you2:13:17don't want to make unnecessary enemies and you don't need any more trouble than you need but you got to ask yourself on a day-to-day basis what makes you think you're not selling your soul you know2:13:28and there's so much foolishness going on in the mid-level bureaucratic world now that's where all the tyranny seems to be focused and the reason that it2:13:38multiplies is because sensible people say nothing when they should say something and what's so strange about that is that there are way more sensible2:13:48people than people who aren't sensible they're just not as noisy so whether you'll turn out if like you know so let's say something's bugging the hell out of you at work well then you have to2:13:58prepare to find another job that's the first thing you have to do I don't think that you should find another job but you should prepare to find another job and2:14:07if possible you should prepare to find a better job because if you can't tell someone to go to hell then you can't negotiate with them and if and if2:14:16they've got you over a barrel then you can't say anything so you going to you've got to set yourself up so you've got some ability and actually that's a really good principle in your life period you should set yourself up so that you2:14:26have a lateral move at hand and you should find out well are there things at work that are disturbing my soul you know when you find that out2:14:35first of all you ask yourself okay I'm disturbed at work okay I'm probably weak and deceitful and useless and lazy you might as well start with that and then2:14:44you talk to some people like your your wife your friends your coworkers and find out are you stupid deceitful and lazy or is there something not-so-good2:14:53going on at work and so if you if you can then eliminate your own personal pathology as a cause of your dissatisfaction then maybe there's something rotten in the state of Denmark2:15:02and maybe you should say something about it before the whole goddamn thing collapses because that can happen it can happen in companies a lot faster than2:15:11people ever think you know and you may find that well first of all you may find if you say something well first of all that's an adventure that's for sure that's a bloody adventure and you have to do it carefully and you have to be2:15:22prepared for it it might be the best thing that ever happened to you and the other thing is if you're careful about it you get your words right like in this is a this is strategic battle right it's2:15:32not something you wander into carelessly then you may find that there's lots of people who feel exactly the same way you do and that you've actually caught and gone to something you're a canary in a coal mine and not just some like2:15:42psychopathic mouthpiece so you go to ask yourself when you go and do what you do like is this making you stronger is this making you weaker and if it's making you2:15:52weaker then you got to ask yourself do you really want to be weaker because the weaker you get the more your tyrannize and then worse than that like the weaker you get the more bitter you get and the2:16:03more you'll work towards terrible things the more you'll snap at your wife the more you'll kick your kids you know like it's no joke to be terrorized at work and so I would say you have an ethical2:16:13responsibility as a citizen to forthrightly confront creeping tyranny no matter where it occurs and part of2:16:23part of what we're learning I would say from these stories if we're learning anything at all is that if you're aimed at the good which is a question you2:16:33really got to ask yourself you know if you're genuinely end up too good then take heart because you're a lot stronger than you think so2:16:42I have a follow-up question okay so I'm speaking to there's lots of people who are in this situation like you know people at universities and corporations2:16:52all over the place I you know Google is not the only company that is no unfindable what's the worst repressive freedom of speech denying workplace2:17:03codes and everybody feels alone right they're all like why should I stand up be a martyr get fired2:17:12this guy Google got fired yeah what's the point like I'm asking rhetorical no no it's a good question and how do you2:17:22how do you convince people that there's a point to standing up when it appears to be futile well the first thing I2:17:31think is you convince them that it's not futile it might be difficult but it's not futile if you get your words right2:17:40you have something to say there'll be an impact of those words it might not be the impact that you would choose but but the other thing you got to tell people is pick your poison you2:17:52don't you may be in a situation where you don't have you don't have a cake walk to the garden of paradise you got tyranny or famine those are your2:18:01choices but you get to pick which one you have and I would say if if you're being oppressed and I mean in your soul by what you're required to swallow at2:18:12work well you think you're not paying a price for that you have no self-respect and and rightly so but worse than that2:18:21you're an agent of your own destruction you're destroying your own ideal and you're letting people who are weak and corrupt win and if you stood up and and2:18:34stood up property but you have to put yourself in order to do this at least to some degree right you can't do it casually you have to do it from some position of preparedness and strength2:18:44then what makes you think you couldn't scare them back into the corners and that would be a good thing and you know2:18:53the alternative personally is bad because psychological degeneration that goes along with it I've seen this with many many of the people that I work with who have been terrorized in the workplace to2:19:03the absolute detriment of their psychological and physical health right to the point of collapse confronting these crazy crazy things when they were2:19:13sensible people that's a terrible price to pay man like it's it's a bad price and then if the foolishness isn't dealt2:19:24with at the local level when it's still relatively trivial then it will multiply until it's dealt with at the social level and we're seeing signs of that2:19:33already antiphon of that you know and problems that aren't solved multiply and soon people fight and you know better to2:19:42argue than to fight unless you want to fight and some people want to fight and I can understand why but I wouldn't recommend it because that doesn't lead2:19:57good places it really doesn't lead good places so I'd say you have a duty maybe that's that's where you stand up it's because you have a goddamn duty to stand up and say just say what you have to say if you2:20:10don't even have to be trying to make a point exactly or trying to get something done it's like this is how it looks to me that's what that guy at Google did he2:20:19wrote this memo and he said I talked to him today said well he went to a diversity training seminar and he thought no I don't agree with that and2:20:28so then they asked for feedback so we wrote this document a month ago this was written a month ago got no real response to it but bounced around inside Google2:20:37until a lot of people you know got interested and then it escaped into the outside world but all he was doing was he was told a bunch of things he didn't2:20:47think were true he wrote down a bunch of things he thought were probably true he launched that out and said well I think these things are probably true it's like well probably they're true well so he2:21:00paid a price for it but maybe we'll see what sort of price he paid for it man it's going to be a lot tougher in two years than he was two years ago so2:21:11no they didn't answer his feedback no no but well you can watch the video the story's there but that's kind of the2:21:20outline of it so sorry to monopolize this so I have one other question about this and I think it's important aside from Google just being a workplace2:21:29right it also controls the own YouTube right yes which in order how is the new censorship scheme and it controls a huge2:21:40amount of the information that people get then so true and so what happens to society when companies such as Google2:21:50which control our information start to censor not just how about themselves and and maybe the information that's coming2:21:59out to the rest of the world how much is this already happening and how much how about if we what happened how about if we refused to find out that would be2:22:08good you know like I reviewed this this guy's document I did that yesterday and everything he said was validated by the scientific literature so what has2:22:18happened is that someone has been fired publicly by major corporation for stating well-grounded scientific truths right there are exactly the sorts of2:22:29things that I say in my classes for example and the reason that I say them is because I read the literature it's not because I'm personally happy about the facts I think I cube research2:22:38particularly is so dismal that you can't possibly read it without being seriously disheartened if I could reconstruct the world so that IQ the IQ research wasn't2:22:48true well it'd sure be tempting you know but that's not how science works science doesn't tell you what you what you want2:22:58to hear it just tells you the way it bloody well is and he got pilloried for he got pilloried for revealing a good2:23:08fraction of current scientific knowledge about gender differences okay that's not good and as you said that's a big2:23:17company and it controls our communication how about we do what we can to ensure that these large communication companies don't get to2:23:28impose a factually false ideological structure on the rest of the planet well2:23:37you can think about supporting this this guy who blew the whistle there's a fundraiser for him online he could use some money he wants to sue Google yeah2:23:51you know maybe we could maybe we could let them know that hiring a human resources director who's also concerned2:24:00with equity is probably not a good idea for capitalist company why in the world would you hire your own enemies I don't understand that so well we'll see how2:24:11the dialogue continues but back to the personal like you need to say what you think because that's where you come from2:24:21right and if you don't say what you think then you kill your unborn self that's what you do that's what Cain did when he killed Abel and that's why his2:24:30punishment was unbearable you know you have things in you that are struggling to come to the light that's the truth you need daughter and you need to either that truth because without that truth2:24:39you cannot live in the world because the world is real and you need truth to live in the world and if you stifle your truth well how how can that be anything2:24:48but something that brings about hell how could it be any other way so you think well why should you speak up that's easy because the consequences of not speaking up although delayed are far worse that's2:25:00the reason that's the reason if it can't be courage it could at least be prudence so yeah2:25:15one more dr. Peterson first of all kudos for mentioning magnolias in my favorite movie that's a great movie man so a few months ago I had a dream and2:25:26when I told someone this dream they suggested that I read the Book of Revelations oh yeah that's a bad dream that the2:25:37there's a lot of interesting stuff in that book the thing that really that I found really interesting right off the bat was the the state is represented in2:25:52two instances as female positively and negatively and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that in the context of like in maps of meaning you often2:26:02talk about the state just as as male or as masculine okay first of all I'm going to comment on your t-shirt that's a2:26:11lobster hierarchy with Horus at the top isn't it it's even better it's the eye of a lobster so that's one that we found2:26:21yeah that's a good one that's a good one that one really cracked me up when I saw it I really thought that was funny man yeah yeah yeah when my graduate students2:26:32used to meet when I first talked about this Lobster stuff we meet for breakfast day and they were a very combative snappy group of graduate students and they're always trying to one-up each2:26:41other with jokes and whenever one really pulled a good joke on another they'd stand up and like it was really it was2:26:51really funny it was really funny okay let's see can I answer that question you2:27:03know how if you're looking at a if you look at a room every color that you see is dependent on every other color in the room right your eyes adjust to that so2:27:13for example if you're in a room based with red light your eyes will in some sense remove the red so you can still see the colors okay so your perception2:27:23is to some degree on-call is to some degree dependent on Khan context and that's one of the things that makes the symbolic symbolic2:27:32interpretations tricky because to see how something is represented symbolically you actually have to look at the broader narrative context within2:27:41which the symbols are embedded so for example you see if I can get this right2:27:51if the story has an island and an ocean then the ocean is often symbolically feminine and the island is symbolically2:28:00masculine but if the story's the island and the sky then Island often becomes symbolically masculine and feminine and the sky symbolically masculine and you2:28:09might think well how can the island be masculine and feminine at the same time and the answer is well it depends on what what it's being contrasted with and why and so that's part of the key to the2:28:20change in symbolism in the book of Revelation and so it isn't inevitably the case that culture is represented with the patriarchal symbolism but it's2:28:31most commonly the case so you know there is Mother Russia for example I guess it would depend to some degree to on what your metaphor is for the state because2:28:40the state can be in all providing mother or it can be a judgmental father and it2:28:49it seems that we killed more towards the father with regards to terminology relating to the state and I think the reason for that is because I think human2:28:59hierarchies like chimp hierarchies are fundamentally masculine the fundamental hierarchy is masculine even with chimps there's a female hierarchy but it's like2:29:09the female hierarchy is nested within the male hierarchy it's not the case with bonobos exactly but I think it is the case with human beings and so I2:29:18think we have a strong proclivity to masculinize the state but that doesn't mean there aren't exceptions and in symbol symbolic representations are very2:29:27slippery that way because you can't stamp an entity with a symbol because that would be the same as just giving it a name right and you can't have a2:29:38dictionary of symbols where you say well you know a house always means the psyche it's like know sometimes the house means the psyche but it depends on the story and so you have2:29:49to take the the entire structure of the narrative into account to determine why those particular symbolic representations are being used what I2:29:59offered in maps a meaning was kind of a shorthand you know generally speaking there's nature positive and negative usually feminine generally speaking there's culture positive and negative2:30:09usually masculine and generally speaking there's the individual good and evil right heroic an adversarial often typically represented as masculine2:30:19especially in adventure stories but it's a schema and it's an interpretive guide and not a set of hard and fast rules because you're in the domain of metaphor2:30:29and it's a it's a slippery domain so you have any luck figuring out your dream sorry did you have any luck figuring out2:30:38your dream at least in some parts I think there's different levels of analysis I mean one was pretty obvious2:30:50yeah all right all right well thank you very much everyone [Applause]0:00:00
0:00:00Biblical Series XIII: Jacob's Ladder
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:30thank you very much hahahaha thank you very much for showing up again that's a really good to see everybody here so one of the things that0:00:45I've been realizing as a consequence of going through these stories is that the0:00:54degree to which they're about individuals is quite remarkable and I think that's really telling you know one of the reasons I prefer Dostoevsky to0:01:03Tolstoy is because Tolstoy is more of a sociologist he's more interested in the relationship between groups of people this is an oversimplification because0:01:12obviously Tolstoy is a great author but I like dusty husky better because he really delves into the souls of individuals and I think it's remarkable the degree to which all of the stories0:01:24that we've covered so far in Genesis are about individuals and they're quite realistic which is quite remarkable - they're not really romanticized to any0:01:34great degree because all of the people that are regard as regarded let's say as patriarchal or matriarchal figures in Genesis have no shortage of ethical if0:01:45no shortage of ethical flaws and also no shortage of difficulties in their life and the difficulties are realistic there they're major-league problems you know0:01:54like familial catastrophes and famine and war and revenge and hatred and all those things it's not a it's not a pretty it's not a pretty book and that's0:02:04one of the things that makes it great I mean that's one of the things that characterizes great literature right is that it doesn't present you with a whitewashed view of humanity or of0:02:15existence and that's really a relief I think because as you all know because you're alive there's no such thing as a whitewash existence like you're to be0:02:26alive is to be in trouble ethically and existentially I've been reading this book recently0:02:35I'll talk about it a little bit later it's called better never to have a bean and it was written by a philosopher in South Africa in Cape Town name0:02:45Benatar that's his last name and he basically argues I think it's a specious argument and I think it's artificially0:02:54constructed but he basically argues that because life is so full of suffering even good lives are very much full of0:03:03suffering that it's wrong to bring children into the world because the suffering outweighs the good even in good lives and it's actually wrong it0:03:13would also be better not to exist for exactly the same reason and my sense in reading the book is that he came to that conclusion and then wrote the book to0:03:22justify it which is actually the reverse of the way that you should write a book what you should do when you're writing a book is you should have a question and you should it should be a real question0:03:32right it should be one you don't know the answer to and then you should be studying and writing like mad and reading everything you can get your hands on to see if you can actually grapple with the problem and come to0:03:42some solution and you should walk the reader as well through your process of thinking so that they can come to the well not necessary to the same conclusion but at least track what0:03:51you're doing and I don't think that's what he did I think he wrote it backwards but then and so I was thinking about it a lot because that's actually a0:04:01question that I've contended with in my writing there are Memphis da Philly and our satanic figures for example in girth is Faust and also Ivan in in that in the0:04:13brothers karamasoff who basically make the same case you know that existence is so rife with trouble and suffering that it would be better if it didn't exist at0:04:23all and the problem I've had with that there's a variety of them but one of the problems I've had with that is what happens if you start to think that way because what I've observed is that0:04:33people who begin to think that way that isn't where they stop like that they get angry at existence which is what happened to Cain as we saw in the Cain and Abel story and then the next step is0:04:43to start taking revenge against existence and that cascades until it's revenge against well I think the best way of thinking about it is revenge against God for the crime of being which0:04:54is I think the deepest sort of hatred that can entertain and and and when you're in the grip of a really deep emotion like a really profound emotion right at the0:05:03bottom of emotions you're in something that's like a quasi-religious state and that's more or less independent of your belief saying a transcendent deity I mean you can be in a profoundly0:05:12emotional state that's as deep as it can be and it can have religious significance without that necessarily signifying anything about a transcendent being you know but but then I was0:05:22thinking you see the problem with that argument is you can gerrymander it endlessly you know because first of all how do you measure suffering and how do you measure happiness it's like how do0:05:31you assign weights to them and god there's just no way of doing that you have to do it arbitrarily and so you can make an argument that the suffering0:05:40outweighs the happiness you just wait the suffering more heavily than you wait the happiness and that's the end of that you know and so that's that's a problem but I think there's a deeper problem and0:05:50I was reading this other book while back as well which was written by the guy who ran the human genome project and I don't0:06:01remember exactly what it was called but it was something like a scientists case for God is something like that and one of the things he referred to which didn't strike me as hard as it should0:06:11have to begin with was the he thought that one of the phenomena say that justified a belief in a transcendent0:06:20being was something like the moral intuition of human beings that you know we have a sense of right and wrong and you know it's certainly in what happens0:06:29in Genesis in the story of Adam and Eve is that that that story announces the coming of the sense of right and wrong right the knowledge of good and evil and it isn't something we ascribe to animals0:06:39it's something that's unique to human beings animals can be predators and you know and they can be gentle and and you can have a relationship with them but0:06:48you never think of an evil cat or you know or an evil wolf even though they're you know they're predatory about human beings we have this capacity to judge0:06:59between good and evil right and wrong and it's really an integral part of our being and I think you can make an evolutionary case for that a biological case for that as you can0:07:09make a biological case for most of what is relevant about human beings because we're biological creatures but we don't0:07:18really understand the significance of that like what happens in the story of Adam and Eve is that that's that realization not coming to the knowledge of good and evil is actually represented0:07:27as a shift of cosmic significance right it puts a it puts a permanent fracture in the structure of being and you know if you think of human beings as insignificant ants on a tiny dust mote0:07:39in the middle of an infinite cosmos cosmos that cares less for us then who cares fundamentally if human beings have the knowledge to distinguish between0:07:49good and evil but if you give consciousness a central role in being and you can make a perfectly reasonable case for that because without consciousness there's no being as far as0:07:59anyone can determine so it may be much more central than we think and and I really don't think there's a counter-argument to that like not a0:08:08solid one you can state that consciousness is epiphenomena land and that the world is fundamentally materialistic and it doesn't matter that there's consciousness you can state that0:08:17but you can make an equally credible case the other way and certainly our lived experience is that consciousness is crucial obviously and we treat each0:08:26other as if most of the time we're valuable conscious beings and we wouldn't give up our consciousness even though it's often consciousness of suffering and so then I think another0:08:36problem with the book is that it's it's sort of predicated on the idea that life is for happiness and I don't think that's right and I don't think that's0:08:46how people experience life and I might be wrong but it seems to me that people experience life as something like a series of crucial ethical decisions it's0:08:57something like that I mean when I just can't imagine maybe I'm being naive about this but I can't imagine that I0:09:06can't imagine another being that's like me in in most senses that isn't constantly wrestling in some sense with0:09:17what the next proper thing to do is it's not like it's obvious it's not bloody obvious and it doesn't mean you'll do the right thing because you don't law lots of times and0:09:26you know that by your own judgement right because you're making mistakes all the time sometimes you don't know what you're doing and maybe it's a mistake and maybe it isn't and who's to say that isn't0:09:36what I'm talking and what I'm talking about when you know that what you're doing is wrong and you go ahead and do it anyways people do that all the time and that's also extremely peculiar you bloody well think that if you knew it0:09:45was wrong and you told yourself that it was wrong that that would be sufficient so that you just wouldn't do it but that isn't what you're like at all you know and you can tell yourself something is0:09:54wrong a fifty times and you'll do it the 51st time and then you'll feel you know like like you deserve to feel probably and but it doesn't stop you and so so0:10:04then I think the other problem with the viewpoint the idea that the suffering of life eradicate sits utility is that it's0:10:13predicated on the idea that happiness or lack of suffering even is is the right criteria by which to judge life and I don't think that's how we actually0:10:24experience life I think what we do instead is put ourselves through a series of excruciating moral choices you know when one of the things that that's0:10:34really significant about the biblical stories and I think about the the entire implicit philosophy you know that's0:10:44embedded in the stories is that that's how life is presented in in the stories is all of these individuals first they're individuals - not groups and second they're agonizing over their0:10:55moral choices all the time all the time and they have a relationship with God and but it's not a it's not a directive relationship exactly even for the people0:11:07to whom God speaks directly which I suspect is not something you'd exactly want to have happen is it's there's still even the fact that they have a0:11:18direct relationship with God doesn't stop them from being tormented continually by their moral choices and so the world is presented as a moral0:11:27landscape not as a not as a place that justifies itself by happiness it's presented as a moral landscape and people are presented as0:11:36preachers who traverse through the moral landscape making ethical decisions that determine the course of the world and that seems to me to be right and that's0:11:47not a that's not the same as happiness by any stretch of the imagination it's a whole different category of being and you know and then I thought that through0:11:57a lot and I think well we do make choices and what we do is contend with the future you know and that the future seems to appear to us as a realm of possibility that's a more accurate way0:12:09of thinking about it then then that the future presents itself to it to us as a realm of determined things it's it's presents itself as a realm of0:12:18possibility and there's good choices in that realm and there's poor choices or even evil choices in that realm and we're negotiating continually deciding0:12:27which of those choices we're going to bring into being that seems to me to be phenomenologically indisputable and we certainly treat each other as if that's0:12:36what we're doing because we hold each other responsible for our actions you know with some exceptions and that we're deciding each moment whether to make things better or worse and that seems to0:12:49me to be correct and I think that that's what these stories illustrate they don't say that directly you know although I0:12:58think it gets more and more explicit as the narrative unfolds but and then part of the realism of the stories is that the people aren't the people that are0:13:09being presented are by no means good I mean maybe with the exception of Noah no one seemed to be a pretty good guile they did he did get drunk and you know and and end up naked exposed to his sons0:13:21and so forth and but I mean he isn't talked about a lot as a character it's a pretty compressed story but Abraham I mean Abraham had plenty of problems not0:13:31least of which was in his inability to leave home and then you know his lying about his wife and their there's all sorts of mistakes and then Jacob who were going to talk about tonight is an0:13:41even more morally ambivalent character he's especially at the beginning of the story he's0:13:50it's it's he isn't the sort of person that you would pick out especially if you were a hack writer you wouldn't pick0:13:59him out as the hero of the story he does a lot of things that are really pretty reprehensible and takes him an awful long time to learn better and yet he's the person0:14:08who's put forward as the father of the 12 tribes of Israel it's from this flawed person that the people that that may be that whose story you might say is0:14:19that the fundamental constitutes the fundamental underpinning of our culture it's it's from this deeply flawed individual that that group emerges and0:14:31so you might think of that as a relief to because you know you're no knight in shining armor you know with with a with a pure moral past I mean people make0:14:40mistakes of catastrophic proportions non-stop you know and that also means that these stories put forward something approximating hope because in their0:14:51realism in their moral realism they present heroes I suppose the heroes of renown right the patriarchs of old let's0:15:00say who are realistic people who have fits of anger and rage and who are murderous at times and who are deeply0:15:09deeply embroiled with family dispute and and who who have adulterous affairs and and like they do all the terrible things0:15:19that people do and the weird thing is is that God is still with them and you know it isn't obvious what that means or even0:15:29if it means anything but it's very it's not disputable as far as I can tell that a were conscious and that consciousness0:15:39is a transcendent phenomena which which we do not understand and that the landscape that we traverse through is moral like every story you ever watch anything that grips your imagination on0:15:49the screen or in the theater like any story that grabs you is a story of moral striving it's just not interesting otherwise right the person has to be0:15:58confronted with complex moral choices and then you see the outcome and you know the good guy doesn't and the bad guy does it badly and things don't go so well for the bad guy0:16:07generally and if it's a bit more sophisticated than good and the bad are in the same individual and that's you know that's a more compelling story but0:16:20so we could say well let's we could make the assumption that it might be worthwhile thinking of the world as a as it has been thought of classically as a0:16:29theater upon which the forces of good and evil continually strive for dominance and I for the life of me0:16:38especially after I started reading deeply into 20th century history and all the terrible things that happened in the 20th century and all the terrible unbelievably incomprehensible things0:16:49that people did to one another I just couldn't see seeing things any other way is realistic you know because I don't think that you can immerse0:17:00yourself in 20th century history without coming to the conclusion that evil is a reality and if it's a reality that it depends on what you mean by reality but0:17:09it's fundamental enough reality for me and if it's a reality then I don't see how you can escape from the conclusion that the cosmos as we experience it at0:17:18least is a place of moral striving and well that's one of the things that's really illustrated in the story of Jacob0:17:27and and I found that quite striking so so the last time last lecture I ended0:17:40with the Abrahamic stories with the death of Sarah and that was Abraham's wife and so we're gonna continue from from there remember Abraham had a son0:17:50Isaac and he was asked by God to sacrifice his son which we talked about in in some depth and I was attempting to0:18:00make the case that you know the idea of sacrifice was one of humankind's great discoveries because it meant the discovery of the future essentially but0:18:09it also meant the discovery that the future was something that you could make a bargain with and that you could give up something now something impulsive some pleasure even a deep pleasure in0:18:19the moment and you could strive and hypothetically you could make a covenant a bargain with the future and if your sacrifices were acceptable and that0:18:29seemed to mean an ethically acceptable you had to sacrifice the right thing that that vastly increased the probability that not only you would be successful let's say but that your0:18:39descendants would be too and I don't think that that's an irrational proposition I mean you have to leave in it a bit with the realization that0:18:48sometimes you know you get sliced off at the knees no matter what right because life has an arbitrary element and and that can't be tossed out but building in0:18:58the arbitrary element will say you still want to think well what's your best bet given a certain amount of randomness and it seems to me that conscious self-aware0:19:08sacrifice and proper ethical striving is your best bet and you know there's another idea that well I've always explained it when I've explained it to0:19:19people I've always used the movie Pinocchio as an example you know that when Geppetto was trying to make his puppet into a self-aware and autonomous0:19:28moral agent which is what he wants above all else you know he aims at the highest good that he can conceive which is the0:19:37star that he prays to essentially and hopes for the transformation and there's also something in that that's unutterably profound and maybe that is0:19:46somewhat independent of the idea that you have to believe in God I would also say that what it means to believe in God in the old testament is by no means clear0:19:55and that's something I also really want to talk about tonight it's not obvious what it means and well Gepetto what he0:20:04does at least is aim at the highest good of which he can conceive you know and that that's actually in a philosophical definition of God upon occasion that God0:20:14is the highest good of which you conceive and you know that's different than the idea of a transcendent being precisely but it's in line with it's in0:20:25line with certain interesting psychoanalytic speculations this is one of the things I really liked about Carl Jung you know Jung was so radical a thinker it's just beyond belief like I've read a lot of0:20:34critics of you and I've always I've always got too kicked out of them because the things they accused Jung of are so trivial compared to the things that Jung actually did that it's like0:20:43accusing a murderer of jaywalking like because Jung was unbelievably radical like here's one of his ideas you know he thought that it was necessary he0:20:54believed that psychotherapy could be replaced by a supreme moral effort and so the moral effort would be something like aiming after good and then trying to integrate yourself around that and0:21:04that the the good at which you aimed would be something approximating what you would be like if you manifested your0:21:13full potential and that you have a glimmering of what that full potential was so that would be the potential future you and he thought of that he thought of people as four dimensional0:21:23entities especially essentially that were stretched across time and that you as a totality across time including your potential manifested yourself also in0:21:32the here and now and that part of what your potential manifested itself was something like the voice of conscious conscience or intuition0:21:41it's amazing idea it's an amazing idea right because it's like what you could be in the future beckons to you in the present and helps you determine the difference between good and evil0:21:50it's a mind-boggling idea and you know I think that it's an idea you have to contend with and then he went further0:21:59than that and this is this is also remarkable idea you know he was interested in this symbolic representation of Christ and I mean0:22:08psychologically speaking and he thought of Christ as the representation of the ideal potential human it's something like that so it was a symbolic rip thats0:22:19what Christ was is a symbolic representation of the ideal potential of a human being and so for young there was no difference between there was no psychological difference between who you0:22:29could be in the future beckoning to you and the prey in the present and orienting yourself in relationship to Christ psychologically those were the same0:22:38thing and then so that's a pretty mind-boggling idea like seriously that's a mind-boggling idea you know especially0:22:47when you add the psychological idea that the one of the things that characterizes your ideal future self is the ability to make sacrifices right and the deeper the0:22:56sacrifice the better and then also to recover from the sacrifice right so that's the death and rebirth so the part of you that's most essential to your full flowering as a as a being is your0:23:08ability to let things go and then spring back from that so to die in some sense and to be reborn in the service of a higher good and then well then the next0:23:18part of that is that the direction of the world depends on you doing that so not only your own life but your family's life and and because we're networked so0:23:28intently together you know that the whole panoply of humankind that may be the structure of the of the cosmos and you know you might think well no but you0:23:38know it's not so simple it's not so simple first of all one person can wreak an awful lot of havoc there's absolutely no doubt about that and as we get more0:23:47technologically powerful that becomes even more relevant and important and and and crucial you know one of the things that Young said was that we had to wake up because we are too technologically0:23:58powerful to be as morally asleep as we are and that seems to me just to be self-evident that's yeah for sure that's true we're we're we're half asleep with0:24:08nuclear bombs it's not a good idea it's seriously not a good idea and so well and then you might ask yourself -0:24:18you don't well like what is the ultimate potential of a fully developed human being and well we certainly know that0:24:27you have admiration for people who are more developed rather than less developed that's that just happens automatic or resentment that but that's okay it's the same thing it doesn't0:24:37matter but it's not like you can't identify them you can identify them you know and and they're put forward to you in in in drama and fiction and all of that constantly so that's another form0:24:47of moral intuition you know you can write you can discern the wheat from the chaff let's say and and so the other0:25:01thing that I was thinking about that's worth consideration too is that you know and maybe this is maybe this is petty but I don't think it is somebody asked0:25:13me the other day if I believed in miracles and I hate being asked questions like that you know and you know it's also people ask me do I0:25:22believe in God and like I don't know what they mean when they say that and so I don't know what the answer because I don't think we're talking necessarily going to talk about the same thing but in any case I said yes and I have a0:25:32variety of reasons for that but one of them is that you know the consensus among physicists is that we can track0:25:43the origin of the cosmos to something like a hundred millionth of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang it's like it's so close to the Big Bang that the0:25:53difference is literally infinitesimal but the consensus is that before that whatever that is the laws of physics themselves break down well what what do0:26:05you call an event that exists outside the laws of physics that by definition that's a miracle now that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a0:26:14transcendent Adi that caused the event that's a separate issue but it does imply a barrier of some sort beyond which we can't go where0:26:26some other set of rules apply and so I find that interesting as well so all right so Sarah dies and Abraham0:26:45makes a bargain with the Hittites to purchase a burial place for her and they offer it as a gift and he insists upon0:26:54paying for it it's a little story that basically indicates two things that Abraham was the kind of guy that you trust pretty much when you see him and0:27:03that even if something is offered to him as a gift he's going to do everything to be reciprocal about it and and so it's not a massively important part of the0:27:14story but it's it's in keeping with the same narrative flow and so Efron who's a hit I'd offer Zabar you'll place as a gift and Abraham says no you know you0:27:24have to let me pay for it and Efrain says he will and that works out very well and so he has a good burial place for his wife and then Abraham decides0:27:36that Isaac needs a wife and so he sends his eldest servant to Mesopotamia to0:27:47find a wife for Isaac and there's a strange ritual that's performed so it says in the story that the servant places his hand under Abraham's thigh to0:27:58to swear but that isn't really what it means it means that he places his hand I don't know exactly how to say this properly well use your imagination how0:28:09about that and the idea is that as far as I can tell that he's swearing on the future he's swearing on future people it's something like that so that's0:28:19that's sort of what testified means right think about the route well I'm not kidding I'm not kidding that is what it that's that is the derivation right it0:28:28is the derivation so so so anyways this is a serious issue and so that servant has to go and find Isaac a good wife and he wants him to find Isaac wife who0:28:40is willing to accept the same fundamental belief system which is something like the belief in a god that's a unity rather than a plurality you know the other thing that Jung was0:28:51very insistent upon was that there was a relationship between polytheism and psychological confusion and monotheism0:29:02and psychological unification I really like that idea too that you know that what you're trying to do because you are a plurality that that's one of the0:29:11things the psychoanalysts we're really good at figuring out that the cognitive scientists haven't touched yet as far as I could tell they're way behind the psychoanalysts in that element of thinking is that you are composed of sub0:29:21personalities which all have their own desires and their own viewpoint their own thoughts and their own perceptions and they're in a war with each other0:29:30constantly maybe even a Darwinian war it's been it's been portrayed that way by certain neuroscientists and that that one of the0:29:40goals of life is to integrate all of that plurality into a hierarchical ethical structure that has some canonical ethic at the pinnacle right0:29:51we've talked a little bit about that and it's not obvious what should be at the pinnacle but we can guess at it it's it's that which we admire that's one way0:30:00of thinking about it it's that that describes fair play across a sequence of games that's another good way of thinking about it it's it's the heroic0:30:09ideal that's another way of thinking about it but it's it's combined with generosity you know because the hero the mythological hero goes out into the unknown and slays the dragon and gets0:30:18the gold but then comes back to the community and distributes what's found and so it's courage plus generosity and and so all of your all of that interior0:30:29struggling that you're doing is an attempt to bang yourself against the world with challenge constantly to hit0:30:38everything together like you're beating on a piece of iron to to to cure it let's say so that you don't you're not an internal contradiction you're not0:30:48massive competing gods something like that because it's just too psychologically stressful and hard on everyone else and impossible for them to get along with you if you're one0:30:58thing one moment and another thing another moment and so so anyways Abraham insists that Isaac find a wife from among people who are likely to carry off0:31:09forward the monotheistic tradition and I'm not sure that the monotheistic tradition is actually indistinguishable is actually distinguishable from the individualistic tradition I think they0:31:19might be the same thing at different levels of analysis you know so because individual means undivided in some sense0:31:28right to be an individual means to be one thing and the other thing that mitigates against the idea of life as happiness is it isn't obvious to me that0:31:37it's happiness that is what molds you and shapes you you know it's something more like optimal challenge voluntarily undertaken it's something like that0:31:46right and I think that's echoed in the idea that everyone has a moral obligation to raise their cross something like that to accept the fact of their mortality voluntarily I believe0:31:57that that's the case and I do actually think that that's a prerequisite to proper psychological development because if you're not willing to take your0:32:06mortality on voluntarily like if you're kicking and fighting about it constantly and you have every reason to don't get me wrong then you can't act forthrightly0:32:15in the world right you're going to be afraid and when you're afraid then you can't voluntarily take on a challenge and then if you can't take voluntarily0:32:24take on a challenge then you can't develop and so again the life seems to be something like if it's a proper life is the voluntarily voluntary taking on0:32:33of great challenges and maybe that's better than happiness like it's certainly more noble you know it's not a word we use very much anymore the idea0:32:42of nobility because we're so obsessed with happiness but I think happiness is a like if it comes along man great you know wonderful don't don't take it0:32:52lightly or for granted because it's fleeting but the idea that that's what you should be for in some sense - seems to me if that's what life is for then0:33:02maybe it shouldn't be maybe that's correct because that isn't what life is but so doesn't it isn't obvious to me that that's what life should be you know I0:33:11mean if you really loved someone like like your son let's say what do you say well I hope he has a happy life or would you say I hope he accomplishes great0:33:21things it seems to me that that's better the accomplishing of great things and because that's admirable you know it's0:33:30like a happy person is a happy person but a noble person is an admirable person and and that's that's better man and so maybe there are better things0:33:39than happiness and so you can't judge being on the basis of the ratio of suffering to pleasure something like that it's and I don't think we do that I0:33:49don't believe we do that I mean comedians are happy right but everyone doesn't aspire to be a comedian and you don't watch comedy all the time even though you could laugh non-stop more or0:33:58less if the comedian's funny you want to get your teeth into something it also seems to me that this is one of the reasons I like the existential philosophy was that you know the0:34:08existentialist believed it's sort of an original sin idea they believed that we came into the world with an ethical burden already laden upon us something like something like that and that we had0:34:17a felt sense that it was necessary for us to justify our being and if we didn't do that then we weren't authentic to ourselves we weren't moving towards0:34:26individuality we weren't sustaining the community we weren't living properly and that and that that idea was deeply embedded in people as part of their ordinary0:34:35experience and that also seems to me to be accurate and you know I've dealt with lots of people say in my clinical practice and they don't really cut they0:34:46are they will come and say I wish I wasn't so unhappy but they don't usually come and say I wish I was happier and those things aren't the same and and then when we when you talk to people who0:34:57are having trouble you know they want to straighten things out and figure out how to do them right it's something like that and and that that's the primary that's their primary goal and0:35:16so anyways Abraham sends his eldest servant off to his the place that God has granted him to find a wife and0:35:26interestingly the borders of the promised land are quite similar to the current borders of Israel in these are estimates right based on on the biblical0:35:36and I mean that's not a fluke obviously but it's it's interesting to see the concordance between these ancient stories and the present-day world so I0:35:47thought that was very interesting and it shows once again that the past you think the past is the past but it's not it's it's still here it's embedded in the0:35:56present you know just like the future and somehow in some ways is folded up inside the present waiting to unfold the past is all folded up inside the present too so anyways the servant goes to the0:36:21land that he's been charged to go to and and he's trying to figure out how in the world am I going to find a good wife for Isaac I mean I don't know any of these0:36:30people and so he has this little dialogue that's presented in the form of a prayer I suppose and he thinks well I'm gonna go to the place where you0:36:39water where people get water and water the animals and because that's a place where everyone gathers so that's a good place to find someone and and it's it's0:36:48not a place of fun and lightness and relaxation and impulsivity it's a place of life-sustaining work and and he thinks something like well what would a0:36:58decent girl do at a watering place and he thought well maybe she would offer a stranger some water and also offer to0:37:09water the camels because that would be brave to approach the stranger and then generous and then indicative of the0:37:18willingness to make an effort and when you know that a camel I think he took ten camels was quite a few camels anyways just one and that a camel can drink 200:37:29gallons of water and Rebecca who was drawing water from the wet turns out to be Rebecca I was drawing water from the well which is hard right because water0:37:38is heavy and you have to lift it up and it's ten camels and so that's like 200 gallons of waters so you know she has to put herself out a fair a bit in order to0:37:47make this stranger happy and so that's what happens and then the servant has brought along gifts and that sort of0:37:57thing and anyways to make a long story short Rebecca agrees to come back to come back with the servant and huh marry Isaac and so0:38:11then she has she gets pregnant and she has twins and this is an interesting thing the twins fight inside her she can tell that that they're not getting along0:38:21and this is an echo right it's an echo of Cain and Abel and there's a mythological motif that the unions have called the hostile brothers the hostile0:38:30brothers and you see them all the time Batman and the Joker are hostile brothers and Thor and Loki or hostile brothers and it's an unbelievably common motif and you know the ultimate hostile0:38:41brothers are Christ and Satan so that's the that's the archetypal representation of the hostile brothers right the ultimate good and the ultimate evil and so and so it's an echo of the cain and0:38:52abel story although it's a little more complex I would say from a literary point of view because it isn't obvious which of these brothers is Cain and0:39:02which of them is Abel they have parts of both in each of them so Esau who turns out to be one of the brothers in Jacob movie turns out to be the other both0:39:11have their admirable qualities and their faults anyways Esau comes is born first but Jacob has him by the heel and so0:39:22there was a fight within the womb to see who would emerge first now that's relevant because the firstborn had a special status well has a special status0:39:32in many communities especially agricultural communities and there's a reason all these people were more herds people but if you divide your property equally among all your children0:39:42then in like three generations everybody has one goat and everybody starves to death you know or the same thing happens with lands so one of the ways that that traditional communities solve that is0:39:52they just give them almost everything to the firstborn and then the everyone else knows well you go out and do whatever you can and it's kind of arbitrary and unfair but you know at least it's0:40:01predictably arbitrary and unfair instead of doom over for generations you know so it actually mattered to be the firstborn and and God generally favors0:40:11the firstborn and then you might think well what is it about being born first that's so relevant apart from the the cultural practice of abort generous0:40:22inheritance and I would say well the firstborn is something like the model for the leader of the family right because the firstborn child should be if there's a number of siblings they should0:40:32take care of the siblings at least to some degree but also should be a role model for them so it's like a natural position of leadership but there's a site there's a cycle psychologize ation0:40:42of the idea of the firstborn in these stories because god often passes over the firstborn in favor of a later born child he seems to do that on the basis0:40:52of moral character essentially and so there's this idea that well there's a natural proclivity towards leadership that's just a biological fact that would0:41:01be associated with being a firstborn but there's a element of characterological development that transcends that and so that you it's more important to be0:41:10spiritually a firstborn let's say than to be biologically a firstborn and God recognizes that continually in these stories and inverts the natural order0:41:19and favors a later born who's who's done more work with regards to characterological development and that's also interesting to you know I've talked0:41:28to lots of business people about leadership and there's a literature on leadership but it's not a good literature it's it's pretty shallow partly because it's not that easy to0:41:37define leadership and partly because there are different you know you people have different temperaments and different temperaments can be leaders they just do it in different0:41:46ways now there's something in common about being a leader though and I would say one is that if you're an actual leader you actually know where you're going right because what are you gonna do lead0:41:56people in circles it's like maybe they'll follow you but you're not a leader you're just a charlatan so you have to know where you're going and then you have to be able to communicate that and then people have to trust you so you0:42:06actually have to be honest because people are at that stupid at least not for a long period of time and then where you're going has to have some value because otherwise why would anyone want0:42:16to go along with you so and then you might say well what what are the attributes then that make you a leader and I would say well they're characterological fundamentally and this0:42:25is not naive optimism or or or casual moralizing it has nothing to do with that you know we know for example that0:42:35conscientiousness that the personality trait is a good predictor of long-term success in in most occupations not all but most and that one of the things0:42:44that's associated with conscientiousness is that people keep their word they're trustworthy and that's certainly one element of a leader especially across any reasonable amount of time you have0:42:53to be able to trust the person they can even be harsh right it doesn't matter because you can see harsh leaders and kind leaders but as long as they do what they say they will do then then you can0:43:02follow them and you know that the future payoff is is is secure something like that so the idea that character logical0:43:11development is more important to leadership than primogenitor I think that's the right word primal Genesis anyways being a firstborn that's a very0:43:21crucial psychological realization that it's character logical development that makes you favored of God you know and I do think we've forgotten this in many0:43:30ways because there isn't a lot of emphasis in our education system on characterological development and that's very very surprising to me I think maybe0:43:39it's partly because in our fractured society we can't agree on what constitutes a reasonable characterological goal so we just throw0:43:48up our hands and don't educate our kids to any degree at all especially in schools about what an admirable person is like or even let them know that well0:43:57maybe you should actually try to be one you know that that's actually the most important possible thing that you could learn right [Applause]0:44:09so and I also think and I think this is laid out very thoroughly in the biblical stories as well is that if there are enough people who are admirable then0:44:20things work and if there aren't and things things are terrible you get wiped out you remember when Abraham is bargaining with God with0:44:31regards to Sodom and Gomorrah he asks God to save the city if there's like 40 admirable people right respectable but let's say admirable right I don't want I0:44:41don't want to say good because good is being corrupted in some sense by casual usage I mean admirable noble people right I think Abraham bargains got down0:44:52to like ten if there's ten of them in the city the city won't be destroyed and that that's not very many in this city so there's an interesting idea there which is that there there doesn't have0:45:01to be that many people in a group who have their act together but zero is the wrong number and if it's zero then then we're seriously in trouble0:45:11and I think that goes along with the idea of the Pareto principle in economics too which is that it's a small minority of people who do most of the productive work in any given domain but0:45:21so so a small number of properly behaving people might have enough of an impact to keep everything moving and that might also that might actually be0:45:30true but it can't fall below some crucial level and I do think that we're in some danger of allowing it to fall below some crucial level because our society seems to be at war in some ways0:45:40against the idea of the individual and individual character per se and I think that's absolutely I think that's0:45:50absolutely catastrophic and that's part of the reason that I'm doing these biblical lectures you know because I think that I've known for a long time that the moral presuppositions of a0:46:01culture are instantiated in its stories they're not instantiated in its explicit philosophy there might be a layer of explicit philosophy and of course there0:46:10is in the West and a layer of explicit law but underneath that there are stories and there isn't anything under the stories except maybe behavior you know and0:46:19that's so implicit it doesn't even actually count it's not a cognitive operation and so this is the story these are the stories that are underneath our culture and so there better be something0:46:30to them that's what we hope and but more importantly maybe we shouldn't toss them away without knowing what they mean because if we toss them away then we're0:46:41throwing everything that we depend on away as far as I can tell and we'll we will pay for it we'll pay for it individually because we'll be weak you know because if you're not firm in your0:46:50convictions then someone else who's firm in their convictions can you're their puppet like instantly and then you're also the puppet of your own doubts right because unless you have convictions0:47:00you're gonna generate doubts like mad because everyone does and then the doubts win and and you'll be paralyzed because there'll be you know 50% of you0:47:09moving forward and 50% of you frozen stiff and that'll be enough just to lodge you in place and so okay so0:47:20there's a psychologize ation of the idea of leadership which is very important and then it's associated with the idea of character or logical development and it's associated with the idea of struggle not happiness and it's also0:47:30associated with this Abrahamic idea which I really liked and which was something that's been very useful to me as a consequence of doing these lectures because remember at the beginning of the0:47:40Abrahamic stories abraham's like a stay-at-home guy right he's like the guy who's 40 years old living in his in his in his mother's basement and god says like get the hell out of there you know0:47:49get out in the world where you belong go do something difficult because what you're doing isn't acceptable and you know the first thing he does is go somewhere there's a terrible famine and0:47:59then he goes somewhere there's a tyranny so you know it's it's pretty funny he follows God's call and it's not like sweetness and light and paradise immediately it's nothing like that it's0:48:09it's instantaneous combat you know of the most difficult kind so but but Abraham does in fact follow that impulse0:48:19and you know it's interesting too I mean I don't know here's another thing that made me a really an advocate of psychoanalytic thinking and it was the0:48:29sort of thing that started to terrify me about what the human psyche was out like I started to understand that not only were we like an amalgam of relatively autonomous subpersonalities0:48:40each of which had the possibility of gaining control but that we were also victim you might say or beneficiary of0:48:50impulses that were beyond our conscious formulation or or or understanding or capacity to resist so here's this here's0:48:59a funny story so I was talking to one of my patreon people online this week and he said he was a committed atheist and that's fine you know lots of atheists0:49:09are very honest people and they're atheists because they don't know how to reconcile what they know with traditional claims let's say and they're0:49:18not willing to just mangle them together you know and there might be cynicism all that associated with it as well but he said he was he said he was entranced by these biblical lectures you know which0:49:28is pretty weird and he said if someone would have told him a year ago that he was going to like be obsessed with the sequence of biblical lectures he would have told them that they were mad and so0:49:38we had a bit of a discussion about that and because this is an interesting thing you know and he mentioned this he said it was something like you don't choose your interests they choose you and0:49:48that's really worth thinking about to man because you know it's really hard to get interested in something you're not interested in even if you know there's a good reason for it you know you're0:49:57studying for an exam you find the material boring you know anything will be more interesting than than the studying even though you know that that's what you need to do you can't0:50:06voluntarily grab yourself by the scruff of the neck let's say and shake yourself and say sit down and concentrate your mind will just go everywhere but then if0:50:15you're interested in something and even if it's something you shouldn't be interested in because that happens all the time then it's like you're a laser focus man you can pay attention forever you can0:50:24work until you're exhausted you won't even notice it then you remember everything it's like okay if you can't control your interest what does and man I tell you you can0:50:35think about that for a very long time so Jung talked about the spirit mercurius you know Mercury's the winged messenger of the gods and and here's how he0:50:44conceptualized it psychologically he thought is what the ancient people who thought about mercury has the winged messenger of the gods were trying to state psychologically you know your your0:50:54interest Flitz around it's like there's something that captures it and that moves your interest from place to place you know like if you walk into a bookstore you'll get interested in a particular book it's as if the book0:51:04grips you is you don't know why you're interested in that you might but often you don't know why you're interested in that book and you know your interest is flitting around and so that's mercury0:51:13the thing that makes your interests like flicker around is mercury the winged messenger of the gods and mercury is the messenger of the gods because it's the things behind the scenes psychologically0:51:23that are manipulating your attention and for Jung those were equivalent in some sense to the lost gods and so for Jung your your interest was being manipulated0:51:33behind the scenes by unseen forces that were associated with your character illogical development across time that was the manifestation of the self so the0:51:42self is this the the potential you let's say and the way it operates in the present is by gripping your interest in directing it somewhere and that's part0:51:51of the instinct of self-realization it's a mind-boggling idea man really it's I think it's correct I can't see how it can't be correct it doesn't mean0:52:00I understand it completely but it certainly seems phenomenologically correct and I mean the potential that you are has to manifest itself somehow in in the here and now it has to and0:52:11what better way than by directing your attention you know it's like it seems like this might be useful for you or maybe you get attracted to this person or maybe you admire this person that0:52:20happens with kids a lot they'll admire someone and then copy them and you can see that that's obviously part of their developmental progression right it's a form of hero worship but kids are very0:52:29imitative and they hero worship at the drop of a hat and so they're they're entranced by the the next stage of development and if they see someone who0:52:39embodies that especially if it's in the zone of proximal development it's it's um it's something they could achieve stretching a bit they find someone who embodies that next stage of development0:52:49and then they start to imitate them and act like them well we're adults are no different we're no different we're just we do it at a perhaps more abstract and sophisticated0:52:58level so okay so Jacob and Esau are hostile brothers there they're like Cain and Abel except0:53:07the mixture of Cain and Abel and they're very different Esau was red and covered with hair he was a hunter and a man of the field so he's like your basic jock right he's extroverted he's outgoing0:53:17he's really tough he's like extraordinarily masculine he hunts and he's a real favorite of his father and so and and Jacob isn't he's a dweller in0:53:27tents and yeah right exactly exactly exactly right and it says Isaac loved Esau but Rebekah loved Jacob now that's0:53:37a problem right that that's a big problem and that there's a Freudian element to this it's like this family is now divided because one child is the favorite of the mother and that's Jacob0:53:46and one child is the favorite of the father and so Jacob is kind of a mother's boy I guess to use an rather archaic phrase and certainly not as0:53:56admirable from his father's perspective as Esau who's a tough guy who goes out with a bow and arrow and like you know wanders around in the plains and brings animals home and and he's tough he's a0:54:07tough guy so and but but there's this discord in the family because one parent prefers one child and the other parent prefers the other and it's obvious from0:54:18the story that the parents do not communicate about this because they really take sides and so there's a split in the family and that's I think very realistic because one of the things that0:54:28you do learn if you have a family and of course most of you do but if you also think about families is that there's there's deep divisions within families very very frequently that no one will0:54:37ever talk about and or even think about often because it's too painful to think about you know and Freud himself said Freud was clearly his mother's favorite0:54:46and the family sacrificed a lot including some of the potential ambitions of the other children in order to kind of put Sigmund Freud up on a pedestal and and advance his education0:54:57and it worked I mean you know he turned into a great man but there was a cost to his siblings and Freud himself said that there was something about being the favorite of the mother that gave a0:55:07person additional confidence throughout their life and you know there's there's something to be said about that even someone like Eric Erickson you know he0:55:16noted that very interested in child development that that first bonding with the mother was the it was the place where trust was established maybe trust0:55:25even in the goodness of existence was established and so anyways Jacob is Rachel's favorite and he saw his Isaac's0:55:34favorite now he saw being extroverted let's say is also a bit impulsive and0:55:44maybe he's not he's a man of action he's not a forward thinker and but he's also doing hard work and so you know he goes out and he's hunting and he's worn out0:55:53and he comes home and he's faint with hunger and Jacob is at home cooking he's boiling up lentils red lentils and0:56:02you know Esau comes in from the hunt and he's like half starved to death and he's sitting there in the aroma of these red lentils reaches them and he's exhausted0:56:13and and and he tells Jacob that he wants some of this stew and Jacob who's being0:56:23a pain in the neck fundamentally they basically says no there's a there's a teasing thing going on here and and we won't give him any and and and there's0:56:33you have to imagine this because it's not laid out explicitly in the story but there's some dispute about whether Esau gets to have lunch and Jacob finally0:56:43says well I'll give you some but you have to you have to give me your birthright and he saw you think he must say something like you know well to hell0:56:52with it take it you know you son of a take it just give me some damn stew it's something like that so that's what happens but you know with these0:57:01archaic people once he made a statement like that that was you were done that was it and so Esau sells his birthright0:57:10and this turns out to be incredibly significant Manson who wrote biblical commentary said oh there's a bit of a0:57:19twist to it so Esau eats the the red lentils and then from then on his name is red and you've got to use your imagine in a bit I mean people are making fun of0:57:29him right that's why they're calling him red I mean he's already red because we established that but no one was calling him red before this and so for the rest of his life you know every time he goes0:57:39out amongst his friends and family they call him red and sort of snicker because he's the you know half famished idiot who sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils and so it's it's not it's not0:57:49that funny actually and so Esau is not happy about this and and it actually turns out that this so what does it mean it means don't sell the future for the desires of the0:57:59present and don't be casual about what you have and then there's an archetypal element to this too and Benson says various have been the opinions what this birthright was which Esau sold but the0:58:09most probable is that together with the right of sacrificing so determining what should be sacrificed and when and being the priest of the family it included the0:58:19peculiar blessing promised to the seed of Abraham that of being the progenitor of the Messiah and the error of the special promises of God respecting0:58:28Christ's Kingdom it was at least typical of spiritual privileges those of the firstborn that are written in heaven well that's a lot harsher than meets the0:58:42eye to begin with and so there's a very interesting deep moral story there which is it's sort of Esau does the opposite0:58:53of a sacrifice it's the reverse right he sacrifices the future for the present and so the story basically says the way it's laid out across stories is that if0:59:03you're the sort of person that sacrifices the future to the present then that eradicate the possibility that you will bring the the most noble being0:59:14into existence that's what it means and you can again this is the psychological significance of the biblical story so that's a bad thing to do if you want to0:59:24realize your potential let's say you don't do reverse sacrifices that's a very bad idea and so Esau really did himself in by0:59:33being too attached to the present without a vision of the future so he's - in the moment you know and and he pays a heavy price for it I0:59:43mean he's the first of all he loses his birthright and and his double inheritance so there's a practical consequence and then there's a spiritual consequence and then he's well he's been0:59:53made a fool of by his brother Jacob means supplanter by the way that's what the name means and Jacob is always trying to usurp Esau as we see and so1:00:03Jacob gets one over on him and you know that's not doesn't make an older brother happy when a younger brother gets something over on him that's for sure and then he loses the opportunity to be1:00:12the progenitor of the Messiah which is like people already didn't realize that precisely but it seems to be you know it's kind of rough that so and then1:00:23there's there's a statement in Matthew 16:26 for what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul or what shall a man give in exchange for a saw it's an echo of the1:00:33same idea you know when you think well what is this idea of soul mean and it's not intellect it said it's something like it's something like consciousness1:00:42allied with character I think and I think the reason that it's valued so much is that because you got to ask yourself well what do you really have when it comes down to it so life is1:00:51suffering let's say and you know you can you can pile up worldly goods and the God in the Old Testament doesn't seem to have anything against that really right the people who he favors seem to prosper1:01:02quite nicely in the world but they also have to make a choice between whether they're going to fundamentally sustain their character or whether they're going to prosper in the world when push comes1:01:12to shove and the idea constantly is that really what you have in the world that allows you the best possible defense against the suffering that's intrinsic1:01:22to being is your character that's what you have period and I don't think there is anything that's more psychologically true than that you know because everything else well first of all your1:01:33relationships with others depend on your character and certainly this is part of the story of Noah's Ark you know because his generations were perfect so he had a very tight familial arrangement everyone1:01:45trusted each other that's a big deal if you hit a rocky patch in your life right and it's character that it's character that determines that you know if you're generous and honor1:01:54and all of those things and people know they can rely on you assuming they're not resentful that's a whole different story then they're gonna come to your aid when when it's necessary they're1:02:03gonna pull together with you and you know when people are really after you for one reason or another and they're accusing you of all sorts of things and you're guilty because you you have a1:02:12past it's laden with characterological errors then it's very easy for people to take you down because they'll poke until they hit a place where you're guilty and then you're done because you'll do1:02:22yourself in with your own judgment and so well so ESO makes a very big mistake and there's a sacrificial idea here too1:02:35which is you know now and then you're going to be faced with a situation where it's something you really want or your character maybe you'll have to lie about something you know and you'll think what1:02:45difference does it make you know a lie about it Jacob does this but the problem there's a bunch of problems with that one is that well now you know that you're the sort of person that will in1:02:55fact deceive yourself about the nature of reality if something shiny is dangled in front of you and that's not good because it undermines your faith in yourself and when you're really in1:03:04trouble they call that the dark night of the soul when you're really in trouble that's what you've got you've got whether or not you can trust yourself and that's it you know when things are1:03:15really harsh and so if you've betrayed yourself in that manner then you weaken yourself under the worst possible circumstances and that's just that's really not a good thing1:03:24so this is very practical advice it's not casual moralizing there's very little casual moralizing in these1:03:33stories in the next part of this story there's some parallels with Abraham and that's built into the narrative I think because Isaac is Abraham's descendants1:03:44and so we have to keep the narrative echoing forward otherwise it loses its its continuity and there's a famine in1:03:53the land that Isaac sin and God tells him to stay the course anyways repeating the promise he he gave to Abraham although Isaac goes to AB Emelec also1:04:05telling the King and people that Rebecca was his sister exactly what Abraham did when he went to Egypt and so there's another echo there of the same the same it's as if the1:04:15story is being told for a second time essentially and that's supposed to remind you of the of the previous story but they're careless the King sees that1:04:24Rebekah and Isaac are intimate together and luckily he doesn't have them put to death he just tells everybody in the kingdom that they're to be left the hell1:04:33alone and then Isaac prospers in that land just like Abraham did in Egypt until the Philistines asked him to leave he's just getting too rich and powerful things are1:04:43going too well for him so he's asked to he's asked to leave now in the meantime Esau gets married Hannah this is a funny little story he says he marries two1:04:54women who give grief to Isaac and Rebekah so they who every so marries they're not popular with his with their in-laws not in the least that actually1:05:03becomes relevant a little later because they drive Rebekah quite mad so I get a kick out of that because that's very common you know it's not easy to integrate new people into your family1:05:14and and hope that that will go smoothly it's actually one of the real catastrophes in life right you have a kid maybe you get along with them and maybe you don't but let's assume you do1:05:24but then they marry someone that you just don't like and or maybe you think is wrong for them I mean that's really rough that's what are you gonna do about that you know because you're you're1:05:35basically screwed both ways if you have the person you love around then you have to put up with this Prentis creature that they allied themselves with and if you if you get rid of them completely1:05:44well then you know you don't have your child anymore so it's a very very difficult position and so that's another example of the realism I think of the stories now Isaac who's hypothetically1:05:55on his deathbed asks Esau to hunt for venison because he likes venison and he's happy that his son is a hunter and Rebekah over here is this and so she conspires with Jacob to to1:06:08slaughter two small goats and make his father some stew because he wants Esau to make him stew out of venison but Rebecca who's being I would say let's1:06:19say slightly deceitful or probably lying that would be more accurate she conspires with Jacob so Jacob kills two little goats kids and1:06:28boils up a stew and then he puts on some goat skins because Esau is a hairy character and and Rebecca dresses Isaac1:06:37in Esau is clothing because Isaac can't see very well at this point and so then Jacob goes into his father with the stew and he's trying to disguise his voice1:06:48but it doesn't work very well and so Isaac asks him to come close and Jacob puts out his arm with the goat skin on it and and Isaac smells him too and he1:06:58smells like he's oh and which maybe wasn't the best thing but and feels like him and and so because Isaac thinks he's1:07:08on his deathbed he decides to deliver a blessing - hypothetically - Esau and so but it's Jacob and so that's a big deal1:07:19- because the blessing is actually as I said before with these ancient people it appeared as though once you said something you didn't get to take it back you couldn't say well look you've you1:07:29deceived me so it doesn't count it was like they weren't maybe as as1:07:38what week might be one way of thinking about it but another way is they weren't quite as attentive to context you know because if I make you a deal and then it turns out that you've betrayed me I may1:07:47feel that the deal is no longer valid because the assumption was you were being honest to be giveth in that you know violates the whole spirit but that isn't how these people thought they said1:07:57once he promised man you promised and that was that so Isaac blessed Jacob he says that God give you the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth and plenty1:08:07of corn and wine let let people serve you and nations bow down to you be lord over thy brethren that's gonna be rough on e so let thy mother's sons bow down to the cursed be everyone that curseth1:08:17thee and blessed be he the blesseth thee and so there's a quite a remarkable painting of that so there's Rebekah she's looking pretty old and Isaac's1:08:28looking pretty blind and Jacobs taking directions from his mother and we might say he's perhaps a little old to be taking moral lessons from his mother especially1:08:37given how she's acting and so it's a pretty ugly scene altogether especially that we also know that Jacob already tricked Esau out of his birthright and1:08:46so now he's like taking the birthright and he's taken the blessing and so as I said that Jacob he turns out to be the1:08:55father of Israel it's like he's a reprehensible character these are major-league betrayals that he's engaging and it's not trivial he really really pulls the rug out from under his1:09:06brother and you know you could say well Esau is not as awake as he might be you know he's kind of a wild man and fair enough but it certainly seems to me that the the predominant moral error falls on1:09:18Jacobs shoulders it's very treacherous behavior what he's doing so then he saw shows up and he's got a nice stag for his dad and it's like little late for1:09:29that and he states that his brother was rightly named Jacob which means supplanter because he's been deceived twice and Isaac says Isaac answered he's1:09:40asking funny I was asking fundamentally if there's anything at all left over for him and Isaac can't give him the same blessing because that's already been given so he has to think of something1:09:49else and Isaac says behold I've made him thy Lord and all his brothers I've given to him for servants which includes you1:09:58and with corn and wine have I sustained him and what shall I now do unto thee my son and Esau said unto his father have you even one blessing for me my father1:10:07and blessed me also and an e so lifted up his voice and wept and you know we already know that Esau is a pretty tough guy by all appearances and you know he's1:10:16out there hunting on his own and camping and it's like he's no pushover and the fact that this reduces him to tears is an indication of the magnitude of the betrayal and Isaac says behold thy1:10:27dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth and of the dew of heaven from above and by thy sword thou shalt live and thou shalt serve your brother and it shall come to pass when you will have1:10:36the Dominion and you'll break the yoke his yoke off from thy neck and Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him and Esau said in his heart the days of1:10:46mourning for my father are at hand then I will slay my Jakub so fundamentally you know if Isaac dies or when he dies then we'll mourn1:10:56for him and then Jacob better look the hell out because it's like it's it's serious death coming his way and you know he's got a he's got a point he's in1:11:07in Dante's Inferno I think I mentioned this at one point so Dante's Inferno it's a very interesting story it's a descent into hell and it's it's actually one of the places1:11:17that we sort of derive the popular conception of Hell was partly based on Dante's on Dante's imagination on his work and what Dante was trying to do was1:11:26to discover the hierarchical structure of evil and you know you might think there's a hierarchical structure of good some things are better than other things but there's also a hierarchical1:11:35structure of evil some evils are greater than other evils and he put betrayal in the in the in the lowest part of health right so if you were betraying people you were right besides Satan himself and1:11:46so and I think that's good that's very smart well Dante was a genius after all and I think the reason for that is that you see if someone trusts you they're1:11:57laying their vulnerability open to you now they might just be naive let's say and that's we won't think about that because you're just a child if you're naive you can still be betrayed but if1:12:07you're an adult and you trust it's often because you if you're an actual adult its you willingly open yourself up knowing that you could be hurt right because you're not naive anymore so you1:12:17decide to trust and you see all open myself up and I know that I'm laying myself open to you if you choose to use that power and then that's a good thing1:12:27to know you know if you've been hurt as a child or hurt as a naive person you might say well why should I ever trust again which is a really good question and the answer is the reason you trust1:12:36again once you're an adult is because you're courageous you're courageous it's an act of courage to trust and the reason it's useful is because if you1:12:46trust someone you open the door to reciprocity and negotiation and cooperation and you entice the best part of the person forward and so it's a it's1:12:56a courageous act but then if you betray someone then what you've done is you've taken the best part them which is the part that will courageously trust you know with open1:13:07eyes right and you've stuck a dagger in that and so you've purposefully damaged the best part of them and so that's why it's such a egregious fault and and it's1:13:19often people don't recover from that sort of playing at you if you betray someone badly enough you can you can damage them like you can give them post-traumatic stress disorder if you really if you really put your mind to it1:13:29and you know that's not just a psychological disorder if you have post-traumatic stress disorder it produces permanent neurological alterations that make you more neurotic1:13:38more sensitive to negative emotion really for the rest of your life like you can you can recover from it to some degree but stress will tend to reinstate1:13:49the PTSD so you you hurt someone and it's not merely cycled not not that psychological is merely but it's not merely psychological right it's it's1:13:59fundamental physiological damage so anyways Jacobs smart enough to get out of there and which is also not1:14:08really a testament to his integrity right I mean he's done these terrible things at the behest of his mother because he wants power and and he wants1:14:18to get it without deserving it and then you know he finally goes too far and he hightailed it out of there to his to another family member to his mother's1:14:27brother and so it's not exactly the world's most heroic story that's for sure and so now there's an interlude1:14:36here and this is a really interesting interlude it's the story of Jacob's Ladder so he's off to visit Lebon or lab and who's his his mother's brother and1:14:47on the way he he has asleep and he lighted upon a certain place and tarried there all night because the Sun was set and he took of the stones of that place1:14:57and put them for his pillows which seems to indicate very bad planning on on his part and and lay down in that place to sleep and he dreamed and beheld a ladder1:15:07set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven and beheld the angels of God ascending and descending on it and behold the Lord stood above it and said I am the Lord God of Abraham thy1:15:16far and the guard of Isaac the land were on thou liest to thee I will give it and to thy seed and so this story of Jacob's1:15:26Ladder has really possessed the imagination of the West and there's a reason for that it's because it's an archetypal story because the idea of a ladder that reaches to heaven is one of1:15:35the oldest ideas of mankind so you find it widely distributed among the shamanic cultures for example and it's a hallmark of psychedelic experience that's another1:15:44way of thinking about it which is a very peculiar thing so there's one representation of of the ladder you see god up at the top there peeking out from1:15:53the clouds now you know that's sort of where we get the idea that God is in in heaven and then heavens up in the sky and and that's an easy story to make fun1:16:04of because you know we've gone up to the moon and there's no God there and and but but this this is not a reasonable way of conceptualizing what these1:16:15experiences are about these experiences what this is the opening up there that's more like an opening into an alternate dimension that's a better way of1:16:24thinking about it's beyond like from from the judeo-christian perspective one of the things you have to understand is that God is beyond space and time he's not in the universe he's outside the1:16:34universe in some manner and so the idea that that you have an experience of God and it's up isn't the OP is the best that the human imagination can do with1:16:44what's essentially a form of extra dimensional experience or that's the best way to conceptualize it and these experiences aren't rare you know they they make the they make up the core of1:16:54of the shamanic tradition and so there's an intrusion of the ancient shamanic tradition which is tens of thousands of years old into the biblical stories at this point1:17:04now why Jacob had a essentially shamanic experience is very difficult to tell because we don't know what these old people were up to right and we don't know how much of the archaic tradition1:17:15archaic religious tradition was still extant about at that point in time but we certainly do know that our ancient forebears were using psychedelic1:17:26substances constantly like Amanita muscaria mushrooms for example which were widely used in India before they became extinct that's the theory anyways that seemed to be the basis of the chemical1:17:36soma which much has been written about and so we here ever this as a dream that were as a vision and perhaps that's what1:17:45it was but perhaps that wasn't what it was either and perhaps it was an experience that was induced by or by the same processes that shamanic people have1:17:57always induced these experiences and so we're gonna go through this a little bit so anyways there's a there's a connection between heaven and earth that opens up that's that's that's the that's1:18:06the vision and there's messengers moving up and down now one way you can conceptualize that is psychologically as we already discussed that you know there1:18:15there are forces within you that are active and alive and you can think of them in some sense as messengers of the higher self and so you could think about1:18:25this as an image of a psychological reality but and so we can stick with that but but here's some of the1:18:35representations that have been made I really like the one on the right that's William Blake I like the helix idea and I don't think that that's that's fluke1:18:45there are helixes and double helixes and all sorts of imaging imagery very ancient and very modern that are associated with both healing and with this kind of vision so and you see it in1:18:56the Blake representation God is associated with well really with the Sun and with light and and you see that on the left as well that wherever God is is1:19:06where light is and so that's a very interesting idea as far as I'm concerned as well there's some other representations one by Chanel1:19:22so now there's this idea that there's a there's the possibility of opening up a line of communication between the human psyche and the transcendent divine and1:19:31there's a there's a great image of Christ as Pam - they're so creator of the world that is one of the first mosaics if I remember correctly and I1:19:40wish I knew remember where it was but I don't but it's a very interesting image I'm having a carving of it made at the moment by a friend of mine but you see1:19:50Christ's face portrayed in a medieval manner and he's holding a book so it symbolizes the importance of the book you know as a means of transmitting1:20:00wisdom and his face is very asymmetrical and that the eyes are different one side and the other and one half of the face represents the human part and the other1:20:10side of the face represents the divine part and you know I also think about that psychologically because I do think that that's the right way to1:20:19conceptualize human beings is that there's an aspect of us that's mortal and human and limited but there's an aspect of us that's transcendent and divine as well and it's latent in some1:20:29sense but there are times when it manifests itself and this is not speculation right this is like the oldest experience of human beings now1:20:39it's not necessarily an easy experience to have but it's reported everywhere and it can be reliably induced as we've discussed before by chemical means which1:20:48and I don't know what that means exactly we've talked a little bit about psilocybin mushrooms for example and you could say that the mystical experiences that have been invoked in the newest1:20:57experiments down it Johns Hopkins are arrangements or forms of psychosis you know because they have some similarity to psycho psychotic experiences although1:21:08psychotic people were given LSD in the 60s and they always said that that was something different than what they were having and if you give psychotic people amphetamines you could make them worse1:21:18so their bio chemically separate and we know that and but also the thing that's so interesting about the psilocybin experience is is that they reliably1:21:27produce mystical experiences that the people rate as among the most important experiences of their life and among those who have the psychedelic experience positive1:21:36things happen to them and so that kind of messes with the whole psychosis theory right because what are you gonna do you got a claim that you give someone a pill and they have a psychotic break1:21:45and then they're healthier it's like no that isn't how psychotic breaks work you're not healthy or after having one you're like you're a broken egg and it's1:21:54not easy to put you back together so and we know that people all over the world have discovered every manner of psychedelic substance that you could possibly while you imagine there's lots1:22:04of hungry people wandering the earth for a long time and they eat every damn thing they could get their hands on and now and then something very peculiar happened as a consequence so so I'm1:22:17gonna tell you a little bit about the shamanic tradition because it's associated with Jacob's Ladder so according to le a de murcia le odd it1:22:27was a great historian of religion a comparative Jung's and and and they influenced each other quite substantially le otta believed that shamanism that used psychedelics was a1:22:37degeneration from the original more pure shamanism but I think later scholarship has demonstrated that that's incorrect that that the shamanic ritual per se was1:22:47a direct consequence of the use discovery of an and ritualistic use of psychedelic substances but anyways Eliana identified three pathways to1:22:58shamanism and the shaman in it in a tribe was more educated than the typical person with a larger vocabulary and was1:23:08the repository of the oral tradition and so learned all the stories that had been passed down word to mouth and people by the way are very very can very very1:23:19accurately tell the same story across generations that's been quite well documented so and and people who can't read really can remember because what1:23:28else are they going to do their memories are far greater than modern people's memories because we can forget everything because we can just look it up but they remembered things because1:23:37they had no choice my father knew someone who was illiterate and and and and couldn't use numbers either when he grew up in Saskatchewan1:23:47you know sixty years ago and he was a he had a sheep if I remember correctly and although he couldn't count he knew if one of his sheep was missing because he1:23:56knew all the sheep and so he could tell just by looking if one of the sheep was missing but he couldn't count and so well so people who don't have our1:24:05particular set of skills first of all they're not stupid and second they have other skills that we don't understand to fill in the gaps so le ah de identified spontaneous vocation so you were just1:24:16you have this spirit of a shaman let's say so you're probably extremely high in openness let's say from a modern perspective hereditary transmission so you know your father was a shaman and1:24:25your grandfather was a shaman and so forth and you got initiated into that process or a personal quest in Siberia this is from Ileana in Siberia the youth1:24:36who is called to be a shaman attracts attention by his strange behavior for example he seeks solitude becomes absent-minded loves to roam in the woods or unfrequented places has visions and1:24:46sings in his sleep you know if you put someone in a place that's deprived that's where you're you're deprived from a sensory perspective it normal people1:24:56will hallucinate quite quickly so it seems what happens is that if you dampen down the sensory input then you start to become aware of the background processes of your mind it's something like that1:25:05it's like the signal-to-noise ratio I got to get this right as the noise decreases some of the noise becomes1:25:14signal the background noise become signal and you start to become aware of your own internal psychological process is it something like that he has visions and sings in his sleep in some instances1:25:24this period of incubation is marked by quite serious symptoms among the accout young man sometimes has fits of fury and easily loses consciousness hides in the forest feeds on the bark of trees throws1:25:34himself into water and fire and cuts themselves with knives we went to a part lash in northern northern Vancouver1:25:44Island about a year ago and they had this one dance it was the croc Wakulla natives and they had this interesting dance that was the dance of the wild man and so the person1:25:54who invited us was the wild man and he was dressed up and in tree branches and so forth and so he was the person who'd been in Bush too long and he came in as a1:26:03cannibal and there there was genuine cannibalistic rights among these people not so long ago he came in as a cannibal and everybody had to wear this like cedar headdress because if you had a1:26:13cedar headdress on then the cannibal wouldn't take a bite out of you and they actually took this rather seriously so you should have your cedar headdress on and so he's looking around the crowd and1:26:23there's like 400 people in this place and he could really act - so he's doing this wild man dance and then all the women stood up and started to kind of1:26:32dance in place and sing and they were taming him so that was really cool you know it was really interesting to see that because those people are about they've had an unbroken culture for1:26:42about 13,000 years say that's how long they've been out there and it was very interesting to see that dramatization of the domestication of of man by women1:26:52laid out in that dance in that way but it was also interesting in relationship to the shamanic tradition because he came in as a wild man right and he had to be re civilized in some sense and1:27:03brought back down to earth so but by whatever method he may have been designated as shaman is recognized as such only after having received two1:27:13methods of instruction the first is ecstatic dreams trances visions the other thing that this guy told me and I have no reason to doubt him he's also1:27:24not a literate person and so has a great memory he does carving traditional carving and he's very good at it he carved a 53-foot totem pole that's now1:27:33in front of the Museum of Art in downtown Montreal so if you ever go there you can go see it I won't be there forever but it's there right now and he1:27:44was taught to carve by his grandparents and he said that he dreamed in you know you know what the Haida images look like so the Crocker walks are kind of like1:27:53the high that same sort of imagery he told me that he dreamed in those images so when he dreams that's the form that the things he dreams about takes and he1:28:02also said that he would talk to his grandparents in his dream so if he was working on a piece of wood and trying to figure out how to carve it and he ran into a particularly difficult problem1:28:11he'd dream and his great he'd have a conversation with his grandparents and they'd help him figure to solve the problem and then he wake up and he could go Karva and the thing is he told me these things sort of1:28:20matter-of-factly right like you don't you know what I mean it wasn't like he was telling me these weird things that happened to him although he was doing that to some degree he I asked him a lot of questions1:28:32about what he carved and what it all meant and you know that was just part of his explanation of how he did it and he he carved me a couple of doors that I have in my house and one of them is1:28:43quite interesting well the to make a panel and they're an underwater scene and under the water there's a bunch of you know mythical monsters some of them1:28:53are killer whales and I think there's an octopus down there and carved in this particular style and he said that the other thing that happens to him when he dreams is he goes down to the bottom of1:29:02the water where these mythical creatures are and he gets inspiration from them and so I thought that was extremely interesting too you know we we don't know what a mind1:29:12that isn't hyper civilized let's say hyper literate like like our minds are cuz we're so bombarded by external stimuli we have no idea what the natural1:29:22mind is like really and so it was quite interesting to to to listen to that and also to see the consequences cuz he's quite a great he's quite a great carver1:29:32so the first is ecstatic dreams trances visions the second is traditional shamanic techniques names and functions of the spirits mythology and genealogy1:29:41of the clan a secret language this twofold teaching imparted by the spirits and the old master shamans constitutes initiation well so you know modern1:29:50people have a problem with that because we don't really get initiated but I would say that you know let's say that1:30:01we reach out a quest of some sort you wouldn't be here I don't think if you weren't because why else would you be here and so you're on a quest of some1:30:10sort to figure out to struggle with the meaning of life let's say and you don't want to do that alone because you only last like 70 years and good luck1:30:19figuring it out on your on your own it's just not gonna happen it's too complicated and you'll be too isolated right if it's just you that's insanity that's no one can stand that and so you1:30:30hope that other people have things to tell you and that your culture has something to tell you you know so you're on a quest maybe not with the same intensity as a shamanic initiate but you1:30:39know let's give you some credit and then you're also trying to understand the wisdom of the past and that's the second part of this it's like okay well you're1:30:48a human being and human beings have been telling stories for a long period of time trying to figure out what's going on trying to figure out how to orient themselves in the world and so you know partly what you're doing here is exactly1:30:58what the shamanic initiatives in the second part of the process which is to expose yourself to the degree that you can - names and functions of the spirits1:31:08mythology and genealogy of the clan and the secret language this twofold teaching imparted by the spirits and the old master shamans constitutes1:31:17initiation so it's that's the rebirth right yeah that's that's what a nation is it's being born again and and that's1:31:26a birth of the spirit rather than over the body it's something like that and so it's the rebirth of an integrated psyche that's one way of thinking about it and a psyche that's that's individual but1:31:36also grounded in common humanity and the wisdom of common humanity and that makes you strong or at least it makes you stronger because there's a limit to your1:31:45strength but God Only Knows to some degree what that limit is you know people can be unbelievably tough unbelievably tough and I think it's even1:31:54the more admirable for human beings to be tough because we're so conscious of how we can be hurt and we're so conscious of what that hurt can lead to1:32:03you know you can have your family taken away from you and you can be destroyed and the fact that you can be courageous in the face of that at all is something that is absolutely unbelievable right1:32:13and people deserve a lot more credit I think then people give themselves because the fact that we can be honorable under conditions of life and1:32:23death right of suffering that's that's a testament to the human spirit and there's a profound anti human ethos I1:32:33think that pervades our culture you know that considers human beings cancers on the planet something like that you know and that there should be less of us it's the same spirit that motivated the guy who wrote1:32:43the book about it better to have never been it's like I don't see it that way you know I mean I think people do pretty well for you know for having their leg1:32:53caught in a bear trap and their head caught in a vise they're actually doing pretty well because life is really hard and the fact that we're not absolutely brutal and murderous all the time is1:33:02really something remarkable given what we actually have to contend with that we can go out of our way to be honest and generous and altruistic and to care for1:33:11each other under unbelievably dire circumstances and to act nobly sometimes under the most trying conditions you know in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago1:33:20he tells story after story of people who acted abysmally but also people who under the worst threats imaginable never sacrificed their character you know in1:33:30reading about that is really well it really makes you wonder that's that's what it does the future shamans among1:33:39the Tungus as they approach maturity go through a hysterical or a history would crisis but sometimes their vocation manifests itself at an earlier age the boy runs away into the mountains and1:33:48remains there for a week or more feeding on animals which he tears to pieces with his teeth he returns to the village filthy blood-stained and it's only after1:33:5710 or more days that have passed that he begins to babble incoherent words the strange behavior of future shamans has not failed to attract the attention of1:34:06scholars and from the middle of the past century several attempts have been made to explain the phenomena as a mental disorder but the problem was wrongly put from the one hand it is not true that1:34:15shamans always are always have to be neuropathic in mentally deranged on the other hand and this is the critical issue those among them who had been ill1:34:25become shamans precisely because they had succeeded in becoming cured so it was it's not the descent into this strange subterranean psychological state1:34:34that constitutes the transformation that makes the shaman but it's the emergence back out of it and that's a journey to the underworld in a and a rebirth right1:34:43and so and there's this great book this is a great book by a guy named Henry Ellen birch a and he was an existential psychoanalyst and philosopher and he1:34:53wrote a book called the Discoverer of the unconscious which I would highly recommend it's on my list of recommended readings it is a great book if you want to know about the psychoanalytic1:35:02tradition it's the best introduction there is and he discusses Adler and Jung and Freud and there's a very credible job of all three but also takes the1:35:12history of psychoanalytic thought back three or four hundred years before Freud and so it's it's very engaging reading and and and and very interesting and one1:35:22of the things alan burridge a points out quite clearly is and he associates this to some degree with this shamanic tradition that both Freud and Jung Jung in particular underwent very intense1:35:33periods of psychological disturbance let's say and I would say what was happening is that because they were questioning their axioms at the most1:35:42fundamental level they were deranging their cognitive and perceptual structures right and Jung was also experimenting with imaginative techniques with visionary techniques1:35:51which he which he did a lot and there is a period of his life where he was having constant a constant stream of visions which he wrote down in a book called the red book but at the same time he was1:36:02still functioning as a psychiatrist and operating normally in the world and so you know people have suggested that what he had was a psychotic break but that's ridiculous because you don't know that's1:36:12not how it works man if you're having a psychotic break you you know I've been an effective psychiatrist those things do not go together especially not for a long period of time and so there there's1:36:22the possibility of extreme experience without psycho psychopathology and so and Allen Burgess he says much the same1:36:32thing about Freud and about Charles Darwin as well who underwent a terrible period of of mental confusion I would1:36:42say as a consequence of formulating his theory of evolution which was really hard on him because he was a he was a die-hard Christian and he knew what he knew what the implications of his theory1:36:52word he didn't know what to do about that you know so it was very very hard on him so it's quite common for people of genius to go through an intense crisis psychological crisis but then1:37:03resolve it and the genius is in the resolution right the precondition for the genius is the dissolution in some sense because you have to be obsessed with the problem it1:37:12has to grip you completely before you're going to concentrate it on it's so obsessively that you might come up with a solution but it's the people who come up with a solution that are the prophets1:37:22in the shaman and so forth and so on and and and so that's not this isn't something that only characterizes archaic cultures we just don't recognize it in our own culture properly and and1:37:32that's a problem well sometimes we do right you remember that in the Lion King right that Rafiki shows up he's the1:37:41shaman he brings he brings Simba down that tunnel dark tunnel that's the dark night of the soul he has him reflect upon himself in a pool when he reflects1:37:52upon himself deeply he sees the reflection of his father then that becomes a car thing of cosmic significance and his father appears in the sky just like God appears to jacob1:38:02and basically tells them that it's time for him to grow the hell up and to return to the devastated kingdom and to set it right you know and so and that's1:38:12right that's exactly right I mean we live in the devastated Kingdom that's an eternal truth and it's the responsibility of the individual to grow the hell up and to set it right because1:38:23when it's devastated and when things are not in place then everyone suffers too much and that's not good and there's no excuse for not doing something about it because you don't1:38:32have anything better to do so and even like children's movies tell you this so [Music]1:38:42this is a fun one this is from the Eid wine Psalter 9th to 12th century and that's Adam and Eve but the there is1:38:52speculation that the fruit that they're eating there you see it is psilocybin mushrooms right because they're the only kind of mushroom that grow like that so1:39:02that's pretty wild you might say and then this is the I think it's called Bannister realign if I remember correctly and it's what ayahuasca is made out of and it has this1:39:12double helix form which is very very interesting and they the people the natives nobody could figure out how the hell they made this ayahuasca we which transports people spiritually in a1:39:23very intense manner and there's a whole religion based on it like a modern religion as well as the archaic religion and to make this stuff they had to take two plants that don't grow anywhere near1:39:33each other and like there's like a million plants in the Amazon so like how do you figure that out nobody knows and then you have to cook them in this very particular way for a particular amount1:39:43of time before you produce this stuff so one of the plants has DMT in it which is a very intense psychedelic but it's very short acting and the other has an MAO1:39:52inhibitor so if you take the DMT and you take the MAO inhibitor then the DMT trip lasts for much longer and so that's what these Amazonian natives figured out and1:40:01no one has any idea how they managed it and if you ask them they tell you that the plants told them how to do it which isn't much of an explanation as far as modern people are concerned but then1:40:11when modern people take the ayahuasca and the plant so to speak starts to talk to them there are a little less leery of the whole theory that the plants had something to do with this so you know1:40:22and these things that these I'm loathe to talk about this because I'm not an advocate for drug use but by the same token you can't ignore empirical data1:40:31it's not reasonable and the empirical data that psychedelic substances can produce mystical experiences and that those often have a transformative effect I mean one of the latest studies showed1:40:41that if you took people who are dying of cancer and you and you gave them psilocybin in a sufficient dose to produce a mystical experience that you radically it decreased their their fear1:40:51of death it's like you go to think about that man that's that's tough that's a tough experiment you you just wouldn't1:41:00expect that that you think you take someone you'd arranged them intensely and then when they come back they're not even though they're dying they're not nearly as afraid of dying you know you1:41:10got to kind of wake up and smell the roses when you see something like that and the people who are doing this research are very reliable people so there's the Amanita muscaria you know1:41:21there's this old idea it's quite a funny idea toadstools so flies like Amanita muscaria and there's some this is ridiculous there's some evidence that1:41:31they actually like getting stoned so cuz animals will eat these like reindeer will eat these things too and they get pretty tripped out by them and so I have this book on psychedelic use1:41:42among animals which is a small book but and so so there's there's this idea that toads used to sit around the they have1:41:51any NamUs carry and wait for the stone flies to like buzz badly around them and then snap them up so that's pretty funny I think and so and you know there are1:42:02mushrooms in in the u.s. that are the oldest the oldest organisms on the planet a there's one mushroom I can't remember where it is but it covers something like oh god I don't know like1:42:12square hundreds of square miles it's like this huge thing because it's all underground right and they have these very complex networks of my Celia1:42:21they're called and they think the thing is like a hundred and fifty thousand years old something like that so there's plenty of things about the world that we don't know that's for sure there's the1:42:32chemical makeup of the classic psychedelics you see they all have the same fundamental structure this is serotonin that's the one of the major brain neurotransmitters and so what1:42:41happens with the psychedelics is that they they alter the they alter the brain function by altering the neuro chemical1:42:51utilization of serotonin they changed the manner in which the serotonergic systems worked and the serotonin system is very basic system because when you're an embryo and your1:43:01brain is developing it's the serotonin projections that basically orchestrate the development of your brain so they're and they're very archaic circuits very very archaic circuits so and this is the1:43:14paper I think I stole this from psilocybin Griffiths who's been doing a lot of this research psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences having substantial and sustained1:43:23personal meaning and spiritual significance so why that's a good question right like so so here's a question for you it is1:43:34beyond dispute that human beings are capable of religious experience why why is that exactly and like you can1:43:43associate it with psychosis but that doesn't work if the theory doesn't hold theory hold water it's not the same thing so why is it there exactly and it's not an1:43:54easy thing to figure out like I've been trying to figure I'm always trying to figure out a biological explanation for everything right because if you want to find something to stand on you want to make sure that it can resist a challenge1:44:03and so if I can find an explanation for something that's reductionistic and materialistic and biological then I'm going for that that's a tough one consciousness is a tough one the moral1:44:14sense is a tough one they're not easy things to crack the Big Bang is a tough one so you know I mean a cynic might say1:44:25that maybe sometimes when people are close to suicide they'll have a mystical experience you know and you maybe you1:44:34say well it's a last-ditch attempt of your brain to delude you into thinking that your life has some significance you know and that's a plausible theory but I1:44:44don't think it counts for the generality of the phenomena so so I don't buy it1:44:56what happens in the shamanic experience is that the shaman has the experience of being reduced to a skeleton first so1:45:06death a deaf experience very realistic death experience and then the next thing that happens is that he finds himself in1:45:15a place where he's communing with his ancestor or the ancestral spirits and then after that there's the climbing of something like the ladder Jacob's Ladder1:45:25se and an encounter with God for all intents and purposes and it's very widespread phenomena it's the World Tree1:45:38and I've thought about this a lot trying to figure out what this what this represents according to a yeah coot informant that's in Siberia the spirits carry the future shaman to hell and shut1:45:48him in a house for three years here he undergoes his initiation the spirits cut off his head which they set off to one side for the novice must watch his own1:45:57dismemberment with his own eyes dissolution to the primary elements in some and hack his body to bits which are later distributed among the spirits of various sicknesses it's only on this1:46:07condition that the future shaman will obtain the power of healing his bones are then covered with new flesh and in some case he is also given new blood so there's a death and resurrection1:46:16experience that's associated with the shamanic ritual we're here in the presence of a very ancient religious1:46:25idea which belongs to the hunter culture bone symbolizes the final route of animal life the mould from which the flesh continually rises it is from the1:46:34bone that men and animals are reborn for a time they maintain themselves in an existence of the flesh then they die and their life is reduced to the essence concentrated in the skeleton from which1:46:43they will be born again that's a good graphic representation of the experience1:46:54that's an old painting by I think it's her own amis Bosch if I remember correctly and I really like that because it's it's reminiscent of the near-death experiences that you hear people1:47:03describe and they're quite common as well and and I had that very weird experience once I don't think I've told you this story I was I was assessing someone who had1:47:15gone through a car windshield and he was very depressed it had happened a long time before but he was very depressed and the insurance company was basically accusing him of malingering because he'd1:47:25been depressed for so long and you know he'd sort of healed up and everything but if your left hemisphere is damaged especially the frontal part of your left hemisphere then you can be in a chronic state of depression because the left1:47:35hemisphere generally speaking is responsible for positive emotion and so if it isn't there then it's like negative emotion for you and so I wouldn't assess him and I was giving him1:47:45this I think it was called the MMPI the Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory which is a kind of a standard path personality test half1:47:55psychopathology test and he was filling it out he was a very serious guy middle-aged guy nothing about him was new agey in the least he was like an1:48:05accountant I think I think in fact he was an accountant if I remember correctly and there was one question and it said my spirit has left my1:48:16I think that's right it's very close and he stopped and he asked me well he said I'm not sure how to answer this and so I1:48:25said well why and he said well after I went through the car windshield I was in a coma for three weeks something like that and I died I think he said he died three times and he said that he could1:48:36remember he couldn't remember anything during that period of time and he couldn't remember the car accident that's retrograde amnesia it's quite corn common with head injuries and he1:48:45said that during one of those experiences and this is all he remembered from the hospital was that he came out of his body and went down the1:48:54long tunnel of light you've heard these near-death experiences and then saw his family members there and saw the heavenly light and then realized that it1:49:03wasn't his time and came back to his body now what was interesting about this guy was that well first of all I didn't ask him about this right he basically1:49:12volunteered this story and it was instigated by this question and and he didn't know that anybody else at any1:49:22ever had an experience like that cuz I asked him if he'd ever heard anything about like that he said no so that was interesting but what really was interesting is how the hell did he1:49:31remember that right because he had amnesia during that entire period of time he was in a bloody coma so he didn't remember anything they remembered that and so well those experiences are1:49:45more common than you think and then there's a you know there's a painting of one which is quite interesting and that's like a tunnel to heaven it's the same basic idea it's a little bit more1:49:54suffering going on in this one I think but that's pretty much typical of Hieronymous Bosch I mean I don't know what was up with that guy but he was he was one strange character now the1:50:04Scandinavians have this idea that the world is a tree and I've been thinking about that a lot I think that the tree1:50:13idea tree is something that is grounded in in matter let's say and that reaches up to heaven in the Scandinavian tree at1:50:22the bottom there's quite a cool idea at the bottom of that see this tree is constantly being gnawed by snakes you can sort of see the snakes at the bottom and at the same time it's being watered1:50:31and the water makes the tree grow at the same rate that the snakes gnaw on its roots so it's like a yin-yang idea you know that there's continual chaotic destruction and replacement at the basis1:50:41of whatever this process is but the tree seems to me to be a representation not so much of its it's like a different dimensional space that's that's what's1:50:50trying to be represented so imagine that you know you're structured if you take powers of ten magnification say human beings are about in the middle of the1:51:00tiniest thing and the largest thing if you do it by my powers of 10 and so you know you have a subatomic level in an atomic level a molecular level and you1:51:10know then that may be a level of organs and then there's you and then there's your family and so on all the way up the the tree fundamentally and so I think1:51:21that what this tree represents and this is the things that thing that the shaman moves up and down I think that's what it represents it's this it's this different view of of its dimensionality it's1:51:32something like that and I think that what happens in the psychedelic experience is that consciousness can travel up and down that structure it's something like that and maybe not only up and down it but maybe right through1:51:42it and I know that's a radical claim it's a really radical claim and it might be wrong but it's probably wrong even because most radical claims are wrong1:51:52but but but I'm not so sure it's wrong1:52:03and here's something cool so that's the Scandinavian world tree and that was drawn by an anthropologist who visited1:52:13the tribes in the Amazon who use ayahuasca now you see it's a snake it's1:52:23a tree with snakes well you know that's reminiscent of the story in Adam and Eve obviously but it's also reminiscent of our primate dwelling place right because1:52:32that was basically our ancestral home a tree surrounded by snakes and the snakes like to eat us and this is a long time ago this is like 50 million years ago1:52:43it's really a long time ago and so we don't know where these images come from precisely but I do have the suspicion1:52:52that we use the circuitry that we developed to detect snakes to represent the unknown as such because like a snake1:53:02is something that comes out of the unknown and like we evolved right we all evolved out of an animal sub structure and so we had to get our our biological1:53:12cognitive structure from somewhere and we have this capacity of thinking about the absolute unknown and the terrors that are involved in that that the horrors that can emerge from what we1:53:21don't understand and it stands perfectly to reason that we would use circuits that were already pre developed for that and that this is a reasonable representation of the existential1:53:31structure of the world so I think I might have showed you this before but it1:53:40never ceases to amaze me this this picture so my son drew this when he was nine eight and so on the right you see mushroom houses and they have the names1:53:50of all his friends on them and so that's order right and then on the left side you see chaos there and that little orange thing is a bug and then there's a1:54:00river that runs right down the middle and so that's like the you know the yin-yang symbol with the divide in the middle that's quite cool and then there's there it is there's Jacob's1:54:10Ladder it's like Jack and the Beanstalk which is by the way another variant of the same shamanic story and there are bugs going up and down it they're taking messages from heaven1:54:21and then up there in heaven it's got the Sun and there's st. Peter and I don't know where in the world he got this it's not like he had a lot of religious1:54:30education I mean despite me and you know there's the pearly gates up there and then that was the world as far as his he had a very well ordered psyche I would1:54:40say and and still does but when he drew that it just absolutely blew me away and so I had it laminated and it's in my office because well I don't know because1:54:50like what the hell do you make of that you know that's that's why so well you1:55:07sort of get the picture there you know the cathedrals the great cathedrals of Europe are there like the forests in stone right and they try to represent1:55:16the light coming through the leaves and so it's sort of our ancestral forest home but it's it's transformed into these great sculptures of stone and you1:55:25know they produce all because of the combination of light and darkness and color but also I think for the same reason that huge trees produce awe and people you know and we don't want them1:55:35cut down they seem sacred in some sense and perhaps they are but you know it also seemed to me this is an intuition1:55:45that the the architects of these great cathedrals were trying to get they're trying to express something that's deep and structural they're trying time1:55:54trying to express the idea that if being was constituted properly then it would be organized from the subatomic level all the way up to the highest cosmic1:56:04level perfectly so every layer stacked on top of each other without any contradictions now that would be an ideal mode of being and everything would come together under those circumstances1:56:14and that's what's being expressed in these cathedrals it's not all that's being expressed because they're also shaped like a cross and you know the idea is that the center of the cross1:56:24which is the center of suffering is also the place of the individual the place where the transformation takes place that's all built into the architect as well and so then there's the tree1:56:39like structures that make us up it stretched down to the tiniest realities1:56:49the microcosm and there's this this idea1:56:58it's all represented in the same way again it's this idea especially the Mandela up in the top-right it's the idea of is perfection of crystalline1:57:07structure and that's what the Yogi's are trying to attain when they organize their bodies they're trying to get every single layer of their being aligned properly and it's something like and you1:57:17can kind of see an echo of that in the I think that's a Tibetan sand painting if I remember correctly left the idea is1:57:26that if you get yourself a line properly then information can flow along that tree that that's you without without1:57:35impediment something like that and that would be like a state of optimal health and that both physical and spiritual exercises can put you in that state and1:57:45that's well those are all clouds of ideas that surround this idea of a ladder to heaven so Jacob is talking to1:57:54God and God says behold I am with thee and I will keep thee in all places where you go and bring you again into this land for I won't leave you until I have1:58:03done that which I have spoken to you of and Jacob awakened out of his sleep and he said surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not and he was afraid and1:58:12said how dreadful is this place this is none other but the house of God and this is the gate of heaven when Jacob rose up early in the morning and took the stone1:58:21that he had put for his pillows and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on top of it that's a sacrifice and he called the name of that place Bethel but the name of the city was called l-'izzat the1:58:31first and Jacob vowed a vow saying if God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on so1:58:40that I come again to my father's house in peace then shall the Lord be my god and this stone which I have set for a pillar shall be God's house and of all of that that is given to me I will1:58:50surely give the tenth unto thee and that's a pretty good place to stop so now I'll just conclude so you have this1:59:04very morally ambivalent character right who's so far pretty much everything he's done that we're familiar with is not good so he's he's betrayed his brother1:59:14horribly twice badly enough so that he his brother wants to kill him and everyone can kind of sympathize with his brother so and then he runs away1:59:23essentially because his mother tells him to which is not exactly a testament to his character and despite that strangely1:59:32enough he has this experience you know and that's heartening I guess and that's the point is that people are predisposed1:59:42to terrible error there's no doubt about that and yet when I was writing my latest book I had a friend of mine1:59:52Norman Doidge wrote the foreword and Norma's written a couple of great books and he's Jewish and he read some of what2:00:01I'd written and he took me to task for making the god of the Old Testament you know from a Christian perspective too harsh and unforgiving and I rewrote a2:00:12fair bit of it because of his criticism and because of what I've learned doing these lectures it's like it's not exactly right you know I mean what happens in the Old Testament is if you2:00:21screw up especially if you know you do and you decide that you're not going to do anything about it so it's conscious and deliberate then like look the hell out you are in serious trouble and I2:00:31actually think that's also psychologically accurate one of the things young pointed out and this always struck me was that if you don't know what you're doing this is actually in2:00:40the Gospel of Thomas as well interestingly enough as one of the caustic Gospels Christ tells his followers something like if you make a mistake and you don't know what you're doing then you'll be forgiven for it but2:00:51if you make a mistake knowing what you're doing and you do it anyways then like good luck to you and and and I think that's I think2:01:00that's that's psychologically accurate I mean one of the things that's very2:01:10interesting about the judgmental God in the Old Testament however is that he can be bargained with and even if you make mistakes especially if you're2:01:20unconscious of them if you haven't learned yet let's say then you always have the opportunity to return to the proper path and that's people get2:01:29cynical about that because there's no this mostly Christian idea that you could live a terribly sinful life but if you repented on your deathbed it's like heaven for you and it's like oh that's2:01:38that sounds like a great deal right it's like you can do whatever the hell you want until just before you die of course you might not know when that is so that's a problem you then you can just2:01:47say well I'm sorry and you know everything's forgiven but the problem with being cynical about that sort of thing is that it's no trivial matter to repent you know because to repent means2:01:57a figure out what you actually did and the worst things that you did the more horrible it is to figure it out it's no joke right and there's no genuine2:02:07repentance without understanding of the depth of your depravity and so if you lived a particularly reprehensible life and you come to understand it I think2:02:18that in and of itself could kill you you know it's a terrible thing to wake up and see what you've done if what you've done is truly terrible so there's no2:02:30easy out it's not an easy out it's it's just pure cynicism to associate that idea with with an easy oh it's not but there is that positive idea that it's2:02:40continually represented is that the individual is the source of moral choice and the individual is prone to genuine2:02:50error and temptation in a believable and realistic way but that that doesn't sever the relationship between the individual and the divine and the2:02:59possibility of further growth and then I would say well thank God for that because without that like who would have a chance right who would have a chance and so the idea that2:03:11the daddy has presented the infinite let's say as presented in the Old Testament is merely judgmental is definitely wrong and and is in fact something that you can contend with and2:03:21Argan with oh I'll close with one thing one of the things that I learned that while I was going through this was the meaning of the name Israel because Jacob eventually gets named Israel and and I'm2:03:32jumping ahead a little bit to the next lecture but Israel and so he's also the father of Israel and the father of the twelve sons who make up the twelve2:03:41tribes of Israel but what Israel means is he who struggles with God and that's such an interesting idea because it's again a psychological idea and that's why I said2:03:52earlier that it isn't obvious in the Old Testament what it means to believe in God because what Jacob does is struggle with God and I think that that's a really good characterization of an2:04:01ethical life because if you're trying to lead an ethical life that's what you're doing is you're struggling like blind belief isn't helpful because you don't2:04:10know what you're believing in like it's just not that helpful but if you're possessed by by the desire to orient yourself properly but also confused by2:04:19the by the existential structure of the world which we all are then then what you're doing when you're trying to orient yourself properly in life is struggling ethically and Jacob actually2:04:30gets quite hurt he wrestles with God literally and God dislocates his his his thigh and so you know the idea there is watch the hell out right the thing that2:04:40you're contending with is powerful although you can contend with it that's the thing that's so interesting but you know you do it at some genuine peril which i think is exactly right but the2:04:51idea that Israel so there's Israel the state let's say it Israel the promised land and all of that but there's this more important idea which is again a psychological idea which is the State of2:05:00Israel which is the promised land is the state that everyone who wrestles with God exists in and that's not happy naive2:05:12belief in you know an eternally blessed afterlife it's not that it's not a wish fulfillment it's it's it's to be actively engaged in life in the2:05:23difficulties of life right and trying to find the path because that's what wrestling with God is is trying to find the path and that2:05:32seems to me what belief means fundamentally in the Old Testament perhaps in the New Testament as well is that belief is expressed in trying to2:05:41find the path and that's an ethical struggle and it's a real struggle it's the struggle of life so as long as you're willing to engage in that struggle then hypothetically you have2:05:51the divine behind you and so I believe that I think that's true because the2:06:00other thing I see is that the people who set things right so that yeah the the horrible forces of2:06:09cosmic destruction don't do us in the people who are trying to set things right are the ones that are struggling ethically and so and that there is a redemptive element to that and I don't2:06:20think there's any way of being cynical about that so well so thank you will [Applause]2:06:50so remember to speak right into the mic because there are all these other people watching that will hear it will hear us so okay2:07:00hi dr. Peterson so with the story of Jacob today there was a theme of betrayal and you can see that from the beginning because he was very angry and jealous at his brother I was thinking are there new stories or2:07:11we can say about betrayal that does come from a loved one right where it's not from a place of so black and white of anger resentment and bitter and how do the parties kind of recover from that or2:07:23is there any way to redeem that or is it as black and white as if you betray someone then there it's like Jacob where hatred no and in fact in this story it's2:07:33not black and white because we know we're only halfway through it and one of the things I've noticed as a clinician let's say is that and as an observer of2:07:43people in general is that I've never ever seen anyone get away with anything and Jacob doesn't get away with any of this and so you know he's humbled by his2:07:55eventual experiences and he learns that he did it wrong and there's reconciliation that happens throughout the story of Jacob so and there's minor2:08:05betrayals and major betrayals you know that some of them have tremendously serious consequences and some of them have lesser consequences but there is an underlying idea that things can still be2:08:15set right even though it's well I think it takes Jacob some 20 years something like that to set things right and even then it's2:08:25like touch and go so if I answer your question okay yeah hey you speak2:08:34frequently in your lectures about I guess the war between good and evil or the struggle of life really is a struggle between good and evil being at2:08:43the core of a conscious lived existence and I guess on that note if you were2:08:53100% certain that there was no afterlife would you still be able to preach that there's a positive meaning in life if you were a2:09:03hundred percent certain some atheists seem to be 100 percent certain and yet they still preach that there's some positive meaning to life would you be one of those or would you turn into Cain2:09:13you know so cynical I think that well as far as I'm concerned one of the things I learned from studying 20th century2:09:22history is that like even if the idea that even if you take the most cynical of ideas let's say that life is irredeemable suffering and and perhaps2:09:31isn't even justified because of that it still seems to me that you have an ethical duty let's say to live in a2:09:41manner that reduces that to the degree part that that's possible and so and I think that that can be experienced as meaningful in some sense independently2:09:51of the transcendent context now I don't exactly know how to strip off the transcendent context because one of the things I would say that's happened to me is because I've spent so much time2:10:01looking at the horrible things that people have done is that it's like Jung said that he when this is one of his famous quotes he said no tree can reach2:10:10up to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell and so as I've dug deeper into the depravity of human beings my sense2:10:19of the possibility of human beings has also grown what would you say in proportion and until I've become2:10:28convinced actually that good is a more powerful force than evil even though evil is an unbelievably powerful force and so I can't really strip the transcendent away now whether what2:10:38bearing that has on eternity say on an afterlife i mean i i i I can't say anything about that the only thing I guess I can say is that there are many2:10:48things about being that we don't understand in the least and we don't understand the nature of consciousness or the nature of time so I I'm not I2:10:58wouldn't despair about that but yes I think that life can still be meaningful without without there being a necessity of an afterlife2:11:10no no no no hi dr. Pederson2:11:19so since studying your work one of the things that I found most fascinating is your analysis of the story of Cain and Abel and my question is if if Cain got2:11:33to the point that he did right before killing his brother murdering his ideal and decided that that was something he2:11:42didn't want to do what advice or guidance would you would you give a person that got to that point2:11:52well there's a story I read called the cocktail party I've mentioned this2:12:01before by TS Eliot and in the cocktail party there's a scene it's a play where this woman approaches a psychiatrist and and starts talking to him about her2:12:10problems and she says something that surprises him she says I hope that I'm the problem he says well why would you hope that and she says well I thought2:12:20about it a lot and if the world is the problem then I'm done because I can't change the world but if I'm the problem then maybe there's something about myself I can change and I can undo this2:12:30terrible situation that I'm in and so I would say that's repentance fundamentally it's like there if and I2:12:39say this carefully because I understand that people are susceptible to bad fortune sin and ignorance can make that2:12:50worse but independently of that like good people suffer make no mistake about it but if things aren't right for you if2:13:01you're resentful about being because that's the right way of because that's the deepest way of thinking about if you read the writings of the people who do2:13:10the mass killings for example that's what you see over and over it's cain it's like they're angry beyond comprehension at the in tolerability of2:13:19being and they're angry at God even if they don't say it exactly like that they come so close to saying it like that that it's there's no difference you know what God says to2:13:31Cain is look to yourself first before you criticize being and that strikes me as right it's because to not do that is2:13:41arrogant beyond belief that's satanic arrogance literally if something like that can be literal it's like don't make yourself the judge of being before you2:13:50clean up your your room let's say and because the other thing to it this is something I learned in some part from2:13:59Solzhenitsyn when he was in the prison camps and trying to understand how these heroic people he saw could possibly manage it one of the exercises he undertook and he really viewed this2:14:08within a Christian Orthodox context of repentance and redemption is he said he went over his life with a fine-tooth comb and tried to imagine all of the2:14:19ethical mistakes he made in his entire life that he knew were mistakes it was it was this was the soul searched not he2:14:28wasn't relying on external standards of morality except insofar as we're inevitably influenced by those and then his idea was is there something I could do right now to put that right and2:14:39that's the right question like if things aren't going your way and I think that means that you're resentful and arrogant and deceitful those are the three things2:14:48that clump together I think that constitute the core of evil it's something like that and so if you're possessed by that which is a hell then2:14:58its repentance that's the right answer and what that means is you have to figure out what you did wrong and you have to pay for it and then at least you2:15:07could think well look I can try that with all of my soul let's say and see what happens right it can at least be an experiment and then I would also say that that's an act of faith it's an act2:15:17of faith to conduct that experiment because you put yourself on the line right and that's what an active faith is you don't know the outcome but you don't know the outcome of your life so live in2:15:27some sense is an act of faith you're putting faith in something that that's why you're moving forward you couldn't move forward without an act of faith you know and people say well I own2:15:36move forward on the basis of the facts it's like yeah but you select the facts and there's an infinity of facts and they don't just tell you what to do so it's not a credible answer so if you're2:15:47in that situation it's like look to yourself you know and one of the things about Solzhenitsyn that's so bloody amazing is that's what he did and then2:15:57he wrote the Gulag Archipelago and you know he took an axe to the intellectual and moral substructure of of the totalitarian communist states so while2:16:06he was redeeming himself let's say he was simultaneously redeeming the world and you know you see something like that like you you gotta wake up man that's2:16:16that was really something so yeah dr.2:16:29Peterson I have a lot of questions that arise from your comments at the Bell for one hundred event your m103 video your recent discussion with ayaan Hirsi Ali and your comments on Islam in the West2:16:38in general and in your comments there's this common theme that one of these things is not like the other you put the judeo-christian tradition on the one side and Islam on the other specifically2:16:48the quote complex problem of Islam in the quote as a quote totalizing system and before I go further let me state that if hypothetically a final analysis2:16:57of Islam resulted in as total of denunciation as your analysis of post-modernism or near Marxism I wouldn't be personally offended at all this isn't a a personal question in your2:17:06recent interview with ayaan Hirsi Ali she said Western values are superior to Islamic law and Islamic values I agree with that basically certainly in the context of2:17:15let's say current global affairs I'll skip the quotes from a recent magazine interview but you should read them because hers is a worldview which is very much the West versus Islam not2:17:24radical Islam but Islam including necessarily the military option so my question is at the level of psychological significance of these stories at the level of mythology and2:17:33archetype how is Islam so different from the Jo Christian tradition you know because Adam Adam Eve of Shaitaan Shaitaan so on and so forth everything from the fault of the flood a lot of2:17:44what you've discussed in this lecture series is necessarily part of Islam as well and in fact I think one of the strongest criticism of Islam that it's perhaps pretty unoriginal you know tonight you said that the moral2:17:54presuppositions of a culture are instantiated in its stories I see a lot of the same stories so current global affairs aside I'm asking at the deepest levels how different are these stories2:18:04in the morals presuppositions ok well that's that's a killer question well ok so the first thing I would say is2:18:14fundamentally I don't know and so part of the reason that I'm one of the things I'm planning to do is to have a series of discussions and plenty of people have2:18:24contacted me about discussing with ayaan Hirsi Ali as you know she has powerful and serious folks and they're not happy2:18:35with her black and white distinction and so now I read infidel and I really liked that book like I my sense was that she2:18:45she was a heroine now what that means in relationship to Islam that's a different story because she came out of a like a2:18:55totalitarian let's say family structure in a relatively totalitarian society and you could make the case that there's a2:19:04correspondence between that and his lemon you could make the case that there isn't and and of course that's the critical issue and so there's a couple2:19:13of things that I can't wrap my head around with we have wrap my head around easily in relationship to Islam and so one is what I see as the failure to2:19:24separate church from state and that's a problem now it may not be a problem as such but it's certainly a problem in2:19:34relationship to the relation between Islam and the West because we separate church from state now there's fundamentalists in the United States Christian fundamentalists2:19:43who think that that separation is a mistake so it's not only it's not only an idea that's rooted in Islam that those should be United but it's2:19:54definitely a problem with regards to our coexistence because that's a fundamentally different presumption okay so that's problem number one problem2:20:03number two for me and again this may be a consequence of my ignorance which I'm trying to rectify Muhammad was a warlord and I I don't know what to do about that2:20:15fact like one thing you can say about Christ hypothetically let's say I'm not talking about a historical reality2:20:24necessarily although I'm not denying it either is that of all the things he was warlord was definitely not one of them2:20:33and I don't know what to do about that and so I don't know how to reconcile that and I don't know how to reconcile2:20:43like not only was Muhammad a warlord which I don't think is an unreasonable thing to proclaim the expansion that he2:20:55initiated was unbelievably successful I mean within six hundred years it was the biggest empire of the world had ever2:21:04seen and a demolished Byzantine Christianity which is something that Western people don't even know you know I've read thinkers who said that the2:21:13West was so traumatized culturally let's say by the demolition of Byzantine Christianity that we can't even study it now and so I don't know if that's true2:21:24but I don't know that it's not true either and the Buddhists were wiped out of Afghanistan and we saw that echoed in2:21:33talibans destruction of those great Buddhist monuments and so so what I'm hoping is that there's a bridge there2:21:46better be a bridge and that's why I want to have these discussions because I'd like to understand if there's a bridge and so lots of people have sent me2:21:56people who I should talk to who who they think represent Islam far better than ayaan Hirsi Ali and perhaps they're correct and hopefully I'll get an opportunity to talk to them because I2:22:06would like to know why I would like to know if what I think is wrong because if it's wrong it's important that I know it's wrong but2:22:16at the moment I don't a I don't know it's wrong and B I don't see I'm not2:22:27sure what it signifies so and I don't think anyone is sure right because we have this entangled entangling of the2:22:37civilizations you know when there's other things too like I'm not very happy with the Saudi Arabs and the Wahabis I don't think they're our allies I don't2:22:49see how any Western woman can possibly think that they're our allies and I'm not happy with the fact that the petrol dollars that we send them are transformed in substantial part into the2:23:01kind of propaganda that's definitely a threat to the West and I'm not very happy with the fact that our politicians appear stupidly blind to that now that2:23:13may again be a consequence of my ignorance it's certainly possible but those are the sorts of things that that2:23:22I can't reconcile and so you know I've seen that I've also seen parallels2:23:31between the ideas that I'm presenting here and other religious traditions Taoism and Buddhism Hinduism it's harder2:23:40for me to bridge the gap with Islam and I'm not sure why that is I think it has something to do with the things that I just laid out now what I don't know about Islam would feel very many volumes2:23:50many of which I have sitting on my shelves at home right now because I want to do the reading you know as I progress through this but2:24:09good evening dr. Pearson thanks for continuing this series even as atheists appreciate the interaction and the the2:24:19conversation I wanted to ask you something that is both emotional and analytical because oftentimes you're2:24:28basically pegged as seeing things very analytically so you were talking earlier about you were talking about the the the2:24:41juxtaposition between happiness and honor even though I don't think they're mutually exclusive personally but if2:24:51there's a situation let's say where someone is truly in love with someone else and they love them for many years and decades they have a whole history2:25:00together and then someone and then one of the people in this grouping start falling in love with someone else so2:25:10it's not that there's less love for the original partner how analytically and emotionally do you take care of a2:25:21situation like that when you feel that you want to stay honorable and be happy okay so the first thing I would say is2:25:30the devil is always in the details right so one of the things that I'm not happy about with much modern moral theorizing2:25:40is that it takes a story like that you know and then tries to extract out a general moral principle and often that's impossible because the particulars of2:25:50the situation are very important but having said that all right so let me think about that for a minute I'm not2:25:59sure that it's possible to be honorable in a situation like that because I think that you've acted out the violation already and having acted out the2:26:08violation to confess it might be the right thing to do although perhaps not you know because if you it isn't obvious to me that if you betray someone then2:26:18you get to have the right to tell them about it I know I know you're not yeah yeah I understand I understand my2:26:31observation has been that if there's a tight relationship and if one party is betrayed by the other in that matter that it's almost always irreconcilable2:26:40it breaks it and you know I've helped people try to struggle through that but on both sides of it the person who was2:26:49betrayed and the person who did the betrayal I've seen people grow up and not do it again and this was in situations where their partner didn't know and in a2:26:59couple of those situations it seemed to me that it might have even been a necessary learning experience for the person who did it you know it it helped2:27:08them develop and that doesn't mean I'm justifying it but life is complicated but but I think that society works2:27:20better all things considered when you make a promise and you stick to it and one of the things I learned from reading young which which I really liked was you2:27:32know he believed that and he had his affairs too so you might think about it as somewhat hypocritical but but I think that people can make mistakes without2:27:42having what they think necessarily be wrong you know he said that there are things in a marriage that you can't have unless you're all-in and I believe that2:27:52I believe that and so if there's a back door open or though like to begin with or a back door opens then I think that there's something about the relationship that is lacking at least and I think you2:28:04pay a big price for that so I mean it depends on whether you regard a marriage as a practical arrangement or a spiritual arrangement now really it's2:28:14both you know and both are important but if it's a spiritual arrangement or a psychological arrangement above all then I do think that you don't get the2:28:26transformation without being all-in and if you violate it then even if you can work it out with your partner there's something that you will never get as a2:28:35consequence so [Applause]2:28:44last question okay I hope I'll make this good thanks also for a continuing the lecture series I haven't listened to all2:28:53of the lectures but it seems like you focus very much on the appeal of the bible-- of stories to the individual psychology you have any thoughts on the2:29:02relative importance of crowd psychology to the appeal and staying power of the bible and also the the reason why the Bible or the biblical stories took2:29:11precedence over other ideologies which could have taken its place okay well let's go to the second one first I think2:29:25it's the same thing that happens when someone both creates and edits a great movie it's no one knows like imagine how2:29:37many choices are there in a great movie let's say it's an animated movie because absolutely everything in an animated movie is constructed everything there's God only knows how many choices like2:29:47maybe there's millions of choices you know and each choice is guided by some intuition of narrative suitability or2:29:56beauty or there's some higher ideal motivating it right the desire to produce a masterpiece maybe that's it that was certainly the case with the Disney movies for example and so that2:30:06that aspiration then then makes the decisions and so I would say well something like that guided the writing2:30:16and the selection of the stories in in the biblical canon now could have there been other stories included well the2:30:25Catholics and the Protestants don't have the same biblical tradition and neither do the Jews and the Christians and so it isn't exactly clear what to make of that you know I mean that's akin in some2:30:35sense to the discussion we just had about Islam and Christianity in some sense I've left that aside that specific2:30:46question except insofar as I've just answered because I'm trying to take what we have which I know is that their route of our culture and to figure out what it2:30:55is that we have why it is that we have it well I've made some attempt to explain that in the manner that I just described but I don't2:31:05have a final answer I could it have been different it could have been different at some levels but the same at others2:31:14you know I mean one of the things it's the scholars of comparative religion who haven't been infected fatally with post-modernism have definitely realized2:31:23so young for example in Le ah de people who are interested in grand narratives one of the things they pointed out quite clearly is that there's there's there's2:31:32a set of common mythological themes across many cultures and I tried to outline that in maps of meaning and that worked out quite nicely for me at least2:31:41as far as I was concerned because once I had the basic archetypal structure mapped out it opened up all sorts of stories to me from all sorts of different cultures and that's been unbelievably useful like the2:31:51Mesopotamian story of it the Anu mulisch when I figured out what that meant as far as I was concerned like I've never forgotten that it just seared itself2:32:00into my memory and the same with the Egyptian stories and you know some Buddhist writings that I've read in some the daodejing is also very powerful so I2:32:09think that things can be different on one level and the same at another but that humanity kind of coalesce is on what's the same over a reasonable period2:32:18of time because there isn't that many ways that human beings can live properly as individuals and as groups together and so there's this constant force that2:32:28makes our ethical presuppositions converge and then that's automatically expressed in the stories it's something like that now it's an imperfect process2:32:37and it's full of error so2:32:48so just one announcement well two announcements the next lecture I believe is November 14th so I'll hopefully finish off the story of Jacob looks like2:32:59it and then I'm also appearing on a panel with God's odd and or an Amity on November 11th and there's still quite a2:33:08few tickets available for that so if you're interested you could go to my website and pick up those tickets huh it should be well hopefully it'll be interesting I think it will be and might2:33:18be too interesting that's one possibility so we'll see but I'm gonna do two more of these this year and I hope I get through the story of Joseph2:33:28and then I can start in the New Year with it with Exodus and that's a story that I know quite well and that the Exodus and Leviticus and what's the one after that yes thank you so I'm very2:33:40much looking forward to that because that is one killer story that so and I've got some surprises for that as well so anyways thank you very much for2:33:49coming and hopefully we'll see you November 14th0:00:00Biblical Series XIV: Jacob: Wrestling with God
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:14[Music] all right so the last time I was here many of you were as well we got halfway0:00:23through the story of Jacob and I've been digging underneath the story sporadically since then to try to find out whether other themes are being0:00:33developed and I've got some things that I think are really interesting to talk about so so we'll get right into it so0:00:42I'm gonna review a little bit first so we were talking about Jacob and I'll read eight his biography a little bit so0:00:53that we can place ourselves in the proper context before we go on so his mother Rebecca gave birth to twins and the twins even in her womb were0:01:03struggling for although they were struggling and of course the story is that they were struggling for dominance the older are the younger against the older really because Jacob Jacob means0:01:13usurper and Rebecca had a what would you call a vision from God that said that Jacob would supplant Esau and so even0:01:26before her twins were born they were in a state of competition and that's a recapitulation of the motif of the hostile brothers right it's a very very0:01:36very common mythological motif and we we already saw that really well developed in the story of Cain and Abel right and Cain and Abel were essentially the first0:01:46two human beings the first two natural born human beings and they were instantly locked in a state of enmity which is symbolic of first the enmity0:01:56that exists within people's psyche between the part of them you might say that's aiming at the light and the part of them that's aiming at the darkness0:02:05and I think that's a reasonable way of portraying it obviously it's a way that sort of rife with symbolism but my0:02:14experience of people especially when you get to know them seriously or when they're dealing with serious issues is that there is quite clearly a part of0:02:23them that's striving to do well in the world or even to do good and another part that's deeply sinned and embittered that that says to hell with it and is self-destructive and0:02:34lashes out and really aims at making things worse and so that seems to be a natural part of the human psyche and0:02:44that's also reflected in the the idea of the fall and so those ideas are not easily cast away they're associated with the rise of self-consciousness right and0:02:54in the story of the Garden of Eden and I think that's right because I do think that our self-consciousness produces that division within us because more0:03:04than any other creature were intensely aware of our finitude and suffering and that tends to turn us at least to some degree against being itself you know I0:03:15was watching a bunch of protesters in the US last week scream out the sky about Trump you know and it was0:03:27interesting like I thought it was an extraordinarily narcissistic display but but despite that there was something symbolically appropriate about it0:03:36I also there's a movie I really like sadly enough called fubar I don't know how many of you have seen that yeah you0:03:47know that movie I take it yeah it's about the people I grew up with so yeah that's true man I'm telling you that's true so the the guy the main actor in0:03:58fubar who's quite bright but completely uncivilized gets testicular cancer and there's one great scene where he gets far too drunk and he's stumbling around0:04:07the street you know in in a virtually comatose state and of course he's not very thrilled with what's happened to him and he's shaking his fist at the sky0:04:16it's pouring rain and he's cursing God and you know it's like well you can kind of understand his position so that kind of reminded me of these people who were0:04:25yelling at this guy you know they were basically they were out dramatizing the idea of in rape they were enraged at well you could say god of course most of0:04:34them wouldn't say that but but they were the ones yelling at the damn sky I mean you know so you got a he got a look at what they're doing rather than what they0:04:43say and they were outraged that being was constructed such that Trump could have arisen as president and so well so this idea you know that we can be easily0:04:54turned against being and work for its destruction is a really it's a really common common common theme it never goes away you see it echoed in stories like0:05:04with the new Marvel series for example you see the enmity between Thor and Loki that's a good example of the same thing or between Batman and the Joker there's0:05:13there's a Superman and Lex Luthor these there's these pairs of hero against villain that's a really dramatic and0:05:22easily what everyone can understand that dynamic right it's a basic plot and the reason it's a basic plot is because it's0:05:32true of the battle within our spirits our own individual spirits it's true within families because sibling rivalry can be unbelievably brutal it's true0:05:41between human beings who are strangers it's true between groups of people like it's true at every level of analysis and then in some sense it's it's archetypal0:05:51true at least with regards to deep religious symbolism because you see that echoed in many stories as well so I think the clearest representation is0:06:01probably Christ and Satan that's the closest to a pure archetype although there's in the old Egyptian stories there's Osiris and Seth or Horus and0:06:11Seth and Seth is a precursor to Satan etymologically so it's a very very common motif and so that's what happens0:06:20again in Rebecca's womb is that this thing this idea is played out right away and the two two twins are actually what0:06:30would you call it there they have a superordinate destiny because one of them is destined to become the father of0:06:39Israel and of course that's a pinnacle moment in the Old Testament obviously and arguably a pinnacle moment in human0:06:48history now you know degree to which the stories in the Old Testament actually constitute what we would consider empirical history as a matter of debate but it doesn't matter in some sense0:06:59because as I mentioned I think before in this lecture series know there are there are forms of fiction that are met a true0:07:09which means that they're not necessarily about a specific individual although I generally think they are based on the life of specific individuals it's the0:07:18simplest theory but who knows right but they're they're more real than reality itself because they abstract out the0:07:27most relevant elements of reality and present them to you and that's why you watch fiction you know you don't you want you want your fiction boiled down right you want to boil down to the0:07:37essence that's what makes good fiction and that essence is something that's truer than then plain old truth if it's handled well and so you know if you0:07:48watch a Shakespeare play half a lifetime of events can go by in a Shakespeare play and it covers you know a wide range0:07:57of scenes and so on and and so it's it's cut and edited and compressed all at once but because of that it blasts you with with a kind of emotional and0:08:07ethical force that just the mere videotaping of someone's daily life it wouldn't even wouldn't even come close to approximating so then this motif of0:08:20the hostile brothers that's a that's a deep deep archetypal truth and raychel0:08:32two nations are in thy womb and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels and one people shall be stronger than the other and the elder shall serve the younger and so there's a0:08:41inversion there right because as we've discussed historically speaking and traditionally speaking it's the elder0:08:51son that to whom the disproportionate blessings flow there's some truth in that too even more0:09:02what would you say more empirically iq tends to decrease as the number of children in the family increase the younger the old is the smartest generally speaking it0:09:13isn't clear why that is but it might be that they get more attention and who knows so those of you who are younger can be very unhappy about that fact now0:09:23Jacob okay so there's another there's another plotline here too because Abraham and0:09:33and Rebecca are at odds at sorry Isaac and Rebecca are at odds about the children right so there's a there's an0:09:44eatable twist to it too because well Isaac is allied with Esau who turns out to be the hunter type so he's your basic0:09:53rough-and-tumble character you know and he's kind of a wild looking guy he'll Harry and he likes to be outside he lives in tents he likes to hunt he's a0:10:02man's man that's one way of thinking about it whereas Jacob dwells in tents you know he doesn't go outside much he's more well maybe he's more introverted but he's certainly this sort of kid0:10:12adolescent say who hangs around home and it there's some intimation that he's his mud well he's clearly his mother's favorite and with all the advantages and0:10:22I suppose disadvantage does go along with that and Isaac and Rebecca don't see eye-to-eye about who should have predominance among the sons and Rebecca0:10:33is quite complicit with Jacob in inverting the social order so the first thing that happens that's crooked is0:10:43that Esau comes in from hunting and he's you know maybe he's been out for a number of days and he's ravenous and0:10:52he's kind of an impulsive guy doesn't really seem to think about the long term very much and Jacob was cooking some lentil stew and Esau I want some of it0:11:04and Jacob refuses and and then says that he'll trade his his birthright for it and Esau agrees which is a bad deal0:11:16right it's a bad deal and so you you could say that Esau actually deserves what's coming to him although0:11:25at minimum you'd have to think of them both as being equally culpable it's a nasty trick and so that's Jacob's first trick and0:11:35then the second trick is that it's later and Isaac is old and blind and you know0:11:44close to death and it's time for him to bestow a blessing on his sons which is a very important event apparently among these ancient people and Esau again is0:11:57out hunting and Rachel dress dress is Jacob up in a hairy it puts a goat skin on his arm so he's kind of hairy like Esau and dresses him and Esau is closed0:12:07so he smells like he's so and Isaac tells Esau to go out and hunt him up some some venison I think it is and0:12:17which is a favorite of his and Rebekah has Jacob cook up a couple of goat kids and serve that to Isaac and play the0:12:27role of Esau and so he does that it's pretty net damn nasty really all things considered you know to play a trick like that both on your brother and on your0:12:37blind father and the inclusion with your mother it's not the sort of thing that's really designed to promote a lot of familial harmony and so especially0:12:47because you've already screwed him over in a big way once you know you'd think you'd think that would be sufficient so anyways he's successful and Esau loses0:12:58his father's blessing and so that Jacob ends up really in the position of the firstborn and it's quite interesting because you know God tells Rachel that0:13:07Jacob is going to be the dominant twin and you'd think again with God's blessing or at least the prophecy that Jacob would end up being a good guy but0:13:16he's certainly not presented that way to begin with which is also quite interesting given that he's the eventual founder of Israel and it's another indication of the realism of these old0:13:26stories you know and it's it's quite amazing to me it's always been quite amazing to me how unpretty fight these stories have remained you know because0:13:35you'd think that if you're even the least bit sinned especially if you had the kind of Marxist religion is the opiate of the masses kind of viewpoint which which is0:13:44a credible viewpoint you know although it's wrong but it's correct well I I think it's a shallow I think it's a shallow interpretation and not part of0:13:53the reason I think it's a shallow interpretation is because the stories would be a lot prettier if that was the case these characters wouldn't have this strange realistic moral ambiguity about0:14:05them you know if you're gonna feed people a fantasy then it you want it to be like a Harlequin novel or or our greeting card or something like that you0:14:15don't want it to be a story that's full of betrayal and deceit and murder and mayhem and genocide and all of that if that just doesn't seem all that0:14:24what would you say calming I guess would be the right right answer so anyways Jacob gets away with this but Esau is not happy and and Jacob is quite0:14:35convinced that he might kill him and I think that was a reasonable fear because he saw was a tough guy and he was used to being outside and he knew how to hunt and he knew how to kill and he actually0:14:45wasn't very happy about getting seriously screwed over by his you know stay-at-home younger brother twice and so Jacob runs off and goes to visit his0:14:55uncle and on the way and this is a very interesting part of this story he stops and to sleep and he takes a stone for a0:15:05pillow and then he has this vision it's called a dream but the context makes it look like a vision of a ladder reaching up to heaven and with angels moving up0:15:17and down the the ladder let's say and there's some representations of that I showed you some of them the last time we met but I'll read it to you first he0:15:27lighted upon a certain place and Ty read there all night because the Sun was set and he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillows and lay down in that place to sleep and he0:15:36dreamed and beheld a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it and behold the Lord stood above it and said0:15:46I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father and the god of Isaac land whereon thou liest to thee I will give it and to thy seed and thy seed0:15:56shall be as the dust of the earth and thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and the south so that lays out the canonical directions right so now there's a center0:16:05with the canonical directions like the thing that you see you know that little symbol you see on maps it's the same thing that symbolically placed upon the earth so a center has been established0:16:15with radiating well with with what with with directional lines radiating from it so it establishes as a place and in the0:16:27end I seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed so that's pretty good news for Jacob and it's not self-evident why God is rewarding him for running away after screwing over his brother but0:16:37that seems to be what happens and so here's a couple of representations classic representations the one on the right is William Blake is what I0:16:46particularly like you know and Blake assimilates God with the Sun and with light right so that's quite a common0:16:57mythological idea that that God is associated with light and the day behold0:17:08I am with thee and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest and will bring me again into this land for I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of and Jacob0:17:17awaked out of his sleep and he said surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not and he was afraid which is exactly the right response and said how0:17:26dreadful is this place it is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven and Jacob rose up early in the morning and took the stone that he had put for his pillows and set it up0:17:36for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it and that's that's a more important thing than you think and we'll go into that a little bit more deeply because up0:17:45to this point in this story there isn't anything really there isn't anything that's really emerged to mark a sacred space right there's no there's no cathedral there's0:17:54no Church there's nothing like that but here's this idea that emerges that you can mark the center of something that and that's important and you mark it with a stone0:18:03and stones a good way to mark things that that are important because the stone is permanent right and we mark things with stones now like we mark graves with stones for example because0:18:13we want to make a memory and to carve something into stone to carve a stone and then to carve something into stone is to make a memory and to use stone is to make a memory because stone is0:18:22permanent and to set it up right is to to indicate a center and so that's what happens and pours oil on the top of it which is kind of offering and he called0:18:33the name of that place Bethel but the name of the city was called Las at the first and Jacob vowed a vow saying if God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go and will give me0:18:43bread to eat and raiment to put on then a tenth of what I earned I will give him0:18:54I missed that that's interesting too because now there's a transformation of sacrifice right because until that point0:19:03sacrifices have had been pretty concretize dit was the burning of something whereas here all of a sudden it's the offering of of productive labor per se0:19:15like a tithe because it tithe is a form of sacrifice and so there's an abstraction of the idea of sacrifice no sacrifice it's really important that the idea of sacrifice gets abstracted right0:19:26because it should be abstracted to the point where it's it's used the way that we use it today which is you know we make sacrifices to get ahead and everyone understands what that means but0:19:37the sacrifices are generally some combination of psychological and and and practical so we're not acting them out we're precisely we're not dramatizing0:19:48them at ritualizing and we actually act them out in our in the covenant that we make with the future and we do that well unless we're extraordinarily impulsive0:19:57and aimless in our lives and have really no conception whatsoever of the future and are likely to sacrifice the future for the present which is it what he saw does right then we make sacrifices and0:20:10you got to think like the idea of making sacrifices to make the future better is an extraordinarily difficult lesson to learn it took people god only knows how long0:20:19to learn that you know like we have no idea it's not something that animals do easily chimpanzees don't store leftover0:20:29meat you know they just and neither do wolves they just a wolf can eat about thirty pounds of meat in one sitting and that's that's where the idea of wolfing it down comes from they're not hiding it0:20:39saving it for later you know they can't do that so they can't sacrifice the present for the future so this is a big deal that this that this happens now I0:20:49want to tell you a little bit about the idea of the pillar because it's it's an unbelievably deep idea and it Orient's0:20:58us in ways that we still don't it's still orienting us in ways that we don't understand and in fact it's actually the mechanism by which we're oriented or and0:21:09if it's lacking then we become disoriented and so I'll show you some pictures and describe them first okay so first of all there's a walled city so0:21:19let me tell you that you could think about that as an archetypal human habitation maybe it's a reflection of something like a fire in the middle of0:21:28the plain or the forest or the jungle for that matter although it's kind of hard to get a fire going there imagine a fire ringed around with logs and perhaps0:21:38ringed around with dwellings right so the fire is in the center and the fire defines the center and then as you move away from the fire you move out into the darkness right so the fire is light and0:21:49communion and safety and as you move away from the fire you move out into the darkness and what's terrifying out beyond the perimeter so what's beyond0:21:58the perimeter is terrifying you can feel that if you go camping somewhere that's wild you know you're pretty damn happy especially if the wolves are howling you're pretty damn happy to be sitting0:22:07by the fire because you can see there the fire keeps the animals away and you know if you do wander into the bush into the darkness then you're on alert and0:22:17you know you're predator detection systems are on alert and so you could think about the classical human habitation as two places one where your0:22:27predator detection system isn't on alert another where your predator textured detection system is alert on alert and you could think about that roughly as0:22:36the distinction between explored territory and unexplored territory and really the the founding of a place is precisely this is a lot of this I got0:22:46from reading your chair le ah de the founding of a place is precisely the definition of a explored center set against the unexplored periphery and you0:22:57know what's interesting about that so you can kind of think about that with regards to the walled city right everything in the wall is cosmos and everything outside the wall is chaos and0:23:09you know but it also extends to the conceptual realm because imagine that you're the master of a field of study and so that's an interesting metaphor0:23:19because a field is a geographical metaphor right and if in the center of the field are those things that everyone knows really well the axioms that0:23:29everyone abides by in the field and then as you move towards the fringes you get to work towards the unknown towards the frontier of the discipline and as you0:23:40become expert you move from the center to the frontier and so then you're on the border when you're when you're when you're a scholar a competent school0:23:49you're on the border between the unexplored or the explored and unexplored and you're trying to further that border so even if you're just doing this abstractly it's the same thing and0:23:59it's a reflection of the fact that every human environment concrete or abstract it makes no difference0:24:08recapitulates the cosmos chaos dichotomy or the order chaos dichotomy and that's why in Taoism for example it's the union0:24:18of chaos and order that constitutes being itself and that you stand on the border between chaos and order because that's the proper place to be to orderly0:24:27to much in the explored you're not learning anything too much out there where the Predators lurk then you're frozen with terror and neither of those0:24:37positions are desirable so and that's what you know and so you think and this is a concur reality obviously as well as a0:24:46psychological reality there were reasons for those walls right because inside the walls where all the people like us and so that begs the question what does it0:24:56mean for people to be like us and then outside the wall there rose all those people because they were the worst forms of predators because people are actually0:25:06the worst forms of predators who aren't like us and the wall is there to draw a distinction between like us and not like us and so and that was a matter of life0:25:17and death if you can tell that because I mean look at those walls they had to build those by hand and you know you do see walled cities that have three rings0:25:26of walls so these people were terrified but not so terrified as the people who built three walls they were really terrified and they had their reasons so0:25:37okay so now there's an idea that's that's reflected in the Jacob's Ladder0:25:48story that the center where you put the pillar is also the place where heaven and earth touch and so that's that's a0:25:59complicated idea I think that you can you know I'm trying to look at these stories from a psychological perspective and so then you could say that that's a0:26:08symbolic place where the lowest and the highest come together and so it's a place where earthly being stretches up0:26:17to the highest possible ethical abstraction and that's the center because one of the things that defines us say as opposed to them is that we're0:26:27all united within a certain ethic that's what makes us the same this is a complicated line of reasoning and but0:26:39I'll go back to it after I show you some more pictures but so that's that's the first idea is that the center is the place where the lowest and the highest0:26:48touch simultaneously and so you could say that in some sense it specifies the aim of a group of people that's another way you know if you get together with0:26:57people make a group even at work you group yourself around a project and that unites you and it unites you because you all have the same aim you're all0:27:06pointing to the same thing and that makes you the same in some ways because if you're after the same thing I am then the same things are going to be important to you that are important to0:27:15me and the same things are going to be negative to you that are negative to me because our emotions work out that way and that means I can instantly predict you I know how you're going to behave0:27:24and so our aim which is basically our ethical aim it's because we're aiming at something better at least in principle we're aiming at something better so our0:27:33ethical aim that unites our perceptions and that's what aligns our emotions and so that sort of begs the question if you're going to build a community around what aim should the community congregate0:27:44okay so the idea here is that the center of the community is the pillar that unites heaven and earth so it unites the lowest with the highest so there's some intimation of the idea that it's the0:27:54highest that unites the community okay and so keep that in mind and that's a very old idea as well that's the idea of0:28:04the axis mundi which is the center pole that unites heaven and earth it's an unbelievably old idea tens of thousands of years old it might even stretch back0:28:13to whatever our archaic memories quasi memories I don't know how what you would describe them archetypal memories of our0:28:22excessively old ancestry and trees when the tree itself was in fact the center of the world and that it was ringed by snakes and chaos and so well we have no0:28:34idea how old these ideas are but they're very very old and evolution is a conservative business once it builds a gadget then it builds new things on top0:28:44of that gadgets like a medieval town right the center of the town is really old and new newer areas of the town get built around it but the center is still0:28:54really old and that's what we're like you know our platforms like our our basic physiological structure this this0:29:03skeletal body is some tens of millions of years old or older than that if you think about vertebrates it's much older than that and that's all conserved so everything's0:29:15built on top of everything else alright so there there's a kind of a classic town and there's the idea I showed you this is Scandinavian World Tree same0:29:25idea at unites heaven and earth and around the roots of that tree are snakes that eat this tree constantly so that's the idea that there's stability but0:29:34there's constant transformation around that stability and at the same time the snakes are knowing in the roots there's streams that are nourishing it so it's0:29:44sort of it's sort of an echo of the idea that life depends on death and renewal constantly because your cells are dying and being renewed constantly right if0:29:53they are just proliferating then you have cancer if they're just dying then you die it you have to get the balance between death and life exactly right so0:30:02that you can actually live which is also a very strange thing so and that tree is something that reaches from the bottom layers of being maybe the microcosm all0:30:12the way to the macrocosm that's the idea anyways so then there's okay so there's there's Jacob and his and his pillar0:30:22he's got this idea that you can mark the center with this stone like it sort of symbolizes what he was laying on when he dreamt but now he's got this idea you put something erect and it marks the0:30:32center and it symbolizes his vision of the highest good something like that and the promise that's been made to him and then this is an Egyptian obelisk the0:30:43pyramid on top of it that's in Paris it was taken from Luxor and it put in Paris and so that's a much more sophisticated0:30:54instance of the same idea okay and there was a Stone Age cultures across Eurasia that put up these huge obelisks everywhere these huge like the0:31:04Stonehenge is a good example of that although it's it's very sophisticated and there are also markers of places we don't know exactly what their function is but they're very much akin to this0:31:14some permanent marker of place there's a good one so that's in st. Peters and I really like this one because you can see0:31:23the echoes of jacob's vision for the establishment of a territory there right you've got the obelisk in the middle and0:31:33then you've got the directions radiating from the center and of course save Peters this is the st. Peter's Basilica in Rome which is an absolutely0:31:42unbelievable place it's just jaw-dropping and so there's the Cathedral at the back of it and then there's this circle of pillars that0:31:51surrounds it you can just see them a little bit on on the middle left there that goes all the way around that entire enclosure and you know very large number0:32:02of people can gather there and then so that pillar marks the center and that would be the center of Catholicism essentially that's what that represents right the the symbolic center of0:32:12Catholicism although you could make the case that the cathedral is the center it doesn't really matter they're very close together and it's it's half a dozen of one and six or the other and then here's0:32:23another representation of the same idea right is that this is why people don't like the flag to be burned you know because conservative people see the flag as the sacred thing that binds0:32:34people together and so they're not happy when that sacred thing is destroyed even if it's destroyed in the name of protest whereas the people who burn flags think0:32:43well there are times to dramatize the idea that the center has been corrupt and you can demonstrate that by putting it to the torch you know as a0:32:53representation that that this that the corrupt center now has to be burned and transformed and the thing is they're0:33:02both right they're both right all the time because the center is absolutely necessary and is sacred and is almost always also corrupt and in need of0:33:11reparation that's also an archetypal idea and and that's a useful thing to know because you know it it's easy for young people in particular to think that0:33:20well the world's going to hell in a handbasket and it's the pot fault of the last generation they've left us this terrible mess and you know we've feeling0:33:29pretty betrayed about that and now we have to clean it up it's like yeah yeah people have been thinking that for like thirty five thousand years it's not new and the reason it's not new is because0:33:38it's always true you know what you're handed is a sacred center with flaws always always that's partly because it's the creation of the dead right and the0:33:49dead can't see and they can't communicate and so they're not in touch with the present and so what they've bequeathed to you apart from the fact that it might actually be corrupt which0:33:58is a slightly different thing is at least blind in dead and so what the hell can you expect from something that's blind and dead you know you're lucky if it just doesn't stomp you out of0:34:07existence so so that's a lovely photograph obviously and that's the establishment of a new centre then the0:34:16the centre can be a cathedral too and often is of course in in classic towns European towns in particular although0:34:25it's not only European towns that are like this there there's a center that's made out of stone so that would be the Cathedral and it's got the highest tower on on top of the tower there's often a0:34:35cross and that's the symbolic centre so people are are drawn together around whatever the cross represents now that the cross obviously represents a center0:34:46because it's an X right x marks the spot so the centre of the cross is the center and then the Cathedral is often in a cross shape which also marks the center0:34:55and then in the cathedral there's a dome often and that's the sky and that's that ladder that reaches from earth to heaven0:35:04so it's a recapitulation of the same idea so and people are drawn to that Center and the centre is the symbol of0:35:13what unites them and what unites them is the faith that the cathedral is the embodiment of and you think well what0:35:22does the faith mean and again we're approaching this psychologically and what it means is that we everyone who's a member of that group accepts the transcendent ideal of the group now the0:35:33thing is if you're the member of a group you accept the transcendent ideal of the group that's what it means to be a member of a group so if you're in a work team and you're all working on a project0:35:42what you've essentially done is decided that you're going to make the goal unquestionable right I mean you might argue about the details but if0:35:51are tasked with something you know here's a job for you ten people organize yourself around the job you can argue about how you're going to do the job but you can't argue about the job then the0:36:01group falls apart and so there's an act of faith in some sense the reason that the act of faith is necessary is because0:36:10it's very very difficult to specify without error what that central aim should be given that there's any number of aims right and it's a very very difficult thing to figure out and this0:36:20is something we're gonna do a little bit tonight is like what should the aim be around which a group would congregate you know that so so especially if it's a0:36:29large group and it's a large group that has to stay together across very large swathes of time and the group is incredibly diverse you know what0:36:39possible kind of ideal could unite a large group of diverse people across a very large stretch of time that's a really really hard question and I think0:36:48part of the way that question has been answered is it's been answered symbolically and in images because it's so damn complicated that it's almost impossible to articulate so but0:36:59obviously you need to have a center around which everyone can unite because if you don't then everyone's at odds with one another like if I don't know what you're up to and you don't know0:37:08what he's up to we have no we're just strangers and we don't know that our ethics match at all then the probability that we're going to be able to exist harmoniously decreases0:37:18rapidly to zero and that's obviously just no good that's a state of total chaos so we can't have that it's it's not possible to exist without a central0:37:30ideal it's not possible and it's deeper than that it's deeper than that partly because it's I don't know I'll try to0:37:39get this right this is the sort of thing that I was arguing with sam harris about you see your category system is a0:37:48product of your aims that's the thing like if you have a set of facts at hand the facts don't tell you how to categorize the facts because there's too0:37:57damn many facts there's a trillion facts and there's no way without imposing some ape I already order on them of determining0:38:07how it is that you should order them so how do you order them well that's easy you decide what you're aiming at now how do you do that well I'm not answering0:38:16that question at the moment I'm just saying that in order to organize those facts you need a name and then the aim instantly organizes the facts into those0:38:25things relevant to the aim tools let's say those things that get in the way and a very large number of things that you don't have to pay attention to at all right it excludes Verte like if you're0:38:37working on an engineering problem you don't have to worry about practicing medicine in your neighborhood you don't0:38:46there's a bunch of like if you're focusing on a particular what would you say any any job any any set of skills0:39:00implies that you're good at a small set of things and then not good at an incredibly large number of other skills it simplifies things and so you can use0:39:09your aim as the basis of a category structure and so you also have to keep that in mind because what it means is as far as I can tell that what it means is0:39:18that your category system itself which is what structures your perceptions is actually dependent on the ethics of your aim it's directly it's a moral thing0:39:29it's directly dependent on your aim and that's a stunning idea if it happens to be true it's not how people think about thinking we don't think that way we like0:39:39we think that we think deterministically let's say or that we think empirically or that we think rationally and none of that appears to be the case what we do0:39:48is we pause it a valid aim and then we organize the world around the aim and there's plenty of evidence from that in in in psychological studies of perception right that that does look0:39:58like how the the perceptual systems work mostly they ignore because the world is too complicated they focus on a small set of phenomena deemed relevant to0:40:09whatever the aim is and then of course the aim is problematic again it's complex because the aim I have has to be a name that some of you at0:40:19or at least don't object to because otherwise I'm not gonna get anywhere with my damn aim it has to actually be implementable in the world it has to be sustainable across at least some amount0:40:29of time it can't kill me like it's really hedged in this aim it's it isn't any old thing there's hardly any things that it can be so you know Jacob's aim0:40:41for example in undermining Esau almost gets him killed and you can understand why that's the other thing you think well that that was a nasty bit of work0:40:51you can understand Esau's rage it's even though we're separated from the people in these stories by what four thousand years three thousand years something0:41:00like that you know in immediately why everyone feels the way they do at least once you understand the context of the story that none of that's mysterious in0:41:09the least so so there's the church and the church is underneath the cross right and so that's st. Peter's Basilica and0:41:19so there's the cross on the globe on top of the Basilica and then there's the cross on the obelisk as well and so what0:41:30that means is that and this is where things get insanely complicated is that the center is defined by whatever the0:41:39cross represents now the cross represents a crossing point geographically it's it's certainly that the cross probably represents the body to some degree but then the cross also0:41:50represents the place of suffering obviously and more importantly it represents the place of voluntary suffering transcended I'm speaking0:42:00psychologically right not theologically that's what it represents and so you might say so here's the idea behind putting down the obelisk with the cross0:42:10and saying that that's the center so that's the thing that everyone's aiming at and so the the idea would be well if you're going to be a member of the group defined by this obelisk then what you do0:42:20is accept your position at the center of suffering voluntarily and therefore transcend it that's the idea and that is0:42:29one hell of an idea it really is man that is a killer idea because it's actually a signal it's a really clear signal of psychological health you know because0:42:39one of the things you do if you're a clinical psychologist and someone is paralyzed by fear is what you do is you break their fears down into relatively0:42:48manageable bits and then you have them voluntarily confront their fears and it might also be things that they're disgusted by it's a if they have obsessive compulsive disorder0:42:58but it produces very strong negative emotion whatever it is and then you have them voluntarily confront whatever it is that produces that overwhelming negative emotion and that makes them stronger0:43:09that's what happens it doesn't make them less afraid it makes them more courageous and stronger and that is not the same thing it's seriously not it0:43:18doesn't decrease the fear it increases the courage and so that's a mind-boggling idea and it's deeper you0:43:27know one of the things that's really interesting about these archetypal ideas is that and maybe it's partly because of the hyperlink nature of the Bible that's part of it but it's not the whole thing0:43:36is that no matter how deep you dig into them you'll never get to the bottom you know you hit a bottom you think god that's so unbelievably profound and then if you excavate a little underneath that0:43:46you find something else that's even more profound and you think wow that's got to be the bottom and then you dig under that's like there's no bottom you can just keep digging down well as far as I0:43:55can tell you can keep digging down layer after layer and we'll talk a little bit about more a little more about what the cross signifies as the center because0:44:05you see what people were trying to figure out is what is it that we need to unite under right what's the proper thing to unite under I can give you another example so in the Mesopotamian0:44:16societies the Emperor you know who was more or less an an absolute monarch he lived inside what was essentially a0:44:25walled city and the god of the Mesopotamians was mardik and Marduk was the figure who had eyes all the way0:44:34around his head and he spoke magic words who is very attentive and very articulate and it was Marduk who went out and confronted the goddess of chaos the dragon of chaos and cut her into0:44:44pieces and made up the world okay so you can kind of understand what that means so mardik goes beyond the frontier into the place of predatory0:44:53chaos and encounters the thing that's terrifying and then make something productive out of it so it's a hero myth and an mardik is elected to the position0:45:04of preeminent God by all the other Mesopotamian gods because he manages that so the the mardik idea emerges up the Holy dominance hierarchy and hits0:45:15the pinnacle so that and god only knows how long that took it would be the amalgamation of many tribes and then that the what the the distillation of0:45:26all the tribal myths to produce this emergent story of what constitutes Tok God and then the job of the Emperor was to act out Marduk that's what gave him0:45:36sovereignty so the reason that he was the center around which people organized themselves wasn't because he was when he was being a proper Emperor it wasn't0:45:45because there was something super special about him like the power didn't exactly reside in him which is a really useful thing to separate right you want the power which is why it's kind of nice0:45:54to have a symbolic monarch you get the symbolic power separated from the personality power right because otherwise they get conflated that's what0:46:03happened in Rome it's a very you know you can see it tending to happen now and then in the u.s. like with the Kennedy dynasty's and that sort of thing so the idea was the Emperor had sovereignty as0:46:14long as he was acting out Marduk properly and going out into the chaos and cutting it into pieces and making order that was his job so they used to take him outside the city on the new0:46:25year's festival and strip him of all his Emperor garments and humiliate him and then force him to to confess all the0:46:36ways that year he hadn't been a good Marduk so he wasn't a good ruler and so that was supposed to clue him in and wake him up right and then they would ritually reenact the Battle of Marduk0:46:47against time out the chaos monster using statues and then if that all went well then the Emperor would go back in and0:46:56the city would be renewed for another year and we still have echoes of that in our New Year's celebration right it's the same idea that's echoed down all those all those centuries thousands of years so it says0:47:07such a staggeringly brilliant idea right because so part of the idea is that the thing that's sovereign so that's the pillar at the center that that everyone0:47:16gathers around is at least in part the thing that courageously goes out into the unknown and make something useful out out of it for the community so0:47:28that's very very smart it's very smart so this is another example of a center so these this is the flag this is the0:47:37Union Jack and so it's made up of a bunch of crosses right and so the first cross the English cross that's the flag of st. George that's the flag of England0:47:46and st. what is st. George do slaves the dragon exactly same idea right so safe George patron saint of England goes out and slays the dragon and frees the0:47:56Virgin from the grip of the dragon same idea right so that's the center and then the second cross is called a saltier0:48:06but it's another crucifix so it's the cross on which st. Andrew was crucified says so it's the same idea it's that the center is the center of suffering0:48:15voluntarily undertaken cuz Saint Andrew was a martyr and then st. Patrick is the third cross what did st. Patrick do in Ireland chased out all the snakes right0:48:27so it's the same thing right and so the flag of Great Britain is the combination of all of these three crosses that defines the center and that's what the0:48:36flag is so that symbolizes all of that so that's you know completely mind-boggling so and there's more about0:48:46st. Patrick - so he banishes the snakes after a 40-day fast and so that's an allusion to the 40 years that Moses spends in the desert and also the 400:48:56days that Christ fasts in the New Testament and his walking stick when he plants it grows into a tree so that echoes all of this ideas about the0:49:05center that we just described and he also speaks with the ancient Irish ancestors which if you remember is a characteristic of the shamanic rituals where we're so0:49:17in the typical shamanic ritual which seems to be elicited by psychedelic use the shaman dissolved down past their0:49:27bones and then they go up into heaven and speak with the ancestors and then they're introduced into the heavenly kingdom and then the flesh is put back0:49:36on their bones and they come back and tell everybody what happened and that's a repeatable experience right the shamanic tradition is unbelievably0:49:45widespread so all over Europe ancient Europe and Asia and perhaps as far down as South America right it's highly0:49:54conserved and it's out of that tradition in all likelihood that our religious city Asian emerged so and you can see echoes of that here so so back to the0:50:07story of Jacob and his ladder so that I can come again to my father's house in peace then shall the Lord be my god and this stone which I have set for a pillar shall be God's house and of all that0:50:17that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee so that's that's also an echo I would say of the obligation of those who climb the power0:50:28higher hierarchy to attend to those who are at the bottom right because if you think about the tithing as a form of wealth distribution which is essentially0:50:37what it is the part of the ethic that defines the proper moral endeavor that's related to that Center is not to advance0:50:48yourself at the expense of the entire community so if you're if you're fortunate enough so that you can rise in in authority and power and competence0:50:58within the confines of a community you still have a obligation to maintain the structure maintain and further the structure of the community within which0:51:07you rose now that's obvious right because if people didn't do that after a couple of generations the whole thing would fall apart so you know you you you0:51:16it's it's not reasonable to destroy the game that you're winning it's reasonable to strengthen the game that you're winning and so that's another thing0:51:26that also describes the ethic that should allow you to be an active member of the community around which that that gathers around that Center so so so one0:51:38of the things I've learned about the hero mythology that I really really like is so you see this pretty clearly in the figure of Christ but because two things are conjoined in that story but Christ0:51:50is also the here there's two kinds of heroes say there's the hero that goes out into chaos and confronts the dragon of chaos and gathers the the treasure as0:51:59a consequence and then shares it with the community that's that's that's one the other form of hero is the hero who stands up against the corrupt state and0:52:08rattles the foundation of the state has it collapse and then reconstructs it right so because the two great dangers to human beings are unprotected exposure0:52:19to the catastrophes of the natural world and subjugation to tyranny right those are the two major dangers and so a hero is their ultimate hero is the person who0:52:30reconstructs the structure of the state by using the information that he gathered by going out into the unknown that unites them both and so what that0:52:39means here's that here's the rub as far as I can tell so a structure a center has two risks associated with it one is0:52:50that it will degenerate into chaos and the other is that we'll rigidify into tyranny and it'll degenerate into chaos0:52:59even if it just stays doing what it's doing so if it just does exactly what it's doing and it doesn't change it will degenerate because things change and if it doesn't0:53:10change to keep up then it gets farther and farther away from the environment and it'll precipitously collapse and so and then if it just changes willy-nilly0:53:19so that nobody can establish a stable centralized a game then it degenerates into chaos immediately and no one can get along so there's a rule for being0:53:31longing to the community and the rule has to be that you have to act in a manner that sustains and that sustains the community and0:53:40increases its competence that's the fundamental moral obligation for belonging and well and obviously soul right because why would you belong to a0:53:49why would you walk into a clubhouse that was on fire like that's just not smart right if you're gonna be part of the game if you've decided that being part0:53:59of the game is worthwhile you've also taken on the moral you've also decided even if you didn't notice it that you have to work to support that game0:54:09because by deciding to play that game you've said that it's valuable and if it's valuable then obviously you should work to sustain and expand it because0:54:18that's the definition of having a relationship with something that's valuable and so that's the criteria for membership in the community and that's0:54:28partly why if you regard the cross say as the symbol of voluntary suffering you know suffering accept it voluntarily0:54:37something like that which is means that there's another element of that too that's worth thinking about so you know the reason that cane gets so out of hand is because he's suffering and he won't0:54:48accept it he certainly won't accept responsibility for it he's angry and bitter about it and no wonder right I mean we have to be realistic about these sorts of things there you guys all of0:54:58you people are gonna suffer at some point in your life to the point where you're angry and bitter about it I mean there's just absolutely no doubt about that and you're even gonna think well0:55:07it's no bloody wonder that I'm angry and bitter about it everyone would be and things are so god-awful that there's no excuse for them to even exist0:55:17and like that's a powerful argument although I think it's ultimately self-defeating well that's kind of what the story of Cain and Abel that's kind0:55:27of what the story of Cain and Abel what would you say that's the moral of the story of Cain and Abel essentially so0:55:36what that means instead is that even under those conditions of relatively intense suffering you have to accept it voluntarily because otherwise it turns you against being and then you start to0:55:46act in this terrible manner that makes everything worse and it seems to me that there's a contradiction in that if if the reason you're complaining that things are bad then it isn't0:55:57reasonable for you to act in a manner that makes them worse right I mean even if it's no wonder that people do that but it's it's a degenerating game and so0:56:07that's so the the idea part of the idea of the cross and the suffering that it represents is that if you can accept that voluntarily0:56:17regardless of its intensity then you won't become embittered and resentful and vengeful to the point where you pose0:56:27a danger to the stability of the community so or to your own stability for that matter cuz it's you know it might be your own stability the stability of your family the stability0:56:37of the community and the stability of the world it might be all of that and increasingly I think it is all of that so okay so now Jacob we get the second0:56:52part of Jacob story he goes to meet his uncle Lebon and he meets Rachel there0:57:02again by oh well he falls in love and goes to live with levan there are two daughters there Leah as well as Rachel Leah is not a0:57:13particularly attractive person it isn't exactly clear why but the story makes it quite clear she's definitely the least desirable of the two daughters and the0:57:23story makes reference to her eyes and it isn't clear if there's something wrong with her physiologically or if there's something wrong with her attitude it's not obvious but doesn't really matter0:57:32the point is she's the older daughter but she's the less desirable one Jacob stays a month which is the limit of hospitality in in that time if you0:57:44stayed for a month you were welcome but you had to work for your keep I think after about three days something like that which seems rather reasonable and so he stays a month and then he has a0:57:55chat with Lebon and he says he's fallen in love with Rachel by this time and he says I'll stay with you and work for seven years and then all weird Rachel if0:58:06and the band says that's a fine deal and then the seven years passes and there's a wedding ceremony it's quite a long0:58:15thing and the bride is veiled and the bride goes into the tent with with Jacob0:58:25and if I remember the story correctly I haven't looked at it for a month or so rachel is outside the tent speaking but0:58:35leah is inside the tent and so Jacob thinks he's getting married to Rachel but he's actually getting married to Leah and this is it's an inversion a0:58:45because he's in the dark like Isaac was when he fooled Isaac so now it's Jacob's turn to be in the dark and he gets betrayed by his uncle and his0:58:55bride-to-be Rachel and her sister in a manner that's broadly parallel to the trick that he pulled on Esau and so0:59:04there's a karma notion there which I which I'd like you know I mean you might think of karma as a superstitious idea0:59:13but and there are ways of interpreting it that might make it the case but I don't think that's what it is it's that no bad deed goes unpunished it's0:59:24something like that it's like you know maybe you've done something bad to someone and therefore there's part of0:59:33you that feels quite guilty about that hopefully and that part is looking for punishment to set the stage right and0:59:43you might think well no but things are yes unless you're a psychopath that's how things work if you're interested in0:59:52that kind of thing you should read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment because it's the definitive study of that sort of phenomena right because in that book the main protagonist Raskolnikov gets away with murder like1:00:02he does it successfully no one suspects him and he drives himself so crazy with guilt that he basically falls into the1:00:12hands of the police he drives himself into the hands of the police because he can't tolerate what he did it's very it's amazing it's amazing book but anyways the point is he1:00:23Jakub falls prey to the same sort of crookedness that he used to ratchet himself up the ladder and that happens1:00:33far more often in life and people think and it's really not like he can complain about it right not if he has any sense it's like he does he brings Leah out to1:00:42see Lebon and he says what's what's with this sister you know and Lebon basically says to him in our culture it's the1:00:54custom to marry the eldest daughter first which is exactly right and he said well it would bring you know he's rationalizing obviously because he's just screwed over Jacob in a major way1:01:05but it's a little late to take it back that the marriage has been consummated and the ceremony has been complete and all hell would break out if there was1:01:15any attempt to sever the relationship so that's how it is so Leah's married and Jacob has the1:01:26wrong wife so then so this is Jacob there you see on the left he's got the little flowery hat and he's pointing to Leah and he's saying like what what's up1:01:37here and love the band you know Laband 'is tough old goat and he's not really all1:01:47that sad about it in fact you can imagine that he's kinda good so so okay then he has to work another seven years1:01:57and he gains rachel but because god is a tricky character there's another twist in this story Rachel1:02:07turns out not to be very good at having children or Rachel and Jacob turn out not to be very good at having children but Leah she's really good at having1:02:18kids so she provides Jacob with Reuben Simeon Levi or let's leave I believe and Judah and the names of those meanings of1:02:30those names are there Reuben means see a son Simeon means hearing though I think that was the Lord heard my prayer I think that's what that was Levi means joined Judah means praise to1:02:40yahwah and it's Judah from whose tribe Christ arises Judah is essentially promoted to the status of firstborn1:02:49later in the story this is important because Reuben Simeon and Levy all do something reprehensible and so Judah1:02:58gets gets promoted to firstborn and that's partly why in the logic of this narrative that it's from the tribe of1:03:07Judah that Christ arises so so now while this is going on Rachel is like suicidally desperate for children she's1:03:17jealous of her older sister who's rather ill-favored as we pointed out but who seems to be damn good at producing sons and she's really not happy with Jacob1:03:28and so she choose him out and Jacob basically says like what do you want me to do about it I'm not God which is a reasonable response I would say and so1:03:37in her desperation she gives Jacob illa who's her maidservant we've seen that sort of thing happened before and -1:03:47Billa produces two children Dan and Neff Kelly the reason I'm detailing out all these sons it's Gordon because Jacob is the founder of1:03:57Israel and his sons are the founder of the 12 tribes so it's a pivotal moment in the story right it's it's because he's that he's the fundamental patriarch1:04:08of of those who wrestle with God because as we'll see that's what the name Israel means he gets the name Israel you'll see why in a while but but it's you need to1:04:19know these genealogies in this situation because they play an important role in everything that happens afterwards so1:04:28Naphtali is the second and her name or his name means with great wrestling's I have wrestled with my sister right contended with her and have prevailed so1:04:40that gives you some indication of the tension in the household now leah is now past bearing children she gives Jake Jacob her maidservant to1:04:51Zilpah to keep up with her sister I guess and now Zilpah bares to children for Jacob so he's piling up the kids1:05:02left right and center here one of them is named gad good fortune and the other is named Asher happy or blessed so1:05:11there's more rivalry going on between the sisters this is quite an interesting little story so Reuben who's Lea's daughter goes out and looks for1:05:21Mandrake's now Mandrake's have aphrodisiac property so that's a little odd to begin with but it doesn't matter that's what happens and Rachel is Rachel1:05:35wants the Mandrake's because she's still interested in having some children and so she bargains with Leah to give her a night with Jacob in exchange for the Mandrake's and more sons emerge as a1:05:47consequence of that so then Rachel finally gives birth Joseph and Joseph plays a key role in1:05:57the last story in Genesis which I hope we'll get to in the next lecture and then we can close off Genesis that's the plan anyways so now1:06:08Jacob isn't really very happy about the whole arrangement because he he's been there 14 years and he's got two wives it's not too bad but he you know he got1:06:17he the bargain wasn't exactly clean he doesn't really trust la Bannon and there's no reason for him to do so levan was poor before Jacob came Jacob1:06:28turns out to be a very useful person to have around and so he tells Lebon he wants to leave and go back to his home country and that he'll take the speckled1:06:38and spotted cattle the brown sheep and the spotted and speckled goats from the flock and they're in the minority so that's the idea and sola ban or lab and1:06:48takes all those animals out of his flock so there was an idea that the speckled goats and the brown sheep would breed true so if you have two male goat and a1:07:00female goat and they're both speckled they'll have speckled kids that's the theory and the same with brown sheep and so what Lebon does is he takes all the speckled animals out of the flocks gives1:07:11them to his son and they go three days away with them so that Jacob is left with the flock but with no with none of these animals now the idea was that all1:07:20the what newborns were going to be his and so what Lebon is basically done is set it up so that in principle Jacob is going to get nothing for his work so1:07:30that's another time when Jacob experiences betrayal you know it's almost as if God isn't done with reminding him of the magnitude of what1:07:40he did in the past that that's the moral of the story in some sense now there's a weird little twist in the story here so what Jacob does is some sympathetic1:07:49magic and so when the animals are rutting he puts speckled objects in front of them speckled branches and so forth I guess to remind them about what1:07:58they're supposed to be producing something like that and it works and so all these animals that Lebon left are are producing spotted animals like mad1:08:08and so that's I guess God's changed his mind and let Jacob off the hook slightly here so soon he was very wealthy much1:08:19cattle maidservants men servants camels analysis Laban's son sons become jealous and Lebon is outraged well you know obviously there's some competition there1:08:28between Jacob and the sons which is hardly surprising and the blonde played this trick to strip Jacob of all his property and instead he got far more than he was going to get to begin with1:08:37so you can imagine that's been a bit annoying so Jacob thinks he better get out of there so he tells Rachel and Leah and said unto them I see your father's1:08:46countenance that is not toward me as before but the god of my father has been with me and you know with all my power I've served your father and your father1:08:55has deceived me and changed my wages ten times but God so far has suffered him not to hurt me if he said thus the speckled shall be1:09:04thy wages then all the cattle bore speckled and if he said thus the ringstraked shall be thy hire then all the cattle bore ringstraked thus God has taken away the cattle of your father and1:09:14given them to me and they decide to sneak away and they're unhappy with the inheritance lack of inheritance from the man so as they sneak away1:09:23Rachel steals the idols that her father has in his house and it's not exactly obvious why there's a lot of contention about why she's doing that some of them1:09:33is to punish him to bring with her the images of her ancestors you know maybe she's lonesome moving away from home just out of spite to show him that the1:09:42idols were actually powerless for protection to stop her father from divining the route of their escape that last one is the strangest one because1:09:51the idea would be that Lebon would have used some sort of ritual with the idols that would help him infer their escape route and then could chase them so1:10:01anyways that's the range of speculation about that I think it sounds to me mostly like a little act of revenge maybe with a bit of loneliness mixed in1:10:12Laband pursues them but God comes in a dream to tell him to leave Jacob unharmed hmm LaVon catches up with him and reproaches Jacob saying that he1:10:22would have thrown a great party if he would have known that they were going to leave you know he didn't want them to sneak away in the night and you can't tell from the story whether that's true1:10:31or not and you know these people were pretty rough and pulse of I would say and maybe there was a 50% chance of a slaughter and a 50%1:10:40chance of a party who knows I've been to parties like that actually so Laband complains that his gods are gone and1:10:49Jacob says that whoever has them he will have them killed and Rachel who's really quite a sneaky character all things consider basically1:10:58claims that she's having her period and she's sitting on the carpet with all the idols underneath and she can't move and1:11:07so they search everywhere and can't find them and she's like laughing away behind her hand about that sneaky little maneuver but she doesn't die so that's1:11:16probably a good thing so the ban checks everything out checks the camp out and he can't find anything so they reconcile and so that's the1:11:25first reconciliation that Jacob engages in it's sort of like the what would you1:11:37say the karmic dad is being paid that's one way of thinking about it that's so he got punished for his wrongdoing he's learned his lesson perhaps and it's it's1:11:49that's good enough as far as he's concerned you know he got away good enough and they make peace so then the1:12:00next thing that happens as they're travelling is that Jacob was left alone and there wrestled a man man angel God it's not clear we'll go with angel with1:12:14them until the breaking of the day or God and when he saw that he prevailed not against him he touched the hollow of his thigh and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint as he wrestled1:12:23with him and he said let me go for the day breaks and Jacob said I will not let you go unless you bless me and the angel said unto him what is thy name and Jacob1:12:32said Jacob1:12:44and the angel said thy name shall no more be called Jacob so the supplanter right the the overthrow ur with that kind of intonation of or implication of1:12:55crookedness but Israel which means Hui who wrestles or strives successfully with God for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men1:13:05and has prevailed that's quite a story I like it's it's I don't know I don't know exactly what to make of it there's obviously a symbolic level of meaning1:13:14which is that that is what human beings do in some sense is they they wrestle I would say they wrestle with the divine even with the concept of the divine for1:13:24that matter and but the question is do they prevail like it's got an odd thing that Jacob actually seems to win this1:13:34battle right or at least he wins it enough so that whoever he's wrestling this divine figure that he's wrestling is willing to bestow a blessing on him I1:13:43guess maybe that's a testament to his courage it's something like that maybe it's an indication that he has paid for his sins sufficiently so that he's sort1:13:53of back on the moral high ground but but I think it's really telling that the transformation of the name from Jacob to Israel and that what Israel means is he1:14:03who wrestles with God or who struggles with God and perhaps successfully but it's also so interesting that he actually emerges victorious you know you1:14:13wouldn't necessarily think that that would be a possibility especially given you know God's rather hot-headed nature in the Old Testament you don't wanna mess with him too much but but Jacob1:14:24does it successfully but even more importantly is the idea that whatever Israel constitutes which would be to say the land that Jacob founds is actually1:14:34composed of those who wrestle with God I think that's an amazing idea because it also seems to me to shed some light on1:14:43perhaps what was meant by belief in those days you know like I've often thought of Rett of marriage as a wrestling match right if you're lucky1:14:52the person that you marry is someone you contend with it's not exactly I don't think it's exactly it's not tranquil precisely you know you1:15:01might have noticed that some of you and but but the thing is if you have something to contend against then that strengthens you and and that's actually1:15:12better than having nothing to contend against and so Jakob is the person who's also strengthened by the necessity of this contending and that seems to be the1:15:23proper relationship with God or the angel is that contending the battling right rather than some sort of kind of loose weak statement of belief I mean1:15:36I'm not trying to denigrate that to any great degree it just doesn't seem like the right mode of conceptualization right because human beings are aren't like that were contentious creatures and1:15:48that's actually seems to be something that meets with God's favor in this situation so especially given that that's actually what he names the well the whole kingdom of the chosen people1:15:58is the idea is that that's composed of those who contend with God so that's that's a hell of an idea that that's for1:16:07sure and Jacob asked him and said tell me I pray thee thy name and he said wherefore is it thou dost ask after my1:16:17name so there's no that's not happening and he blessed him there and Jacob called the place of the name of the place Peniel for I or penny'll for I've seen God face to face and my life is1:16:27preserved and he passed over Peniel the Sun rose upon him and he halted upon his thigh now Jacob does walk away it1:16:36injured from this right so he has a permanent limp after that and so that's also an indication of just how dangerous that contention actually is like he gets1:16:46blast he wins but he doesn't get away scot-free and so now so Jacob goes back to Esau and he's terrified even though1:16:57it's been 14 years he thinks maybe his heart headed brother hasn't calmed down yet and he has good reason to think that I would say1:17:07so he sends messengers to Esau who then sets out with 400 men and so Jacob is not very happy with this whole idea and he breaks his people into two bands so1:17:17that maybe half of them cannot be killed and then he takes from his large flocks a bunch of animals and a bunch of servants and he sends them out to meet1:17:26he saw basically to say look I'm I'm I'm a jerk and sorry about the whole birthright thing and and here's some1:17:35animals and you know maybe maybe that's the beginnings of an apology it's something like that and so but he's not very convinced that that's actually1:17:45going to work but he saw who actually turns out to perhaps have matured in the interim perhaps that's one way of thinking about it meets Jacob and says1:17:57that just seeing him is enough but Jacob insists that he takes the gift and Esau accepts and which is probably a wise thing because even if he saw is 95%1:18:09convinced that just seeing his brother is enough there's probably 5% of him that's still really not all that happy and so you have to be careful you know1:18:18when you say that you forgive someone because there might be a part of you that really doesn't that really needs something else before you can actually say okay look fine you know and you1:18:29don't want to fool yourself about that because that 5% that hasn't been completely convinced will find its voice at some point and then maybe undermine1:18:38the whole reconciliation process you don't want to think that you're any better than you are or any nicer than you are it's not helpful and so he saw a1:18:47smart I think so while Jacob smart to say no no like thanks a lot but take the damn goats and Jacob and Esau is smart1:18:58enough to accept that and he might do that maybe - you know - please Jacob but also I think so that there really is the1:19:07possibility of establishing peace because hypothetically the gift that's being offered is of sufficient magnitude to erase the debt of the loss of the1:19:17birthright it's something like that right it's it's it's it's it's the payment of the real debt and Esau said what meanest thou by all1:19:29this drove which I met and Jacob said these are to find grace in the sight of my Lord and Esau says I have enough brother keep thou keep that that thou1:19:38hast unto thyself and Jacob said and1:19:48this is interesting statement I think no I pray you if if I have now found grace in thy sight take the present at my hand for therefore I have seen thy face as1:19:59though I had seen the face of God and now was pleased with me and so that's so he's he's taking the Honorable judgment1:20:08of his brother because it is honorable because he saw did get betrayed so he has a right to be standing in judgment and he equates that judgment with with1:20:19what would you say with the highest of virtues it's appropriate judgment and so he wants to make complete amends to Esau1:20:29as if Esau as a representative of the divine element of justice and I guess that's convincing to ease so it's quite1:20:38a thing to say you know that I need to be reconciled to you because that would simultaneously reconcile me with God it's like it's crucial this is between1:20:47us but it's there's a higher principle at stake that's vital and I think that is the case with betrayal that's very frequently the case because if you betray someone you really have violated1:20:57you've deeply violated what can only be called a sacred trust it's the right terminology for that take it I pray the my blessing that is brought to thee1:21:07because God has dealt graciously with me and because I have enough and he urged him and he took it so you know the story seems to be something like well Jacob1:21:18was kind of an arrogant crooked deceitful character maybe / impressed with his own ability he thought it was1:21:27pretty amusing to pull a fast trick or two on his brother then he ran off which is not all that brave and then he got walloped of a lot1:21:37and perhaps learned something and then when he came back you know he was a different person and so that's a that's1:21:47a reasonable story and you know he he has to repent completely of about what he did before he can rectify the situation1:21:58properly and he's willing to do that so that's an interesting idea too because it's it's it's the early reflection of1:22:07the idea that it is if you do something wrong in the past a that you can learn from it right so that you're actually capable of learning and be that you can1:22:16set the balance right in the present those are very optimistic ideas you know because you might say well once you've committed some sort of crime that's it1:22:27there's no hope for you but that's pretty rough because the probability that you've done unethical things at some point in your life is a hundred percent and so if there was no way of1:22:38setting the balance right after that then everybody would be doomed so so1:22:48then the story gets rough again Jacob settles in Shalem Shalem Dinah his daughter goes looking around for friends Shechem the son of Hamor lays with her1:22:58and then once her for his wife he actually has the order reversed there that turns out to be a problem Jacob hears of this the fathers talk and1:23:08so they make an agreement the agreement is is that if all of hammers men including hammer and his son are1:23:17circumcised so that's the proper offering I guess that brings them into the familial fold and indicates that they're willing to make a sacrifice to1:23:26do so especially after you know Shechem put the cart before the horse let's say the man of hammer or circumcised they agree to do so that turns out to be a1:23:36big mistake so well they're laying around the next day suffering madly from the circumcision Simeon and Levi come in1:23:45they sneak in and kill all of them and take their wealth and their women and children that's rough it's rough yeah I guess you guys noticed that a1:23:57so-so at their honor societies right and there's still lots of honor societies in the world and so they don't take kindly1:24:06to what happened to their to their sister although they don't kill her so now it turns out that yeah it says as it1:24:17came to pass on the third day when they were sore the two of the sons of Jacob Simeon and Levi Dinah's brethren took each man his sword and came upon the city boldly and slew1:24:26all the males and they slew hamor and shechem his son with the edge of the sword and took Dinah out of Chekhov's house and went out the sons of Jacob1:24:35came upon the slain and spoiled the city because they had defiled their sister it took the sheep and the oxen and the alysus and that which was in the city and that was which it was in the field1:24:44and all their wealth and all their little ones and their wives took they came captive and spoiled everything else that was in the house and Jacob actually1:24:53turns out not to be very happy about that because he'd met with hammer and they'd like hammered out a deal and that and that's where they were living and so1:25:02he figured well that he was making the best of a bad law let's say and his sons went behind his back and Jacob says to1:25:11Simeon and Levi you have troubled me to make me meat to make me stink among the inhabitants of the land among the Canaanites and the perizzites and I being few in number they shall gather1:25:21themselves now together against me and slay me and I shall be destroyed I had my house and they said should he deal with our sister as with a harlot and God1:25:33said unto Jacob and this is where we get back to the idea of the center God says to Jacob arise go to Bethel and dwell there okay so Bethel was where Jacob had1:25:43originally put that pillar so now it's back so he it's it's it's a real hero's journey right there's there's the place that he has a set place he goes out and1:25:53has these adventures and and undergoes a moral transformation reconciles and then he comes back to the same place right as it transformed person so that's a full hero1:26:04cycle arise go to Bethel and dwell there and make that there an altar unto God that appeared to thee when thou fled us from the face of Esau thy brother and1:26:13Jacob said to his household and to all that were with him put away the strange gods that are among you and be clean and change your garments and let us arise1:26:24and go up to Bethel and I will make there an altar unto God who answered me in the day of my distress and was with me in the way which I went and they gave1:26:34unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their hand and all their earrings which were in their ears and Jacob hid them under the oak which was by Shechem and they journeyed and the1:26:44terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob so Jacob came to laws which is in the land of Canaan that is Bethel so that's1:26:54the place where he put up the pillar to begin with he and all the people that were there with him and he built there an altar and called the place el Bethel because their God appeared to him when1:27:04he fled from the face of his brother and God appeared to Jacob again when he came out of peda an aram and blessed him and God said unto Him thy name is Jacob thy1:27:15name shall not be called any more Jacob which you remember means usurper but Israel shall be thy name he who wrestles with God and he called his name1:27:26Israel and God said to him I am God Almighty be fruitful and multiply a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee and Kings shall come out of thy loins and the land which I gave Abraham1:27:36and Isaac to thee I will give it and to thy seed after thee will I give the land and God went up from him in the place where he talked with him and God set up1:27:46Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he talked with him a pillar of stone and he poured a drink offering thereon and he poured oil thereon and Jacob called the name of the place where God spake1:27:56with him Bethel1:28:05so he's returned to the central place which had been given to him as his territory Rachel dies in labor in the1:28:16process giving birth to an only son of my sorrow whose name was then changed to Benjamin son of the right hand now1:28:27Reuben so Simeon and Levi have already done something unforgivable now Reuben it's Reubens term he sleeps1:28:36with Bilhah who's Jacob Israel's concubine so he's the third of the sons to make an unforgivable error and Jacob / Israel1:28:45gets wind of it so Reuben is no longer he would have been the premier son given that the two older sons were put out of the running so to speak because of their1:28:55disobedience and impulsive vengeful cruelty and then Reuben can't keep is what do they say well you get the idea1:29:07yeah yeah seems to be something that's still quite surprisingly common so then we have this story that that basically1:29:19ends with this establishment of the twelve tribes of Israel from Leah there's Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Issachar and Zebulun from Zilpah there's1:29:29gad and ashur from billah there's Dan and Naphtali and from Rachel there's Joseph who figures extraordinarily importantly in the next story that we're1:29:38going to cover which hopefully will wrap up Genesis and Benjamin and so now Israel itself is established and so then1:29:53we turn to actually going to end this early tonight that's quite bloody miracle so the story then turns to1:30:03Joseph and the story begins essentially now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children because he was the son of his old age and he made him a coat of1:30:14many colors and so what that seems to me to indicate you know coats in dreams very often seems to be particularly true of women's1:30:23dreams that's that's been like my clinical observation clothing and footwear in particular symbolizes a role and that makes sense right because you1:30:34address for the roles it's not that big a mystery but so then you might say well what does a coat of many colors indicate and you know if you think of that1:30:44multiplicity there it's something like the mastery of multiple domains right or maybe something like plural potentiality and so Jacob is is Israel's or Joseph is1:30:56Israel's favorite and because he sees in him this excess possibility and he basically tells his other sons that1:31:05Jacob is going to be the head son which they are not happy with right because he's just this young punk fundamentally and he's clearly his father's favorite1:31:14and he gets this coat that's sort of indicative of this higher status and so Israel inadvertently sets up a1:31:23tremendous amount of sibling rivalry in the household again and that that's the the understructure of the last story in1:31:35Genesis and so in in the last of this lecture series for 2017 we'll cover the story of Joseph and and his coat of many1:31:46colors and what happens as a consequence of his of the favoritism shown to him by his father and we'll track what happens1:31:56as a consequence of that and so I'm going to stop there because I'm finished so1:32:07hello dr. Pearson this is an idea I've been wrestling with for quite some time now this idea of a1:32:17lot of like the greatest sources of wisdom that we've received through human history either through texts experiences or scriptures seems to always come from1:32:28people going to isolation and then coming back so I've had a hard time trying to figure out from a scientific1:32:37point of view or evolutionary point of view what would compel an organism to that is that is centered around its1:32:46behave its behavior centered around surviving in especially for humans as social groups as well as reproducing to want to go into isolation and then not1:32:57only that but obtain some level of information that actually helps the group in coming back that's a really good question okay so there's this1:33:10neuroscientist neuropsychologist named el Conan Goldberg and Goldberg was a student of Alexander Luria and Alexander Luria was a Russian neuropsychologist1:33:20perhaps the foremost neuropsychologist of the mid to late 20th century and he had students Sokolov in vineger dov'è1:33:29who discovered the orienting reflex for example the orienting reflexes the reflex that Orient's you when something anomalous interferes with your goal1:33:38directed behavior it's a major discovery like one of the one of the four or five most important discoveries that have ever been made in in in psychology I1:33:48would say certainly in neuroscience so Luria was a big deal and he was the first person who really established the functional role of the prefrontal cortex as well so and had it very nice overall1:34:02view of how the brain function his book was written in 1980 and it's still there's still loss in it that's really useful which is pretty strange for a science that's advanced that quickly1:34:11anyways so Goldberg came from a great pedigree I believe Maria's teacher was have1:34:20if I remember correctly so anyways Goldberg you know you hear some of you1:34:32may have heard the idea that the left hemisphere is more or linguistic than the right hemisphere is that left hemisphere is specialized for language1:34:41and the right hemisphere is specialized for nonverbal imagistic communication the left hemisphere has a pretty well1:34:51organized microstructure and the right hemisphere is more diffuse as well and that's true in left-handed males in particular so the circuitry can be1:35:01switched around a bit but it's okay the modules are basically the same although they can be moved a little bit but Goldberg thought that it isn't language versus non language it's routine versus1:35:13novelty and so the left hemisphere and there's a neuropsychologist physician named Ramachandran who's done some very interesting work that's pertinent to1:35:25this maybe I'll tell you a story about him anyways Goldberg believed that the right hemisphere say you have very old1:35:35systems underneath both both cortical hemispheres that do things like respond to anomaly to the thing that doesn't fit to the predator in the distance some of1:35:45that's extraordinarily fast so that would be like a snake reflex that can move you away from a snake in less time than it takes the snake to bite and it's really a reflex it doesn't even hit your1:35:54brain it's really super fast and then there's a defensive Crouch that's that's instantiated higher up in the nervous system but that's still remarkably fast1:36:04and then there's fear as an emotion and and the orientation of attention and then there's the cognitive processing and that all streams out across a time1:36:13span right and maybe that time span is half a second so you and that's really a long time if something is attacking you so you got those initial responses are1:36:22quite primitive but they're extraordinarily fast all right so there's subcortical structures that orient you towards novelty and prepare1:36:31you for for freezing or for it and the right hemisphere seems to be dominated by those systems so imagine that what happens is that something1:36:42threatens you you orient towards it the right hemisphere produces a bunch of images about what it might be so imagine that's what happens when a child is afraid of the dark1:36:51the child's on the bed they're afraid of the dark they're crouched because they're frozen like a prey animal and their right hemisphere is producing monsters to inhabit the the darkness1:37:01that are the child's hypotheses about what might be out there okay because that's what you want to know right you1:37:10want to know what's out there and then you want to know what to do about it I can tell you two kids dreams that are sort of relevant to that so when my1:37:19daughter was about three she came into the bedroom that my wife and I had and she was crying she'd had a nightmare and she said that she saw a stream and there1:37:32was garbage all over the stream and she didn't like that and so I sat her down I said okay so imagine the stream with the garbage in it now imagine that you're taking the garbage out and throwing it1:37:42in the garbage bin and so she and I got her to like visualize that because that kind of puts her back in the semi dream state and then she cleaned up the mess1:37:51and then she could go off to sleep now you you could tell the child don't worry about the dream isn't real that's not that's true because it's not real like other daytime things are but1:38:01it's not like it's not real it's a dream like a dream is real it's just not the same kind of real and so what I did with1:38:10her was to indicate to her practically that if she saw something a normal uh something that was out of place right something that was a mess that it was1:38:19within her capacity to set it right okay and so okay so now your right hemisphere tells you what monsters might inhabit1:38:28the the darkness now what you have to do is figure out there's two things you have to figure out one is what to do about a given monster and now there is1:38:40to do what about is to figure out what to do about the class of all possible monsters right that's a whole different thing that's something that only human beings are1:38:49capable of that level of abstraction right and so what you might do about a particular monster is hide or go out and get rid of it if it was just an actual1:39:00animal right but that doesn't help because there's all the other potential predators that are still there and so maybe you can go hunt all them down but that doesn't help either because you1:39:09can't hunt them all down it's not or it's not very likely anyways so instead what you have to do is figure out how to configure yourself so that you're in the best possible position to fight off the1:39:19monsters when they come that's your best bet all right so now people are trying to figure this out forever they're trying to figure out what's the answer to the1:39:28problem of the class of all possible monsters part of that sacrifice so there are routines for example in in1:39:38Hinduism with the goddess Kali you make offerings to Kelly who's this devouring goddess and then she turns into her benevolent counterpart and so sacrifice1:39:48is actually one way that you can tame the monsters if you think about the monster has the set of all negative future potentialities you make the1:39:57proper sacrifice as those monsters stay at bay but then there's heroism as an alternative to which which means the act of confrontation of the class of all1:40:07possible monsters and the building of yourself up and into this sort of courageous person that can do that it took a tremendous amount of meditation to transform those images say of the1:40:19monsters in into it or to solve the problem of the class of those monsters so now I'll tell you another child1:40:29stream so some of you have probably heard this before but it's such a great dream that it's worth it's worth telling so now is that my sister-in-law's house1:40:41once and her son was running around he's about four very precocious very verbal very intelligent running around with a knight hat on and a sword1:40:51so he's engaged in this pretty intense play world and when he goes to sleep he puts the knight hat on his pillow and the sword by his pillow and at the same1:41:00time he having night terrors so he's waking up and had been for a number of weeks Nate waking up screaming and then but he1:41:09doesn't know why there's some things that aren't going so well in the household and the parents get divorced shortly afterwards okay so that's oh1:41:18that's that's what's going on underneath right and he's also gonna go to kindergarten and so he's about to go into the world and so he's coping with this you know so I'm watching him zoom1:41:31around as this night and thinking that's pretty cool and that night he woke up and had a it was screaming and so we're1:41:40all at breakfast the next morning and I said did you dream anything and he got really intense and he said yes I had a1:41:49dream and I said well what was the dream and he said well I was out on this field and all these like dwarfs came up to me1:41:59they were only about as high as my knees and they didn't have any arms they have powerful legs and they were covered with like hairy feathers and grease and there1:42:09was cross carved in the top of their head and they had beaks and whenever he moved anywhere they would jump at him with his with their beaks and there were1:42:18lots of them and everyone like just said nothing at breakfast it was like yeah cuz and he was right into this story and1:42:27so we were all like yeah well huh there are that accounts for all the screaming and so and then he said yeah and then in1:42:36the background there was a dragon and every time the dragon puffed out smoke it would turn into these dwarves it's1:42:45like oh man kid you really got a problem there you got you got beat things that are biting you and you can kill them and that's fine but then there's the dragon1:42:55just puffing out new ones so it's like a Hydra problem right the old Hydra is the serpent you cut off one had seven more grow it's not a good thing and it's such1:43:04a cool dream because it really portrayed this class of all possible monsters problem so you've got the specific monsters and that's a problem so you got1:43:14to get rid of them but that's not the problem the problem is is that there's a there's something in the background that's just generating monsters like mad and so I said to him1:43:23what do you think you could do about that and that's a that's a loaded question right that's like leading the witness in the trial you don't get to ask a question like that because it1:43:33implies that it implies the answer what could you do about that is not any different than saying you could do something about that right so1:43:43so I hinted at that as a possibility and his eyes lit up now you remember he's already running around as at night Hey so he kind of1:43:52already knew what to do because he had the whole sword in the Hat and with that you know that you can go after the drag and he kind of got that and he said I'd1:44:01get my dad and then I jump up on top of the dragon and I'd poke out both of its eyes with my sword and then he'd go right down its throat to the fire box1:44:12where the fire comes out and I carve out a piece of the fire box and then I'd used that as a shield and I thought yes1:44:21right right man it's so smart eh because he got the thing instantly he knew that he knew so imagine first of all he1:44:31thought okay I have to go to the heart of the problem right and really to the heart not to the dragon but right down the dam thanks gullet right to the place1:44:40where the fire was actually being it was actually being created because there it was there you could find the shield and that he'd take this thing that was fireproof and make a shield out of it1:44:50and so that was just he had bloody perfect it was so cool and you think well how could a kid come up with that and there's a bunch of answers I mean one is we know snake fear is1:45:00innate we know that now there's been recent research data that that has demonstrated that okay so and we've been preyed on and been predators for a very1:45:09long period of time so the idea that and I found something else interesting about the brain out that dubrow out about the brain recently - and book I was reading1:45:18by Ray Kurzweil called how to build a mind I think that's what it was called it was quite a good book so I think it was in that book or it was in the1:45:27neuroscience paper I was reading doesn't matter but it was in one of those two places so you know that scanning technology has got more and more high resolution over the last few years right it just gets1:45:37more and more high-resolution all the time and so people are now able to look at the micro structures of the brain in a way that hasn't been possible before and so the old idea with the cortex1:45:47basically was that cortex was full of a bunch of neurons and then when one neuron and another fired at the same time they would wire together and that's kind of how your brain learned to make1:45:57connections it's a bit more complicated than that but that will do and then it was found that it wasn't quite that simple because what your cortex is made1:46:06out of are these columns of neurons that are duplicated sort of like a like centipedes legs you know it's very simple genetic code to add another leg1:46:16set of legs to a centipede it's sort of like that with your brain it's made out of all these columns and the columns are basically already quite wired up and1:46:25then as you learn the columns wired together okay so there's some pre-existence structure there but there's more preexisting structure than what that was thought so it's it's basically that1:46:36there are already tracts that link columns together that are in different parts of the brain and the columns can or the columns themselves can send out1:46:46dendrites to these superhighways which are already there and then the superhighway is there and then it can generate connections to the columns at1:46:56the end of the superhighway so what that means is that there's a tremendous amount of cortical structure already in place but there's plasticity around that and when I read that I thought well1:47:05that's part of the source of the archetypes there's already an archetypal structure there that as well as the subcortical structures so you could say that like the kid already had within him1:47:15not only the capacity to represent not only the monster but the class of all possible monsters and the fact that the problem wasn't monsters the problem was1:47:25that monsters could continually be generated which is a way worse problem and then the answer to that isn't to kill an individual monster the answer to that is go to the source of the1:47:35monstrous itself and defeat it so it's absolutely staggering and you could imagine that it would take a tremendous amount of meditate of effort for people to have come up1:47:45with that solution over a very long period of time so now the point of the representation is to formulate a picture1:47:54of what it is that's the threat so that you can then formulate a general purpose solution and so there's this image of1:48:03Kali which I really like because Kelly is sort of the goddess of the darkness let's say in destruction and so Kelly is she has a headdress of fire her hair is1:48:13on fire and she has a headdress of skulls and she has hands cut off all around her neck and she has a belt that's often snakes but it's sometimes she sometimes eating the intestines of1:48:24this guy that she's just given birth to and that she's sitting on she has eight legs like a spider and she's in a web of fire and so she's a monster in some1:48:33sense that represents everything that might terrify and devour you and the question is so you come up with that representation as an image to represent1:48:42the class of all terrifying things and then you have to generate a solution in the face of that class and sacrifice is one of the solutions but that heroic1:48:51encounter is another one of the solutions and that's the one that he catalyzed now he'd been read lots of books he'd watched lots of Disney movies1:49:00you know and and he'd seen the heroic pattern portrayed many many places and his little brain was working like mad to1:49:09extract out the essence of that and to embody it and when I asked him that question it just went snap and all those things lined up and his night terrors1:49:19went away that was it and I followed up with his mom because it was really quite remarkable the whole set of occurrences you know and he didn't have night terrors that night even though he'd been1:49:29having the nightly and that was the end of them because he'd solved his problem like he needed to be the courageous knight that went after the dragon and so1:49:38that is what people need to be so I think when we go into solitude we shut1:49:47off the external stimulation and we let the Dreaming part of our mind emerge and that's this nonverbal pattern1:49:56detector that thinks in images and it's it's the thing that mediates between what we don't understand and what we do understand like if you understand it1:50:06completely you can say it and you can act it out if you don't understand it you represent it in images and there it's like it's the emotion fear1:50:15withdrawal paralysis and then that manifests itself in an image of what that might be and that image is the basis for the story and it's the basis1:50:24for further development of the idea and to go into isolation is to let those images emerge and to dream a little bit and then that moves you that moves you1:50:35ahead into the future so language they use before it's enough just to map out the danger that is imminent in front of1:50:45you but all the potential dangers that you could come up with in abstract form yeah well remember what happens when God throws Adam and Eve out of out of1:50:55paradise they become aware that they're going to die right the future becomes a problem because you could say the future is the place of all potential monsters1:51:05right and so just the monster that you have right in front of you it's like yeah well you get rid of that but that doesn't solve your problem does it the problem is how do you exist in a world1:51:14full of monsters and part of that answer is well you become a monster yourself that's a big part of the answer but it's an incomplete answer because if you're1:51:24just a monster then you're just as bad as the monsters so you have to trance you have to be a monstrous enough to contend with the monsters but then you have to be civilized enough so that1:51:34you're not a monster yourself and that's more or less equivalent to the Union inter integration of the shadow so yep yeah1:51:51hiya dr. Peterson now I've been wanting to ask you this for a while now since I started watching your lectures after I started reading and nici's Beyond Good1:52:01and Evil I came upon a paragraph in his chapter on scholars that really really bothered me and it actually bothers me1:52:10to this day he talked about this kind of person like they were just a mirror-like they stretched he said every part of their skin basically to allow every new1:52:19piece of information that they took on and that all they ever were was just an instrument they were just a mirror on reflecting what they had learned never1:52:29actually having generated anything on their own and it's it's bothered me because I feel like in a way it's sort of like it's it's it's impacted my identity a lot because I don't know how1:52:39are you supposed to create something you know ok well that's ok that that's a really good question I mean Nietzsche is often classed with1:52:48the existentialists right and so one of the tenants of existentialist there's two real tenants of existentialism there's more but obviously we're oversimplifying but one is that life is1:52:59a problem it isn't because there's something wrong with you it's that life is a problem and so that's often contrasted with the Freudian view which1:53:09is that if you have a problem it's because something went wrong during your development the existentialist said no no it's like life is a problem make no1:53:18mistake about it and that1:53:28the purpose of the purpose of scholarship is in some sense to solve that problem and so for Nietzsche like1:53:38he said all truths are bloody truths to me and what he meant by that was that if an idea didn't incarnate itself in you1:53:47and transform your perceptions and your actions then you were merely possessed by the idea you were merely a spokesperson for the idea or you could say that the idea possessed you you're a1:53:57puppet for the idea it's not you it's the idea is in you and it has you you haven't taken the idea and incorporated1:54:06with you and made it part of your life and so there's a romanticism that's associated with that right that's the passionate scholar the person for whom1:54:15ideas are not merely they're not merely what would you call abstracted representations that can be tossed about1:54:24as if they're commodities there there there are more like pert they're more like personalities that might be another way of thinking about it and so if1:54:35you're if if those ideas are compelling then you don't like one thing I learned a long time ago and I think this is1:54:44probably relevant I know when I was a kid I like to argue and I like to win arguments or or or lose them although I like winning them a lot better but I1:54:54didn't really mind so much what the content of the argument was you know I could engage in it like a sparring match and it was in some sense to establish1:55:04dominance right to establish intellectual dominance I quit doing that when I was in my mid-20s because I thought that that was too shallow an1:55:13approach to the ideas they they're not commodities of that sort they're there they have tendrils that reach down into1:55:23the living that's the right way to think about it and so Nietzsche's criticism of scholars and he did this a lot was that they were bloodless you know they didn't1:55:32they were full of performative contradictions that's another way of thinking about they'd say one thing and do another because their intellect was completely dissociated from their1:55:41from their actions and Heath he he thought that was a very bad idea and I think that that's a good criticism I1:55:50think it is a bad idea I also think it makes for an extraordinarily boring lecturer you know because you can tell if you're listening to someone whether the idea is that you're hearing are1:55:59merely being passed through the person as if they're being memorized say or whether they're part of the dynamic core of the person and if they're part of the1:56:09dynamic core of the person then they're almost always engaging and gripping and so he wasn't a fan of bloodless scholars and I think that's correct because one1:56:18of the things that I see it's not a good idea to have ideas possess you unless you know what the ideas are up to and1:56:27lots of people are possessed by ideas rather than possessing them and that what that means is they haven't taken the ideas and integrated them into their1:56:36own being they haven't it's like an incarnation in a sense they haven't incarnated the ideas in an embodied form and and so1:56:46they're incomplete you know Nietzsche also in thus spake Zarathustra when Zarathustra comes down the mountain he sees a bunch of people gathered around a famous individual I1:56:56think maybe a scholar but doesn't really matter and when Zarathustra goes in looks at the person all he sees his little tiny with a gigantic ear and so he's a1:57:05hyper specialist right and so he has a pretty impressive ear but he's only this big and that was Nietzsche's imagistic commentary on the danger of hyper1:57:14specialization and also on the danger of adulation for hyperspecialization and and because he thought about it as a kind of deformity now Nietzsche was a pretty harsh guy but1:57:28but he did address the issue of the relationship between intellectual knowledge and and action because for Nietzsche those things are not to be1:57:37separated in some sense so yeah so maybe I don't know why it maybe it bothered you like it's hard to say why it1:57:47bothered you it might have bothered you because it's sort of undermined the idea of scholar but the other possibility and this isn't an accusation because obviously I don't know anything about you but it1:57:57might also be that it struck a chord you know and that maybe you were doubtful or questioning how tightly associated your1:58:07intellectual endeavor was with your actual character and your practice so that's another possibility I mean that's1:58:16a really good thing to think about because generally speaking that integration is it is very much lacking people are a lot smarter and fluid with their ideas than they are ethical and1:58:26consistent and characterized by integrity so yep1:58:42hey um so last week you talked about how you hated people asking you if you believe in God or do you believe in miracles or you just like those questions elytis but you also talked1:58:51about how and I want to put words in your mouth but I think you said something about the idea of an empirical evidence for religious experiences or spiritual experiences and I wonder how1:59:01those two ideas can a spiritual existence or can a spiritual experience exist without God or who knows who knows1:59:11you know I don't know what I don't know what to make of that I mean you could it depends on what you're willing to accept as proof I suppose that's where things1:59:20get tricky you know if you have to demonstrate the existence of God objectively then subjective experiences of the transcendent are irrelevant right1:59:30but and and that's a perfectly reasonable standpoint if your initial presupposition is the only thing that has actual existence is those things1:59:39that can be demonstrated objectively and I'm not putting that down like that's a powerful methodology our technology is basically dependent on the acceptance at1:59:49least a partial acceptance of those axioms but I also think that it's difficult for me to deny the existence1:59:59of these patterns of thinking that seem to exist cross-culturally like the existence of the representation of the Dragon for example especially given that2:00:09I can see an evolutionary rationale for the emergence of these representations so and then there's also the indisputable fact that religious2:00:20experiences are accessible to people through a number of different avenues now and one of the things I mentioned when I discussed this before is well you2:00:31could say well those are no different than experiences of psychopathology but they are different because the experiences of psychopathology damage2:00:40people whereas the evidence is that the transcendent experiences actually help people so unless you can unless you're willing to say well there are some forms2:00:49of psychopathological experience that actually facilitate health which is possibility but you know I think you're you're pushing your hypothesis at that2:00:59point I'm not sure what you're saying about a religious experience is what I'm2:01:09well generally a religious experience is something like an experience of the of the renewal of the world that might be one way of thinking about it so that2:01:19everything sort of leaps forward as crystalline and perfect as if you had been viewing it from behind a mask before another would be a sense of the2:01:30union of everything and so you're a singular being and you're isolated and in the religious experiences so for example there's a book written recently by a neuroscientist my stroke of what's2:01:44it called my stroke of insight yeah that's right and I believe she had a left hemisphere stroke if I remember correctly and she was sufficiently2:01:56well-developed neuroscientists to understand what was happening as she had the stroke and and she had a intense religious experience as a consequence of2:02:07that and she experienced it as a dissolution of the ego into this state of union with everything and this transcendent experience of awe and and2:02:17the open well I don't remember the rest of it I mean there are other elements of religious experience that are quite common the idea of the opening of the heavens that's one the communion with2:02:26the ancestors that's another the reduction of the body to a skeleton that's another movement up into heaven like these are well documented phenomena2:02:37and a lot of them are associated well of a fair number of them were associated with psychedelic use but that's not the only Avenue to experiences like that and epilepsy can produce experiences like2:02:48that too and then people usually report a near-death experience as well you know people usually report that those experiences have life-altering significance now that in and of itself2:02:59only proves that people are capable of having subjective religious experiences right it doesn't definitively prove2:03:08there's anything outside of that so young Carl young for example most of the time he didn't talk about God he talked about the God image which is not the2:03:18same thing because you could have a god image that was even evolutionarily instantiated without that necessarily being rep to any transcendent being2:03:29beyond the image right so who knows who knows again I think it depends on what2:03:38you're willing to accept as proof now the proof the it's beyond question that can people can have life-changing religious experiences another example of2:03:48that is that the best treatment for alcoholism is religious conversion it's well documented in the literature and I studied alcoholism for a long time so2:03:57one of the cures that sticks is religious conversion and the 12-step programs essentially attempt to instantiate religious conversion and2:04:06it's hard to document their success because they succeed for the people who stick with it but that's not a very good measure right it's sort of it's sort of2:04:17self-evident that they work for the people who stick with it I'm not cynical about about Alcoholics Anonymous or anything but we don't have good data on on outcome but there is good data2:04:28showing that religious transformation is a good cure for for alcoholism so and that's an interesting phenomena too it's2:04:42too complicated I probably can't okay I'll try I'll try this for a second so here's how I think a religious conversion might work so imagine you've2:04:52got the left hemisphere and it's the place where your habitual interpretations reside so I can give you a quick example of this so this guy2:05:03Ramachandran who's a neurophysiologist or I think that's his that's his field of study I think he's at UCLA he studied people who hadn't neglect and neglects2:05:13is a very very bizarre phenomena so if you have a stroke that damages your right parietal lobe you'll lose the left part of your2:05:22being not just your body it's really weird it's like so for example if you have a right parietal stroke and you look at a clock you only see you only2:05:31only half the clock exists for you it's not like you only see half the clock it's weirder than that it's that there's only the right side of the clock there's2:05:40only the right side of you there's only the right side of my body I don't know that this exists and so sometimes people with right parietal damage will wake up2:05:50after the stroke and grab their left arm and throw it out of bed and or their leg and throw it out of bed because it's not theirs and then of course they fall out of bed which is quite a shock to them so2:06:00and so now they'll only eat half the food on the plate nobody can really understand this phenomena logically right because we can't imagine what that2:06:09must be like I think it must be like you know how you know there's things behind you but you don't not see them they're just not there it's not like it's black2:06:18or anything or there's a space it's just not there and so I think what happens is the not there extends to three-quarters2:06:27of the field instead of half the field that's a guess anyway so ramas now the funny thing about people with neglect is that if you tell them if you point it2:06:37out you say well I noticed that you're not moving your left foot today they'll say well it's it's arthritic and I can't move it and say well why do you just try2:06:46to move it so no look doctor I already told you it's in too much pain to move it was working fine this morning that can be months after the the accident so it's a denial and and people thought2:06:56actually that that was trauma induced denial for a long time before they figured it out was actually a consequence of the neurophysiological damage you know Ramachandran found that2:07:05if you irrigated the contralateral ear say now if you pour cold water in someone's ear it upsets their vestibular2:07:16system and their eyes will move back and forth like this you can try that at a party if you want and anyways Ramachandran was testing vestibular2:07:25function on these patients and he irrigated the right ear with cold water and they woke up and maybe what happened was that that was shocking enough2:07:35so imagine the networks in the right hemisphere were degraded but not completely gone and they needed a really high threshold of activation to snap into function so here's an example of2:07:46that if you have Parkinson's disease imagine you're frozen there okay and I throw a ball at you you'll go like this and catch it but you can't throw it back2:07:55so you can the stimulus is enough that's enough to push you past threshold but you can't do it voluntarily now if you have Parkinson's like right to the tenth2:08:05degree you won't even be able to couch it but there's a stage where you could still do that there's a great case study where this grandpa was in a wheelchair he had Parkinson's and his young2:08:15grandson was playing out on the dock and fell in the water and started to drown and he got out of his wheelchair went into the ocean rescued him brought him2:08:24onto the beach sat back down in his wheelchair and was paralyzed together so that was enough so you can imagine there was enough network left so if the emotional tension became high enough2:08:36that the degraded circuits could still function so okay so back to Ramachandran so you irrigate the ear all of a sudden the right hemisphere connections flash2:08:45the remainders managed to connect and the person goes oh my god I've had a terrible stroke I've lost the left side of my body they're crying they're like2:08:54completely catastrophic aliy overwhelmed by it and then 20 minutes later the the effects wear off and they snap back in and now they they've lost their left2:09:04side again they don't remember it and so what seems to happen is that the right hemisphere is collecting anomalous2:09:13information that's what it does that's what it does when you're dreaming it's it's it's it's representing that anomalous information in image form and2:09:23sort of slowly passing it to the left hemisphere so it doesn't overwhelm it and maybe if it gets overwhelming you wake up and you're afraid and you tell someone about the dream that helps you2:09:32figure out what it was but anyways so that the right hemisphere is always trying to tap the left hemisphere into transformation right so now imagine that2:09:42that can happen a little bit or a lot so maybe you're just ignoring a little bit of anomalous information you just have some mildly2:09:52frightening dreams or maybe you've just stacked up a whole bunch of things that you're ignoring and there's some major-league monsters that you haven't contended with maybe there's situations2:10:02where the right hemisphere is stored up enough counter enough of a counter hypothesis let's say about how the world2:10:11works out make making sense out of all those things that you've ignored that one day it just goes snap and you're a new personality and maybe the new2:10:22personality isn't addicted so it's something like it's something like that I think so yeah okay2:10:38joke good morning citizen Peterson oh you got I've prepared a real doozy for you here oh good it's a good thing2:10:48you've got extra time to handle this one I'd even say it's rehearsed a little bit so it's gonna be ultra ineffective yeah okay now I understand that a lecture on2:11:00the psychological significance of anything really is going to indubitably wander off into an anthropocentric worldview but as a2:11:11practitioner of the hard sciences I wanted to dig a little bit deeper you know so I sought out I guess a religious2:11:20interpretation of both creative freedom and I guess the very nature of time2:11:30itself and I found it obviously that's why I'm here and if you think you have an anthropocentric worldview it's2:11:40nothing compared to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger you know now I like to think that you know this microphone here the2:11:50one that you keep muting out on me you know this microphone is an object which exists outside of our individual perceptions that's just the way I like2:11:59to look at it but then I think about the concept beauty is in the eye of the beholder and certainly I mean when2:12:09you're talking about are the appreciation of art there has to be some sort of subjective element integrated into that but there also must be a limit2:12:19as well I mean certain works of art do we appreciate as absolute masterpieces like Michelangelo's pietà for example2:12:30which you bring up frequently because it really is that good but there's other things which are just by comparison there like vandalism you know now2:12:42there's always a temptation all right to invoke the principle of a non-overlapping magisteria but that seems like sort2:12:51of a capo right so I formulated I guess for myself for standards of measure which help me separate what's the difference between art and mediocrity2:13:02and here's the four number one education number two time commitment you got to put in the time if you're an artist it's2:13:11probably gonna become your full-time occupation it's that you have to be that passionate about it number three public display art isn't2:13:20something that you own for yourself you hide it in your basement then it's not art it's something what you have to express you know something which you've got to share and number four and I think2:13:30this is the most important one efficacy of vision if you're an artist you've got to have a vision and we talked about the2:13:40dream state here a lot you go into the dream state you have inspiration but it's not enough to just have the inspiration because that's totally subjective for you the art the art part2:13:51about it is having the techniques and the skill and the intent and I guess the capacity to turn that into something real you know that you can then express2:14:01or share so can you read cardinal ratzinger as explanation for the nature of time and then address the concept of beauty in the eye of the beholder with2:14:11specific reference to the body positivity movement how sheesh misses2:14:56no I don't think I can I think I think I2:15:08think that's ha ha ha I think I think that you you tangled together so many2:15:18things and this is also a tangle of things not that that's a criticism that I can't pull them all together with sufficient rapidity not to bore the2:15:29audience to death so I'm gonna I'm gonna wait I'm gonna wait ok dr. Peterson I'm2:15:40fascinated by the idea of faith what faith means Jacob listens to a voice and believes it he probably heard other2:15:50voices why did he believe this one why what there must have been an a priori sort of functional necessity for him to2:16:03believe the voice that told him one thing or another and and I think that that's a string that runs through the Bible and then through the New Testament we are expected as well I confess I'm a2:16:14Christian I'm I act like I believe God is real and and so there is this call of faith and also the in in every hero's2:16:24story we we see now there is always a moment in that story where the hero must believe something beyond the evidence2:16:33that is before them which is to say they must take a leap of faith so I'm wondering if you can just kind of unpack that experience of faith and the understanding of how a human being makes2:16:42the choice to believe one thing or another god that's a great question I mean uh is this still on is this still working okay okay okay2:16:54good um I don't I don't precisely know the answer that it's it's a very peculiar thing because we think many things or you could say many voices2:17:03appear in our minds because when Nietzsche took des cartes I think therefore I am apart and he said well it isn't so obvious that there's an AI2:17:12first of all that it's a unity like a no unity transparent unto itself which of course the psychoanalysts picked up in a big way and then he wasn't sure that it2:17:22was the AI who thought in some causal manner he said well no it's more like thoughts it's something like thoughts appear in the phenomenal field and maybe2:17:32you choose between them or maybe they possess you like there's lots of other ways of thinking about it it isn't exactly obvious to me why we choose to take one pathway rather than another2:17:42when so many of them offer themselves to us you know people tend to talk about that as something like conscience right2:17:52and now maybe it's that it's got to have2:18:01something to do I think it's an endless regress because you can always ask why the why any assumption became primary but I'll put that aside2:18:11for a moment it seems to me to have something to do with your aims you know that you're more likely to listen to a2:18:21voice that is in keeping with your most fundamental aims and then the question is where do your most fundamental aims come from and from what I've been able2:18:30to determine and I'll speak psychologically again is that to begin with you're a concatenation of rather primitive sub personalities hungry ones2:18:40tired one's upset ones laughing one so you can see that in babies you know they cycle through those states very rapidly there's a infantile unity above all that2:18:51but it doesn't have control right and so then the developing individual has to figure out how to integrate those primitive sub personalities into a2:19:01unified personality at the same time they integrate the unified personality into a social unity so it's partly individual integration2:19:13but it's fed by social forces I mean even when you watch a an infant breastfeed its established a relationship with its mother and there's2:19:23a reciprocity that's already at play there so then that underlying multiplicity starts to form itself into a unity and then the question and I2:19:33would say that's something like that's something like the emergence of the the individual out of out of the the Titans that's a reasonable way of thinking2:19:43about it like a sovereign out of the Titans it's something like that but then there's another division which seems to me to paralyse parallel the the Cain and2:19:53Abel division it's that that integration can be oriented towards something that's positive but it can also be oriented towards something that's negative and that's the split of the world into good2:20:04and evil I think and then it looks like you're navigating between those and I can only account for that with something like choice like I think the free choice even though I don't understand it I'm2:20:16unwilling to deny the existence of free choice merely because I don't understand it because it looks to me like that's how people act that's how they expect to2:20:26be treated and that societies who that that structure themselves in accordance with the idea that people have free choice actually work now that doesn't2:20:35prove that there's free choice but people have been arguing about that forever so but it looks to me so those are two possible means of integration and then I think what you're doing is2:20:45feeding one or the other constantly and I think you probably choose which one to feed I think that's and I mean that's2:20:54how it feels that way to me as well like when I look at my own you know maybe you're really aggravated with something maybe you're aggravated with your wife2:21:03you know or your child or something like that you know and you're feeling kind of nasty and maybe even know that you're in2:21:12the wrong and an idea comes into your head you think I could say that and no you could say it and you know what it would do but then you pause and you2:21:21think would that make it better or worse and then maybe you go to hell with it which is a quite the thing to say I've got a little story about that in a2:21:30minute and then you say it but you knew you knew that you took the low road right and you know it and then you're guilty2:21:39about that and defensive and that makes the fight way worse because then there's no damn way you're gonna admit that you actually did that and so things do go to hell and so so here's here's an ugly2:21:49little idea so that's that's that's relevant to the question so imagine you're playing around with cocaine now2:22:00I'm using cocaine because it's very addictive but it's a very interesting chemical because it's a dopaminergic agonist and what what dopamine does is2:22:09two things it makes you feel like what you're doing is worthwhile but it also imagined that there's a bunch of neural circuits that are active and then they2:22:18get a hit of dopamine or you do then those neural circuits get a little bit more powerful okay so it it has a rewarding property which is that it2:22:27makes you feel like what you're doing is important and it has a reinforcing property which is it makes neural circuits grow so now what that means is2:22:37that whatever you were doing just before you took cocaine grows okay so now imagine there's a bunch of different2:22:46things that you do just before you take cocaine but there's a string of decisions and at one decision point is the same for all of those difference2:22:55occurrences and that decision point is because you know you're in trouble and that decision point is well to hell with it okay so then you think that each of the2:23:05200 times that you take cocaine even though you do it in different places but that one thought is there all the time and that thing grows because you're2:23:14reinforcing it and it grows and it grows and it grows and so now that's in you let's that's part of you and it's the thing that says to hell with it okay so2:23:23now and maybe that's not such a good thing to grow inside your brain so then you your idea and they take you to a cocaine treatment2:23:32center and after a week you're no longer physically physiologically addicted you're not craving you don't have a problem as long as you're there but then2:23:42they take you back to your normal environment and you see like cocaine Joe your friend and as soon as you see him up that thing comes and bang you're back2:23:51on the you're back on the to hell with the track and that's well you're in well you're where you will end up - if you2:24:00reinforce that particular perspective long enough so that's akin in a sense to the this decision-making process you know if you if you take the low road2:24:10then that wins and it gets a little stronger because everything that wins neurologically gets a little stronger it's like a Darwinian competition so one2:24:22rule is don't practice what you don't want to become because you really do become that it builds it builds itself right into your neural architecture and that's one of the terrifying things2:24:32about addiction you know because you think well it's kind of psychological it's like yeah kind of it's also kind of neuro physiological and you build a one-eyed cocaine monster in your head if2:24:42you hit yourself enough with something that reinforcing so yeah2:24:55last question I guess it's just a really simple question then about long2:25:04suffering so when it one of the things that was noticing from the stories of Jacob and a lot of these biblical narratives is you do have this2:25:13all-powerful God who is able to kind of essentially be the hidden protagonist in the narrative but then the funny thing is that he's kind of revealing some of2:25:23his qualities throughout the course of the story so you were talking about the weird paradox of the fact that God somehow allows Jacob Israel to win the2:25:34fight yeah so my question is relating to pants EPs thing about the rats that you told like three or four times and the number of2:25:43occasions I saw one even more recent videos you talked about it where the bigger rat lets the smaller rat win because then the other the smaller rat won't engage in the game so the question2:25:52is is twofold for me one is God allowing humanity to win periodically so that's to allow us to actually engage in the2:26:01dialogue through these stories and to is it a much more primitive version of the virtue of humility which you wouldn't normally characterize of an Amana path2:26:10of anonymity omnipotent deity well those are excellent questions that's I really like the second one in particular that2:26:19that that God's decision to allow human victory from time to time is actually a manifestation of something approximating humility or at least mercy but humility2:26:30is an interesting take on it well it's also connected to Paul's image of how Christ handed him hands himself over and allows himself to be defeated by men and2:26:41therefore conquers sin which is man's enemy it's a weird it's the same paradox where God enters into that dynamic with people and loses and willingly loses2:26:52yeah well that's a okay so the first thing I would say is that that's a really interesting analogy I I2:27:01I can't it's complicated enough question so that I can't go be I don't think I can go be the question actually because it's so2:27:10complicated that I don't think I can formulate it any better than you already did like it's an interesting string of ideas I'd have to play with it a while to see it does shed an interesting light2:27:21on why God is amenable to negotiation in the Old Testament which is really a strange as you pointed out it's really a strange thing it's like this is2:27:31omnipotent God who obviously can do whatever he wants and yet he allow he can be bargained with and that also opens up the question of why like your2:27:40hypothesis is well if you don't let the little rat win now and then then they get dejected and quit playing and that's I mean that's that's a pretty good observation if people don't get to win2:27:50now and then you know they that's kind of what happens to Cain God says well you not playing a straight game that's why you're not winning but I don't know2:28:05there's an intimation in the Old Testament and I think it's more developed in the New Testament maybe not that the straighter the game you play the more likely you are to win and so2:28:17maybe part of the reason that God lets Abraham bargain and and even Jacob is because they've started to play very straight games and so maybe you do win2:28:27in your wrestling with God if you play a straight game I mean I think that's I actually think that's I think the reason that's true is because that's actually why we would define it as a straight2:28:38game now then we could speak psychologically again I think that what we've come to recognize as a straight game is the game that in the broadest2:28:47number of situations across the widest range of time spans is most likely to produce a positive outcome and that's that's actually the grounds for our2:28:57sense of ethics that it's really practical not to belabor it too much because there was there was an interesting insight from Chesterton's the man who was Thursday where God sets2:29:07himself up as the benevolent antagonist so as to accelerate the game yeah well I think that's a really interesting idea I2:29:17mean there is there is hints I would say throughout the biblical story that the reason that God tolerates Satan2:29:26let's say is because without an adversary you're soft and that's I mean that's tied in with the notion that life is something like a moral struggle you2:29:37know that that's the fundamental essence of being a moral struggle now it I think that that's phenomenologically a reasonable observation maybe it's maybe2:29:47other people don't experience it that way but it seems to me like within my own experience that that's accurate now I don't know what again I don't know what that says about the fundamental2:29:56nature of reality but I had a vision at one point that I was in a ring with Satan actually believe it or not and it2:30:07was like a Roman Colosseum and you know I was rather upset to find myself there but I won and I asked God afterwards why2:30:19he would do such a thing and his answer was he knew I could win and that's interesting you know because like I don't know what to make of that believe2:30:29me I have no idea what to make of that but the idea was that if you're trying to encourage someone rather than protect2:30:38them because those are really different things right to protect someone isn't to make them strong to encourage them is to make them strong then you set them a series of challenges right right at the2:30:51point where they may win and maybe you could make a case that that's what you do if you really care for someone now I know that that's it I'm not saying that2:31:00that interpretation is correct I'm not but but there's something mean you definitely with your children you know when you're wrestling with them say when2:31:10you're playing with them you use you push them to the limit of their ability because otherwise they don't transcend2:31:19their current abilities so yep2:31:29[Music]2:31:38so we'll see some of you perhaps most of you in December and I think we'll finish off Genesis at that point and then in2:31:48the new year probably not till the spring I'll start with exodus which I'm really looking forward to because I really like the Exodus story it's an2:31:57amazing story and unbelievably deep note well the ones we've covered so far being you know pretty good as well but so thank you all for coming and we'll perhaps see you in about a month0:00:00Biblical Series XV: Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:23that's a hell of a welcome for someone who's gonna talk about the Bible so I0:00:34thought I would get farther than through Genesis by by this point but I'm not unhappy about the pace either I've learned a tremendous amount and so0:00:43hopefully what we'll do today is finish Genesis completely and then I think I'll try to start up with Exodus in May0:00:53depending on what happens next year I have a busy travel schedule and but I would really like to do it I really like the Exodus story and I understand it very well a lot of the stories in0:01:03Genesis especially after the first few stories say up to the Tower of Babel I had to do a tremendous amount of learning about which is really good but I do know the Exodus story so I'm really0:01:13looking forward to that so so let's dive right into it and see how far we can get today so we'll review first so Joseph's0:01:24father is Jacob and Jacob is the patriarch of Israel essentially that the father of the twelve tribes and we might0:01:35remember that he had a very morally0:01:45ambivalent pathway through life and it's one of the things that I think so interesting about the stories in the in the Old Testament is that these so0:01:57called patriarchal figures are very realistic and it's something that I was also being struck by that accounts in the New Testament that way there's lots0:02:07of things that Christ does that you'd think would have been edited out over time and sanitized but they're not and that the Old Testament is definitely not a book that's been sanitized and that's0:02:17it quite interesting that that's the case so you sort of see people with all their flaws and I've been trying to also0:02:26derive some general conclusions about them the moral of the story of the Genesis stories and because these0:02:35stories are fundamentally moral and moral as far as I'm concerned has to do with action right because moral decisions are the decisions that you make when you're structuring action when0:02:45you decide to do one thing or another generally you want to do things that are the best things that you can think of to do and hence good but sometimes you also0:02:56want to do things that are they're worse things you can do you know because you're angry or resentful or bitter and so the moral decisions that you make that govern your actions are really the0:03:06most important decisions that you make in your life and it's not that easy to figure out how to make moral decisions we don't have an unerring technology for0:03:16that the same way as we do for say making decisions about empirical reality which in some ways seem a lot simpler partly because we can work collectively0:03:26at it partly because we have a rigorous methodology for deciding what's true and what's not so one of the things that's really struck me like it's an0:03:35overarching theme I would say that the emerges out of Genesis especially after the really ancient stories say especially after the stories of Cain and0:03:47Abel and Noah and the Tower of Babel when you get to the accounts of the0:03:56historically or historically real people one injunction seems to be get the hell out there and do something you know one0:04:07of the major themes for all of the patriarchs that we've talked about Abraham say Jacob and Joseph is move out0:04:18into the world regardless of the circumstances at hand now that's in in in the Old Testament stories that's basically portrayed as harkening to the0:04:29voice of God something like that maybe you could think about his destiny or a psychological calling and the funny thing too is is that it's not that these people have an easy time0:04:39of it when they heed that call so what's what's fascinating is that they often run into extreme difficulties right away and I think that's very interesting0:04:49first of all because life is obviously full of extreme difficulties and second it's another example of the failure to sugarcoat things which is one of the0:05:00things I think makes a mockery of anti religious theories that are even quite sophisticated say like Freud's because Freud thought of religion as a and it0:05:10was a wish fulfillment essentially and and also Marx who thought about religion as the opiate of the masses it's if those were true it seems to me that0:05:20there'd be a lot more wish and a lot less reality a lot less stark harsh reality you know in the first thing that Abraham encounters is a famine and then0:05:32he has to hide his wife and then he he basically journeys into a tyranny so that's about as bad as it gets in some ways and those themes recur continually0:05:43and no one ever lives where they're supposed to live they'll even live in Canaan and not the promised land and so it's a pretty rough it's a pretty rough series of stories but the fundamental0:05:54idea is something like there's no time for sitting around there's time to go out into the world and engage and then there's there's hints about the proper0:06:05and improper ways of engaging right so clearly the improper way to engage is I think most clearly delineated in the Cain and Abel story and with Cain0:06:16exemplifying the inappropriate way to engage with the world and that's to engage with the world in a bitter0:06:25jealous and resentful manner now one of the things that I really like about the Cain and Abel story and that theme recurs continually with the with the0:06:34duality of the brothers right there's there's constant conflict between a perspective that's essentially like Cain's and and the and the opposite perspective which all which I'll get to0:06:44in a minute but Caine sees that the world is a very tragic place and that the rewards are distributed unfairly and that there are0:06:55people who do better and people who do worse and as a consequence of that he becomes bitter and resentful and curses God and then he becomes homicidal0:07:05fratricidal which is even worse than he destroys his own ideal then his descendants basically become genocide or something like that so that seems to be0:07:15the wrong way to go about things you know unless your goal is to make things worse like it's not like it has a limited number of things has nothing to0:07:26object to he's got plenty to object to his situation actually is bad he's overshadowed terribly by his brother who everyone loves who does extraordinarily well and who's good at everything and0:07:37the story is a bit of nivel inton for Keynes failure although a fair bit of its laid at his own feet but he's definitely failing and so you0:07:46can understand why he would have this terrible attitude but the problem is all it does is make it worse so it doesn't seem to be one of0:07:55the things I've also learned as a psychologist sort of pondering these sorts of things it's often a lot easier to identify what you shouldn't do than what you should do like it's I think0:08:04evil is easier to identify than good I think good is trickier but evil stands out to some degree and then at least you can say if you're trying to get as far0:08:13away from that as possible we could even say just for practical reasons so your life doesn't become hell and your family life doesn't become hell at least you could get as far away from that as0:08:22possible even if you weren't able to conjure up what would constitute the good as a name you could at least avoid those sorts of pitfalls and I do also0:08:33think that its pitfalls like that that really threaten our society right now you know that I see a tremendous rise in resentment fueling almost all of the0:08:42political polarization that's taking place and seems unfortunate given that by and by large everyone on the planet is richer than they've ever been now that doesn't mean there's no0:08:52disparity there's but there's always disparity anyways Jacob of course Jacob on see so and so the and Jacob ends up with0:09:02with with Isaac's blessing and so that's that's a moral catastrophe and then he has to run because his brother wants to0:09:12kill him and so that's the fratricidal motif again I like that too I think that's real really realistic you know one of the things that Freud noted constantly0:09:22and this is where Freud really is a genius is that the most intense hatreds and also sometimes the most intense love is within families you know and in the0:09:33Freudian world of psychopathology it's all it's all inside the family and in fact the pathology in the Freudian world0:09:43is actually the fact that it's all inside the family because people who get tangled up in the Freudian familial nightmare which is roughly eatable in0:09:52structure can only conceptualize the world in terms of their familial relationships they've been so damaged by the enmeshment and the trauma and the deceit and the betrayal and the blurred0:10:02lines and all of that that they just can't expand past the family and go out in the world so the idea that brothers0:10:11can be at each other's throats I think is that's a very powerful idea and it's not something that people like to think about so so Jacob has to leave and it's0:10:22not surprising because I mean what he did was pretty reprehensible he betrayed his brother but nonetheless he's the person who dreams of the ladder that unites heaven and earth and that's a0:10:35very perverse thing you know what but one of the things I think it does is give in some sense it gives hope to everyone because it isn't you know if0:10:44only the good guys win we're really in trouble right because it's not that easy to be a good guy it's it's it's really not that easy and most people are pretty keenly aware of all the ways that they0:10:54fall short even of their own ideals and so if there was no hope except for the good guys almost all of us would be lost0:11:03and so that's one of the things I really liked and was more surprised about with the Old Testament stories is that these people are a very complex0:11:12and they make very major moral errors by anyone's standard and yet if and yet the overall message is still hopeful and the0:11:22the message that runs contrary to the message of evil say that message of good is something like well there's a lot of emphasis on faith right and the that's a0:11:33tough one because cynics people who are cynical about religious structures like to think of faith as the willingness to0:11:43demolish your intellect in the service of superstition and well there's there's something to be said for that perspective but not a lot because the0:11:55reality is much more sophisticated part of the faith that's that that is being insisted upon in the old testament is something like and I'm speaking0:12:05psychologically here again that it's useful to pause it a high high good and to aim at it so and I really think that's practically useful to the0:12:15research we've done with the Future authoring program for example indicates pretty clearly that if you get people to conceptualize an ideal and a balanced ideal you know so what do you want for0:12:25your family what do you want for your career what do you want for your education what do you want for your character development how are you going to use your time outside of work how are0:12:35you going to structure your use of drugs and alcohol in places where you might get impulsive how can you avoid falling into a horrible pit if you really think that through and you come up with an0:12:44integrated ideal and you you put it above you as something to reach for then you're more committed to the world in a positive way and you're less0:12:55tormented by anxiety and uncertainty and so and that makes sense right because here you are alive and everything and so0:13:04unless you were capable if you're not capable of manifesting some positive relationship with the fact of your being then how could that be anything other0:13:13than hellish because you it would just be anxiety provoking and terrible because you're vulnerable and there'd be nothing useful or worthwhile to do well that's just not I just can't see that as0:13:24a winning strategy for anyone you can make a rational case for adopting that strategy in that you know you can say well there's no evidence for for a0:13:34transcendent morality or for an ultimate meaning there's no hard empirical evidence but it seems to me that there's existential evidence as well that has to0:13:43be taken into account and of course psych psychologists have talked about this a lot Carl Rogers for example in Hume for that matter Freud0:13:52for that matter most of the great psychologists have pointed out that you know you can derive reasonable information that's that's solid from your own experience especially if you0:14:01also talk to other people and you can kind of see in your own life when you're on a productive path that sort of in Nobles and enlightens you or a0:14:10destructive path and I think it's kind of useful to think that maybe the dichotomy between those two paths might be real you know and and because that0:14:22also allows you to give credence to your intuitions about that sort of thing but I don't anyways I don't think it's unreasonable to posit that since you're alive adopting the highest possible0:14:34regard for the fact that you're alive and that you're surrounded by other creatures that are alive I just can't see how that can possibly be construed as a losing strategy and so that's the0:14:44first thing so that's something like faith right it's faith it's not it's not only faith in your being but it's faith in being as such and the faith would be something like if you could orient your0:14:55being properly then maybe that would orient you with being as such and you never know like I mean it might be true0:15:04there's no reason to assume that it wouldn't be true I mean even if you just take a strict biological perspective on this and think about us as the product of three and a half billion years of0:15:14evolution I mean we have struggled over all those billions of years to be alive and to match ourselves with reality and so because one of the things I've often0:15:25wondered is you know life is definitely difficult there's no doubt about that and that's unfair and there's inequality and all of those things and people are subject to all sorts of terrible things0:15:34but I also wonder if you weren't actively striving to make things worse just how much better could they be0:15:43you know because people are very they like houses that are divided amongst themselves they're pointing in six0:15:52different directions at the same time they're working at cross-purposes to themselves because of bitterness or began and resentment and on what unprocessed memories and childhood0:16:03hatreds and unexamined assumptions all sorts of things and you you just gotta wonder if you could push that aside and or int yourself properly and then the0:16:13other thing that of course is stressed very heavily in the Old Testament and of course that goes through the entire biblical corpus is that it's not only0:16:23enough to establish a positive relationship with being which I think is the essential it's a good description of faith you have to make that decision right because being is very ambivalent0:16:33and you can make the case that maybe it's something that should have never happened but that doesn't seem to be productive to me and faith seems to be I'm going to0:16:43act as if being is ultimately justifiable and that if I partake in it properly I will improve it rather than making it worse so I think that's the0:16:52statement of faith and then what seems to go along with that is something like truth in conception and action you know0:17:01even people like Jacob who are pretty damn morally ambivalent to begin with get hammered a lot by what they go through and what seems to happen is that0:17:10they're hammered into some sort of ethical shape right so by the mid point of their life's journey there are people who are solidly planted who you can0:17:19trust and who don't betray being or themselves or their fellow man and so it's an interesting I mean it seems0:17:30reasonable to me to first assume that you have to establish a relationship with something that's transcendent it might even be just the future version of0:17:39you but and then second that you have to align yourself with reality in a truthful manner and that that's your best bet and0:17:52the biblical stories are actually quite realistic about that too because they don't really say that if you do that you're going to be instantly transported to the promised land0:18:01like even Moses as we'll find out in the Exodus stories he never makes it to the Promised Land and so it's not like you're offered instantaneous final0:18:11Redemption if you move out forthrightly into the world establish a faithful relationship with being an attempt to conduct yourself with integrity but it's0:18:22your best bet and it might be good enough and even if it's not good enough it's really preferable to the alternative which seems to be something0:18:31closely akin to hell both personal and social so Joseph's father is Jacob later0:18:41Israel he who wrestles with God and we've talked about that a little bit it's sort of implicit and what I've been saying is that I think we all do that to0:18:50some degree we wrestle with reality itself that's for sure not only the reality we understand but the reality we don't understand which is sort of a0:18:59transcendent reality and then maybe whatever reality is outside of that you know because the classic judeo-christian conception of God is that there's time and space and of course there's lots of0:19:10things about what exists in time and space that we're completely ignorant of and that's transcendent in that sense but then there's an idea that there's a realm outside of that which is a well0:19:21it's an interesting idea it's a very sophisticated idea I think rather than a simple idea it's it's difficult to know what to make of it but it doesn't really0:19:30matter because I think regardless of what your attitude is towards those sorts of things intellectually you still end up in the same position as Jacob for0:19:41all intents and purposes practically speaking because I don't think that there's anyone who at some point in their life or perhaps even everyday doesn't at some level wrestle with God0:19:51and you could just call it well the nature of reality I suppose if you want to be say reductionistic about it but I don't think it makes any difference it's0:20:00still something you're stuck with and it's not only the nature of reality itself that you have to struggle with but it's also the nature of your moral relationship to it0:20:09your behavioral relationship to it so that's how you should perceive it and how you should conduct yourself and then whether or not the the advantages of0:20:18doing it properly are worth the difficulty and the disadvantages so that seems to me just a straight existential statement then you know Jacob gets0:20:27damaged by his wrestling which is also very realistic so anyways he also ends up his father of Joseph who's the0:20:36favorite son son who's born in his old age to his favorite wife and that's who we're gonna talk about to you today so you remember so Jacob is the forefather0:20:47of the twelve tribes of Israel and there's his his wives and this son and the offspring that resulted those are0:20:56all the sons there's a daughter named Dinah as well and rachel is the woman he really loved and the first son he had with Rachel was Joseph and that was when0:21:05he was older and so that's in some sense why Joseph is his favorite so this is the beginning of the story of Joseph now0:21:15Israel Jacob loved Joseph more than all his children because he was the son of his old age and he made him a coat of many colors and there's a lot packed into those two sentences you know the0:21:26first is that now Israel loved Joseph more than all his other children that's probably not so good one of the things we've seen in the stories that have0:21:35preceded this is that whenever there's marked preference on the part of parents for one child over the other and in with with with with Jacob and Esau it was0:21:46Rachel was Jacob was Rachel's favorite and ISA was Isaac's fav0:21:56that didn't work out so well that put a real twist in the entire structure of the family and so there's a warning there right off the bat you might say0:22:05well you can't help having a preference for one child or for another but I don't know if that's true and it's certainly something that you should be very cautious about because it doesn't seem to work out very well because he was the0:22:15son of his old age fair enough and he made him a coat of many colors that's a very interesting image that coat of many colors that that idea and so I'm gonna0:22:25delve into that idea because it sets the stage like it says what sort of person Joseph is he's favored he's younger he's favored but he also has this particular0:22:34garment that characterizes him you know and one of the things I've really learned from analyzing women's dreams in particular is that women very frequently0:22:43in my experience very frequently dream of clothing as a role and so if you're interpreting women's dreams then if they put on the shoes of their grandmother0:22:52for example then you understand very rapidly that the dream is trying to make an association between their own behavior and something that's characteristic of either the state of0:23:03being a grandmother or the particular grandmother and it makes sense right because clothing protects but it also signifies a role and it's interesting in0:23:13in the Old Testament stories often if someone is going to act deceitfully they change their they change their outfit and that's kind of what you do when you act deceitfully right you dress up like0:23:24someone else you present yourself like someone else so anyways back to the coat of many colors well for something to be0:23:35many colored it sort of spans the entire gamut of possibility and so there's a hint there that if you want to be a full-fledged person that you have to0:23:49manifest a very large number of traits and so I want to go into that idea a bit the first thing I want to talk about is some of the things that we've learned0:23:58about what happens to you when you go to a new environment now there's this idea in very deep idea in clinical psychology a fundamental idea which is that if0:24:09someone's a just about something what you do is you and it's getting in their way you take what they're anxious about and you define it because that already delimits0:24:18it right because one of the problems with being anxious about something is you won't speak of it it's like Voldemort and then if you don't speak of it you it's way bigger than it should be as soon as you start0:24:27talking about it you cut it down to size and so and it it's for a bunch of reasons it's because you're not as afraid you're not as afraid of as many things as you think and you're braver0:24:37than you know and more and more capable so as soon as you're brave enough to start talking about what you're afraid of then you see that there's more to you than you thought and that there's less0:24:47to the problem than you thought and then you can decompose it further into smaller problems and then you can figure out how to approach those smaller problems and so and then it doesn't seem0:24:57to me to be that you get less frightened it seems to be that you get more courageous which is way better than being less frightened because there's lots of things to be frightened about so if you're courageous that that really0:25:07does the trick now the question is what happens if you like let's say that you're very socially inept and you don't know how to introduce yourself or to0:25:17make any establish the initial parts of a relationship with anyone and so then you start putting yourself in situations where you're required to do that and so0:25:26then the question is how is it technically that you transform you say well you learn well we want to be more specific about that what does it mean0:25:35that you learned well if you're dealing with someone who's particularly socially inept and you're doing psychotherapy with them you might teach them how to shake someone's hand properly and say0:25:44their name and remember the other person's name and so you just practice that with them so that they have the motoric routine down so that form of0:25:53knowledge is built right into your body it's like look at the person put out your hand shake it don't not like a dead halibut but you know with a reasonable0:26:02grip say your name don't mumble it look look at them so that they can hear you and then when they say their name try to remember it and that's then so you can0:26:11practice that with people and so then they develop something that's motoric right it's embedded right in their body and so and then you can say to them well the other thing you can do is when you0:26:21start a conversation is don't sit there thinking about what you're gonna say next because then you won't be paying attention to the person and you'll make a fool out of yourself because you'll manifest non sequiturs0:26:34right because you'll get out it's like if you're dancing and all you're paying attention to is where your feet are and you're gonna step on the other person all the time so you want to pay attention to the other person and then0:26:43whatever automatized social knowledge you have will come to the forefront so it's a good thing to know if you're socially anxious right if you're socially anxious one of the things you0:26:53should do is pay way more attention to the person you're talking to rather than less and you should pay as little attention as possible to yourself so if you feel yourself falling in because0:27:03you're anxious then what you do is you push your attention out and pay attention to the person because to the degree that you've been socialized then all your automatic responses will kick in so but anyway so you go out into the0:27:14social world and you learn to shake someone's hand and you learn how to listen to them and ask them questions because that's the next thing because people love you can't just ask them0:27:23random questions obviously but if they start talking to you and you don't understand something about what they're saying or maybe something they said is interesting and you ask them a question0:27:32they're pretty damn happy about that because it means you're actually paying attention to them and people actually love to be paid attention to because it hardly ever happens so they really0:27:42really like it and so okay so so what's happening well first of all your mastering them automated motor movements right where to point your eyes where to0:27:52put your hands how to move your lips like really embodied knowledge it's a special kind of memory and you're practicing them so that's building new0:28:01skills for you and then by listening to the person and watching yourself interact you're also generating new new0:28:10abstract information that enables you to conceptualize the world in a different way so if you go out to ten you go out and talk to ten different people or 500:28:19different people then you get to listen to what those 50 people said you get to watch how they're how they express themselves and you gather a corpus of0:28:28knowledge that changes the way you perceive that broadens you as a social agent okay so that's two forms of knowledge but then there's a third one which is real interesting which is that you know you0:28:38have a lot of biological potential and it's hard to know what potential is but part of it is that you're capable of generating proteins that you haven't0:28:49been generating so you should get right on that by the way so but what the way that works in part is that if you put yourself in a radically new situation then your brain that there are genetic0:29:00switches that turn on because of the demands of the new situation that code for new proteins so it's as if you have latent software that would be one way of0:29:11thinking about that will only be turned on if you go into the situation where that's necessary and so then you might think well if that's the case how much0:29:20of you could be turned on if you went a whole bunch of different places and that's a really really that's a profound question because one of the deep answers0:29:29to how you should get your life together is you should go a very large number of places and turn yourself on and I want0:29:40to walk through that a little bit because there's a very rich symbolic world that expresses that so now the idea about having a coat of many colors0:29:50would be that the person who is the appropriate leader because remember or the proper person which would be the same thing one of the things that these0:30:00old stories are trying to express and to figure out is how is it that you should act which is the same as what constitutes the ideal those are the same0:30:10question and the hand here with Joseph is well you should wear a coat of many colors which means that you should be able to go have a drink in the pub with the guys who are you know drywalling0:30:21your your house and you should be able to have a sophisticated conversation with someone who's more educated in an abstract way and that maybe you should be equally comfortable in both0:30:30situations right because you might think well there's more one of the indications that there's more to you is that you can be put more places and function properly0:30:42and that would be a good thing to aim at because here's the other issue is that you know perfectly well that the fun the mental tragedies of life and your0:30:52exposure to malevolence in the course of that life so those being the worst things there's not a lot you can do to to alter that fundamentally because0:31:01their conditions of existence you're going to be subject to your vulnerability and you're going to be subject to malevolence that's that and you can't hide from it because it0:31:11actually makes it worse so you're stuck with it so then the question is well what are your options and one option is to curse the structure of being for being malevolent and tragic and fair0:31:21enough and now there is to make yourself so damn differentiated and dynamic and able that you're more than a match for0:31:31that now that's not an easy thing but doesn't matter because like what what's the alternative there's no good alternative and that's also worth knowing so you see these0:31:45ideas expressed in the strangest places and so we've talked a little bit I think in this video series about Pinocchio but if we haven't it doesn't matter0:31:55you see there's Jiminy Cricket at the opening of the Pinocchio movie pointing to a star which is roughly the nativity0:32:05star for all intents and purposes and it's a it's a symbolic indicator of something Dimond like and pure right0:32:14glimmering in the darkness that's transcendent and above the horizon upon which to fix your eyes and so that's the thing is you need that technically and0:32:24the reason you need that is because we know enough about psychology now to know that almost all of the positive emotion that you're going to experience in your life and positive emotion is analgesic0:32:35by the way right it actually quells pain so it's not just positive it also gets rid of negative which is a big plus almost all the positive emotion that you're going to feel you're going to0:32:44feel in relationship to a goal because you feel positive emotion as you approach a goal and so if you want to feel positive emotion then you need a0:32:53goal and then you might think well if you want to maximize that positive emotion which is enthusiasm and also what pulls you out into the world as well as feeling good then you need the0:33:03possible goal well not because that's gonna engage the largest segments of your being like if your goal is too0:33:13narrow then a bunch of you isn't gonna be on board for it you know if the goal is well-developed and multifaceted then all of you can partake in that even your negative elements even your anger and0:33:23and your fear can get on board with that let's say so you need a goal man that's worthy you've got us thank you good you need a goal that justifies the tragedy0:33:32and malevolence of life that seems to be the bottom line now maybe you think well there's no goal that can do that it's like well there are still better and0:33:44worse goals so and I'm not convinced that there are no goals that can do that I think that's an open question you'd never know that until you pursued the0:33:54proper goal long enough to find out who you would be as a consequence of pursuing it so that's also your destiny or your existential voyage right it's0:34:03also not something that anyone else can do for you someone can say get your act together for Christ's sake and get it get get at it that's that'll make the0:34:12world unfold best for you but there's no way you can know that without doing it so and unless you think you've done a0:34:22particularly stellar job of that then you have no reason to doubt its potential validity so plus like crickets are telling you this and so you know0:34:33they're a very reliable source okay so you see the star the star recurs as a motif in Pinocchio and one of the more interesting elements of it here is that0:34:43when Geppetto wants to transform his puppet the marionette who's being played by forces that operate behind the scenes which is a really good definition of the0:34:53persona from a union perspective right and also something indicative of something like an ideological or conceptual possession Geppetto who's a0:35:03good guy is positive father figure Reid lifts his even though he's a patriarchal figure right and a very competent one he still even lifts his eyes up to0:35:12something that transcends his mode of being positive as it is and wishes that his creation would undertake the kind of0:35:21transformation that would make it autonomous and fully functional as a moral agent no strings right so that's very interesting I think Solzhenitsyn0:35:31said the salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all that's a pretty decent star-like goal I0:35:40would say and so what happens in the Pinocchio story is that because and I think this is a symbolic representative of what I just described you that0:35:49happens at a genetic level if you put yourself in new situations so Geppetto is roughly culture in the Pinocchio story right he's he's a craftsman he's0:36:00he's a and and he makes Pinocchio so he's he's who's his son he's the socializing agent and he aims for0:36:12something above mere socialization which is I think part of the mysterious element of human beings you know in our scientific models we basically have socialization and biology but there's0:36:22always a third element in mythological stories which is whatever you might construe as the spontaneous action of consciousness that's associated with0:36:31freewill and you know that's just basically being conceptualized in religious terms as something akin to the soul now we don't have a category for that scientifically because what we try0:36:41to do scientifically is to reduce everything either to socialization or to biology but it isn't clear to me that that's it's perfectly reasonable from0:36:51the perspective of practicality at a scientific level you don't want to multiply explanatory principles beyond necessity but there's many things that that doesn't come to terms with such as0:37:01the fact that we all treat each other as autonomous beings with freewill and that that seems to work and that if we stop doing that then things go to hell very very rapidly so and the mere fact that0:37:11we have been able to conceptualize what that conscious freewill might be metaphysically or physically doesn't mean it doesn't exist it just means that0:37:20we don't understand it I mean what it was only in the last 15 years that we discovered that 95 percent of the universe was made out of some kind of matter that we can't even0:37:30whose properties we can't even imagine except that it seems to have mass so anyways what happens is when Geppetto reach lifts his eyes up to the star he0:37:42so it's society aligning itself with the proper goal with regards to individual development right so so the instead of0:37:51society being at odds with the individual they line up and then what happens is nature comes onboard and that's the blue fairy in the in the Pinocchio story and that seems to me to0:38:00be a symbolic representation of what happens biologically when when you set the goal properly get your culture behind you and move into the world it's0:38:09that there's a biological transformation that occurs as a consequence of that which means that a bunch of you that hasn't been turned on turns on and I0:38:19guess one question would be is what would you be like if you turned on everything inside of you that could be turned on well that's a good goal that's a good thing to find out so now I'm0:38:33going to introduce a couple of other ideas so there's this idea in union psychology called the circumambulation and you only had this idea that you had0:38:42a potential future self which would be in potential everything that you could be and that it manifests itself moment to moment in your present life by making0:38:53you interested in things and the things that you're interested in are the things that would guide you along the path that would lead you to maximal development now it sounds of like a metaphysical0:39:04idea or a or a mystical idea even but but it's not it's it's not it's a really profoundly biological idea the idea is something like well you're set up so0:39:15that you're automatically interested in those things that was fully expand you as a well adapted creature well like there's nothing radical about that idea0:39:24how else what else could possibly be the case unless there's something fundamentally flawed about you that is what the the situation would be it's0:39:33kind of interesting to think about how that would be manifest moment to moment but the idea is something like well your interest is captured by those things that lead you down the path of0:39:43development well that better be the case okay so that's fine and so there's some utility in pursuing those things that you're interested in that's the call to adventure let's say so and the call to0:39:54adventure takes you all sorts of places now the problem with the call to adventure is like what the hell do you know you might be interested in things that are kind of warped and bent and0:40:03often it's the case that when new parts of people manifest themselves and grip their interest say they do it very badly0:40:12and shoddily and so you stumble around like an idiot when you try to do something new that's where the fool is the precursor to the savior from the from the symbolic perspectives because0:40:22you have to be a fool before you can be a master and if you're not willing to be a fool then you can't be a master so so you're gonna it's it's an error mmm0:40:31error ridden process and that's also laid out in the Old Testament stories because the first thing that happens to all these patriarchal figures when God kicks them out of their father's house0:40:40when they're like 84 is that they they run into all sorts of trouble and some of its social and some of its natural and some of it's a consequence of their0:40:49own moral inadequacy so they're fools and but but the thing that's so interesting is that despite the fact that they're fools they're still supposed to go on the adventure and that0:41:00they're capable of learning enough as a consequence of moving forward on the adventure so that they straighten themselves out across time and so it's something like this so this0:41:09circumambulation that young talked about was this continual will return to this this continual circling in some sense of who you could be you might notice for0:41:19example that there are themes in your life you know when you go back across your experiences you see you kind of have your typical experience that sort of repeats itself and there might be0:41:28variation on it like a musical theme but it's it's like you're circling yourself and getting closer to yourself as you move across time0:41:37that's the circumambulation now you remember that for a second as well go back to it okay so imagine that something glimmers before you it's an interest that's dawning and you decide0:41:47well first of all you're paralyzed you think well how do I know if I should pursue that it's probably a stupid idea and the proper response to that is you're right it probably is a stupid0:41:56idea because almost all all ideas are stupid and so the probability that as you move forward on your adventure that you're gonna get it right the first time is zero it's just0:42:07not gonna happen and so then you might think well maybe I'll just wait around until I get the right idea and which people do right so they're like 40 year old thirteen year olds0:42:17which is not a good idea so they wait around until it's Waiting for Godot until they finally got it right but the problem is you're too stupid to know0:42:26when you've got it right so waiting around isn't gonna help because even if it the perfect opportunity manifested itself to you in your incomplete form the probability0:42:36that you would recognize it as the perfect opportunity is zero you might even think it's the worst possible idea that you've ever heard of anywhere highly likely highly likely so so you0:42:47had there's niches nature called data will will - stupidity which I really liked so because he thought of stupidity as being it you know it's it's you have0:42:57to take it into account fundamentally and work with it and so and so you can take these tentative steps on your pathway to destiny and you can assume0:43:08that you're gonna do it badly and that's really useful because you don't have to beat yourself up it's pretty easy to do it badly but the thing is it's way better to do it badly than not to do it0:43:18at all and that's the continual message that echoes through these historical stories in Genesis it's like these are flawed people they should have got the0:43:27hell out of their house way before they did and they go out and they stumble around in tyranny and famine and self betrayal and and violence and but it's a0:43:39hell of a lot better than just rotting away at home and that's the that's great so that's good and so why is that well okay so you you start your path and you0:43:48think that you're heading you know towards your star and so you go in that direction and then because you're here the world looks a particular way but0:43:58then when you move here the world looks different and you're different as a consequence of having made that voyage and so what that means is that now that0:44:07thing that glimmers in front of you is going to have shifted location because you weren't very good at specifying it to begin with and now that you're a little sharper and more0:44:17focused than you were it's it's going to reveal itself with more accuracy to you and so then you have to take you know0:44:27it's almost like 180 degree reversal but it isn't because you know you've I mean you've gone this far and that's a0:44:36long ways to get that far but that's a lot farther than you would be if you just stayed where you were waiting and0:44:45so it doesn't matter that you overshoot continually because as you overshoot even if you don't learn what you should0:44:55have done you're going to continually learn what you shouldn't keep doing and if you learn enough about what you shouldn't keep doing then that's0:45:04tantamount at some point to learning at the same time what you should be doing so it's okay so it's like this now0:45:14what's cool about it though I think is that as you progress the degree of overshooting starts to decline right and that we know that there's nothing0:45:23hypothetical about that as you learn a new skill like even to play it play a song on the piano for example you over shoot madly you're making all sorts of mistakes to begin with and then the0:45:33mistakes they disappear there's a great TED talk I think it was about this guy0:45:42set up a really advanced computational recording system in his home and recorded every single utterance his young child made while learning to speak0:45:52and then he put together the child's attempts to say certain phonemes and put them in the list and you can hear the child deviating madly to begin with and0:46:03then after hundreds and hundreds of repetitions just zeroing right in on the exact phoneme so you know I you might not know this but when kids babble0:46:12because they start babbling when they're quite young they babble every human phoneme including all sorts of phonemes that adults can't say and then they they0:46:21die into their language so that after they learn say English then there's all sorts of phonemes they can no longer hear or pronounce but to begin with it's0:46:30all there which is really quite interesting but so they zip as they learn a particular language they zero in on the proper way to pronounce that and their errors0:46:40minimize and every time you learn something that's how it is and that's really useful to know too because it means that it's okay to wander around stupidly before you fix your destination0:46:50now you see that echoed in exodus right because what happens is that the Egyptians or the Hebrews escaped a tyranny which is kind of whatever you do0:46:59personally and psychologically when you escape from your previous set of stupidly held and ignorant and stubborn axioms it's like away from that tyranny0:47:09it's like great I freed myself from that well then what well you think well now I'm on the way it's no you're not now you're in the desert where you wander0:47:18around stupidly you know and worship the wrong things until you finally organize yourself morally again and head in the proper direction so that's worth knowing0:47:27too because you think well I got rid of a lot of things baggage excess baggage that I didn't need in my life and now everything's okay it's like no it's not0:47:37you've got rid of a whole set of scaffolds that were keeping you in place even though they were pathological now you have nothing and nothing actually turns out to be better than something0:47:47pathological but you're still stuck with the problem of nothing and and that's well that's exactly why exodus is structured the way that it is it's that0:47:56you escape from eternity its terrain we're no longer slaves yeah well now you're nihilistic and lost it's not necessarily an improvement but it is but0:48:06it is the pre see it's also useful to know that because you can also be deluded into the idea that imagine that you're trying to become enlightened which might mean to turn all those parts0:48:16of you on that could be turned on you think well that's just a linear pathway uphill you know it's just from one success to another it's no it's not it's like here you are and you're not doing0:48:25too badly and the first step is a complete bloody catastrophe it's worse and then maybe you can pull yourself together and you hit a new plateau and0:48:34then that crumbles and shakes and bang it's worse again and so because part of the reason that people don't become enlightened is because it's punctuated by intermittent deserts0:48:44essentially by intermittent catastrophes and if you don't know that well then you're basically screwed because you go ahead on your movement forward and you0:48:53collapse and you think well that didn't work I collapsed it's like no that's par for the course it's not indication that you failed it's just indication that0:49:02it's really hard and that when you learn something you also unlearn something and the thing you unlearned is probably useful and unlearning it actually is painful you know let's say if you have to get0:49:11out of a bad relationship it's like not every not any real there isn't any relationship that's a hundred percent bad and so when you jump out of it well0:49:20maybe you're in better shape but you're still lonesome and disoriented and you don't know what your past was and you don't know what your present is and you don't know what your future is it's that's not that's why people stay with0:49:31the devil they know instead of you know looking for the devil they don't know so so anyways the fact that you're full of0:49:40faults doesn't mean you have to stop and thank God for that that's a really useful thing and the fact that you're full of faults doesn't mean that you0:49:50can't learn and so you can pause it an ideal and you're gonna be wrong about it but it doesn't matter because what you're right about is positing the ideal moving towards it if the actual ideal0:50:01isn't conceptualize perfectly well first surprise surprise cuz like what are you going to do that's perfect so it doesn't0:50:10matter that it's imperfect imperfect it just matters that you do it and that you move forward so that's really that's really positive news as far as I'm concerned because you can actually do0:50:19that right you can do it badly anyone can do that so that's that's useful okay so like if you were an efficient person you would have just done that but you're0:50:29not but who cares you know you still end up in the in the same place and maybe the trip is even more interesting who knows probably two interesting young I0:50:40began to understand that the goal of psychic development by which he means psychological development or spiritual development is the self there's no0:50:50linear evolution there's only a circumambulation of the self a getting closer it's like it's like you're spiraling into something something like that and the thing that0:51:00you're spiraling into recedes as you move towards it and gets more and more sophisticated and well developed as you move towards it because you're not gonna0:51:09run out of goals right no matter how much you have your act together there's probably undoubtedly 30 dimensions along which you could get0:51:18your act together a lot more so and some of those aren't even conceivable to you when you're in your initial on carved state let's say uniform development0:51:28exists at most at the beginning later everything points towards the center this insight gave me stability and gradually my inner peace returned so0:51:41this is fun on the left there that's the short Cathedral that's the one that has the maze in it that I told you about they actually light that up with lasers now0:51:50and so that's it lit up with lasers and so so they're turning it into a Cathedral of light which i think is really fascinating and it's a it's a0:51:59continuation of the same idea right because the stained glass windows were obviously I wouldn't call them primitive attempts to do that I mean stained glass windows are pretty impressive you know0:52:09buddy it's an elaboration of the same thing so now you can go to that Cathedral they light up the whole town like that which is really something and so there and there's how the cathedral0:52:18is built it's a cross and remember the cross is an X that marks the center of the world and the cross is the place where each individual is and I think0:52:27that's the fundamental message of Christianity is the cross marks the place where every single individual is and it's a tragic place that consists of0:52:37suffering and exposure to malevolence and that the only way to come to terms with it is to accept it and that seems to me I don't see anything metaphysical0:52:47about that statement whatsoever it's like well x marks the spot fair enough you're in a spot you're right in the center of your world it's right in the center of the world as far0:52:56as you're concerned and the same with the rest of us it's characterized by suffering and exposure to malevolence there's no doubt about that what are you gonna do about that0:53:05bitter resentful hateful all that does is make it worse so you have to accept it now that's not an easy thing because that's actually I would say a heroic0:53:14task to voluntarily accept the conditions of your own existence and that happens out the cross so that's fine and that's associated with light0:53:23well that's good that that's associated with light you wouldn't want that to be associated with darkness that would be a bad thing so and so there's the there's0:53:37the the labyrinth that was built in 1280 and so the idea is you walk in here it's0:53:47the same idea as that star sequence of slides that I just showed you so here's the ideas that north south west and east0:53:56so that's the whole world laid out in two dimensions and so the question is how do you get to the center now we already know what the center is the center is the center of the cross that's0:54:06the place of maximal suffering you could say maximal malevolence as well but it's also the place where that's transcendent so how do you get there well the answer0:54:15is well you don't just stand on the outside looking in that's not gonna help so and you can't just run right to the center even if0:54:25you're in California and so you have to walk in here and then you see you go like this and you go to every single0:54:37place every single place on that on that little cosmos and then once you've gone to every single place and expanded0:54:46yourself as a consequence of going north and west and east and south then there's enough of you so that you're at so that you can tolerate being first of all that you could figure out where the center is0:54:55but also that you can tolerate being at the center and so that's what that represents that's pretty and look I mean let's make no mistake about it hey0:55:05people were pretty damn serious about those ideas like that's a that's quite the piece of work for people in the 12th century you know those some of those damn cathedrals took 300 years to build we0:55:16don't build anything that takes 300 years people were putting a lot of effort into whatever these things meant you know and if you think they meant bearded man in0:55:25the sky then you know it's hard to it's hard to account for the kind of motivation that would produce these0:55:34buildings with that kind of paucity of conceptualization you know the towns and and it was certainly the case in charge is that they groaned under the tax0:55:45burden that was required to produce these now you might think well that's partly tyrannical and no doubt that's the case but but that's not the whole0:55:55story the whole story is that the people who produce those buildings they thought about every bit of it it's nothing's accidental and they're trying to portray0:56:05something just like that window is trying to portray something that's the same thing as this it's the center from which all things manifest themselves you0:56:14see it that's Christ there and being portrayed as as that center or the center within him something like that very much like the chakras and in in yogic practice0:56:26same basic idea it's the opening up of the internal structure and and and its proper realization so there are people0:56:38walking the labyrinth so that's the coat of many colors right that's that's this0:56:47differentiated mode of being that enables you to be competent and at home in the widest possible number of places and that that's a real differentiation0:56:58of your personality it's a breaking through the boundaries of your personality including the ones that you impose on yourself to become someone0:57:09who's useful wherever they're put and that's really relevant to this story of Joseph - because one of the things that happens to Joseph is that well a lot of0:57:18bad things happen to him because he's the favorite of his father his brothers hate him and so the first they're gonna throw him in a pit I think they do throw0:57:27him in a pit then they sell them to be a slave then he ends up in we'll go through the story he ends up some places where you probably wouldn't want to go prison0:57:36being one of them but it doesn't matter because even when they put him in prison he's actually not imprisoned he just0:57:46figures out how to make the prison work way better and then he's in control of the prison and it really it's an interesting I had this friend you know0:57:55and he was very smart but very cynical and he wasn't employed very well and he got a little older and he should have0:58:04given his level of intelligence and employability and so he had to take jobs that weren't very intellectually challenging you know and one of the things I tried to convince him of was0:58:14that even if he worked he wanted to work behind the parts department in an automotive store because he liked cars but it was beneath him you know because it was sort of a as far as he was0:58:25concerned it was a he was too smart for a job like that which actually turned out not to be true he wasn't smart enough for a job like that or he wasn't wise enough but you know what one of the0:58:34things I tried to tell him was then you're looking at the situation wrong because even in a simple job so-called simple job like let's say dishwashing in0:58:43a restaurant which I did an awful lot of it's not that simple you're dealing with a lot of other people very fast staff changeover you're feeding people you're0:58:52helping them have a celebration you're helping them take a break like you can do it really well and then the kitchen can operate properly and then people can0:59:02come out to the restaurant it's not a bloody catastrophe and like your even when you're doing something that's a menial job so to speak like dishwashing there are ways of doing it really badly0:59:12resentfully and horribly and doing it really well and as soon as you do it really well it's not a menial job anymore it immediately transforms no I mean you0:59:22can be around people who won't let that happen and you should go get another job if that's the case but if you do it properly then it's not menial at all and that's also a good way out of resentment0:59:35you think well I've just got this you know two-bit job it's like yeah what if you did it as well as you possibly could you know what would happen well the first thing that would happen is you'd get a lot smarter that's for sure and0:59:46that that's hardly a negative thing okay so that's the coat of many colors so it's an intimation of0:59:55what Joseph is like and what we're seeing with all of these patriarchal figures is the continual realization of the ideal person right you could think1:00:04about it as successive approximations of the ideal person and the story is exploring all sorts of different possibilities including ones that are1:00:13very violent and catastrophic and malevolent it's trying to cover the entire territory and to focus in on what's the proper way through the maze1:00:23the maze of life the labyrinth and the hint here is that while you should be multi-dimensional these are the generations of Jacob Joseph being 171:00:33years old was feeding the flock with his brethren and the lad was with his sons of Bilhah and with the sons of Zilpah his father's wives and Joseph brought unto his father their evil report well1:00:45we already know that Joseph is Jacob's favorite so that doesn't make him very popular among his brothers he's younger and now we also find out that he's been1:00:54set up more or less as you might say a snitch because that's what this phrase means is that he goes out and watches his older brothers and if they do1:01:03something they shouldn't do then he comes trotting back to Jacob and reports well that's not gonna make you popular so and you would say well is that1:01:12Joseph's problem or jacob's problem and I would say and this is something I learned from reading dealing to is that that's a conspiratorial problem right is1:01:23it's the parents at fault but so is the child who agrees to do that they've they've got a little cabal going and you1:01:33might say well it's only the parents fault but the son will be taking advantage of every advantage that offers him because he could say no to I won't1:01:42do that so anyway so Joseph is the favorite he's a bit of a teacher's pet that's what it looks like now Israel1:01:53loved Joseph more than all his colors because he was the son of his old age and he made him a coat of many colors and when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren they hated him and1:02:02could not speak peaceably unto him so let's say you have a child or number of children and one of them is your favorite how should you treat that child well it isn't obvious that you do them1:02:13any favors by overtly making them your favorite right I mean first of all maybe you don't challenge them as much as you should and second of all you definitely1:02:22set up a Cain and Abel like scenario in the household and that or maybe it's an eatable situation too because you happen to love your child more than you love your your spouse which is that's not a1:02:33recipe for familial harmony so it seems to be a bad idea okay so now we have two reasons that Joseph is not liked by his1:02:43brothers is one is well he's a bit of a Rat Fink and the other is that he's the peas the favorite and he's playing that to the hilt by the looks of things and1:02:52when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren then all his brethren they hated him and could not speak peaceably unto him okay1:03:02and Joseph dreamed a dream and he told it to his brethren and they hated him the more he said unto them hear I pray you this dream which I have dreamed for1:03:12behold we were binding wheat sheaves in the field and lo my sheaf arose and behold your sheaves stood round about and bowed to my sheaf and his and1:03:25remember he's yeah the young one right and and also the daughter of the favorite wife which is another thing that's or the son of the favorite wife which is another thing not really working in his favor and his brethren1:03:35said to him shalt thou indeed reign over us or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us and they hated them yet the more for his dreams and for his words well1:03:44there there's a shock you know that makes perfect sense so and it gets worse so you see here well there's the wheat sheaves bowing there and and then you1:03:54see this what's going on here well that's not the end of his let's call it grandiosity and there's an idea to in in the Old Testament especially in the1:04:04stories of Joseph that if God sends you a dream twice he really means it and so I don't know if that's true although I do know that people have repeating dreams it might be true that the a dream1:04:14you have twice is really trying to punch something home you know it's certainly the case that recurrent nightmares are meaningful and that recurrent nightmares1:04:23are associated quite tightly with decreased states of mental health and that if you can treat the nightmare which is often quite easy by the way1:04:32then the some of the mental health problems will decrease so repeated dreams seem to be important anyways he dreamed yet another dream and told it to1:04:42his brethren and said behold I've had another dream and be and behold the Sun and the moon and the Eleven stars bowed to me and he told it to his father and1:04:52to his brothers and his father rebuked him and said unto you unto Him what is this dream that thou has dreamed shall I in my and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow down ourselves to1:05:02thee to the earth and his brethren envied him but his father observed to saying well what the hell do you make of1:05:11something like that right if someone tells you that it's like are they responsible for their dreams we don't really seem we don't really hold ourselves responsible for for the1:05:22dreams we have at night and what do you make of a dream is like one of the things that Jung pointed out this is where he differed from Freud substantially as Freud tended to think1:05:31that the dream hid its meaning because its contents weren't acceptable to the conscious mind and Jung said no no you don't understand that's not what happens1:05:41what happens is the dream is doing the best it can to express something that the person doesn't yet really know and Jung thought about the dream as a manifestation of nature it wasn't1:05:51associated with the ego at all it was just like you have a dream and there are things happening and it the same way that when you walk into a dinner party there are things happening there you1:06:00know it's not the dream isn't something that's subject to your capacity for manipulation it's something that happens to you not something that you do and so1:06:09so if someone has a dream like that well you've got three options you can just discount dreams altogether which is what people in the modern world tend to do1:06:18which is a very bad idea because there are thoughts and you shouldn't discount them you know I mean and they're hardly random as some neuroscientists claim that's1:06:27absolutely cockeyed theory that random he like television snow on a TV set if it was random so so one is while you1:06:36just discount dreams the other is that you consider the person a liar and a braggart and a narcissist and the third is well what's the third it's like he1:06:46dreamt that the Sun and the moon and the stars bowed down to him you might think about that two or three times so but it's not necessarily something that's1:06:56going to make you happy and his brethren went to feed their father's flock and shechem so they took off and Israel said unto Joseph do you not thy brethren feed the flock and Shechem come and I will1:07:06send thee unto Him and he said him and he said to him here here am I and when they saw him afar off even before he1:07:15came near unto them they conspired against him to slay him rough people back then right this is this sort of thing is happening quite frequently and1:07:26they said to one another behold the dreamer cometh come now therefore let us slay him cast him into some pit and we1:07:35will say some evil beast hath devoured him and we shall see what becomes of his dreams so there's an echo of the Cain and Abel story there obviously you know I mean it's not quite as clear because1:07:47in the Cain and Abel story Abel is clearly just doing well and here you can't quite get a handle on Joseph's character you can't tell if he is actually the elect or if he's just a1:07:57spoiled brat with delusions of grandeur you know and but it doesn't matter because his brothers are so irritated at his the fact that he's favored and1:08:07perhaps even the fact that he might be someone destined for for something special that they find it perfectly1:08:16reasonable to destroy that and it's so hard so interesting how often that motif of pulling down an ideal manifests1:08:26itself in these old stories right it's it's the pattern is established in the Cain and Abel story it just repeats and repeats and repeats and I think that's dead true I think it just repeats all1:08:36the time so that people are annoyed about how tragic their lives are annoyed that they're subject to malevolence and they're annoyed that they're not doing as well as other1:08:46people are doing and that makes them that puts them exactly into this state of mind now maybe with modern people if you're gonna kill someone because you're1:08:56resentful as a modern person you don't generally slay them and throw them into a pit you know what you do is you just kill them slowly over a few decades and it isn't obvious to me that that's any1:09:06better so I've seen plenty of married couples who were in that situation it's like it's like yeah well there is this1:09:16mitch hedberg he used to complain about turtlenecks hey so it was like being strangled by a really weak midget it's1:09:25probably really politically incorrect jokes but it's a funny joke so and then you see you see relationships that are1:09:36like that it's like each person has their hands around the neck of the other person but they don't have enough courage to actually to squeeze they just put enough pressure on just cut the1:09:45circulation off a tiny bit so the person just gets like they die over a 30-year period something like that so yeah and1:09:56you all laugh because you know it's true that's why and we will say some evil beast half devoured him which would be true actually it would be the evil beast1:10:06that's inside the brothers and we shall see what will become of his dreams haha that's a that's interesting too because so they want to spite themselves1:10:17because maybe Joseph is something special and then they want to spite their father which is probably not the wisest idea because they owe him some1:10:26gratitude I mean maybe he's acting like a pain in the neck there's some evidence for that but this is a little bit harsh but they also want to spite God just like Cain did because that's what it1:10:36means we shall see what will become of his dreams right because then as soon as you're in some sense trying to fight against the intuition of someone the1:10:46natural intuition of someone you set yourself up against the structure of being itself and so pretty bad and Ruben heard it and he delivered them1:10:56out of their hands and said no let us not kill him and Ruben said unto them shed no blood but cast him into this pit that's in the wilderness it's like Rubens the good guy in this1:11:05story yeah and and there's no water in the pit by the way inlay no hand upon him that he might rid him out of their hands to deliver him to his father again1:11:16hmm so Ruben was actually trying to save him said he might rid him out of their hands to deliver him to his father again and it came to pass when Joseph came unto1:11:27his brethren that they stripped him of his coat his coat of many colors that was on him and they took him and cast him into a pit and the pit was empty and there was no water in it and then they1:11:42sat down to eat bread and lifted up their eyes and looked and behold a company of Ishmaelites come came from Gilead with their camels bearing spices and balm and myrrh going to carry it1:11:51down to Egypt and Judah said unto his brethren how does it profit us if we kill our brother and conceal his blood so he's the practical guy here's what1:12:01why would we kill him when we can sell him it's like come let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and let not our hand be upon him for he is our brother in our flesh and his brethren were content then1:12:13there passed by Midianites merchantman and they drew and lifted up joseph out of the pit and sold joseph to the Ishmaelites for 20 pieces of silver it's a amount that echoes through into the1:12:24future and they brought Joseph into Egypt I'm never really sure how these slavery stories work it's like so it's two 2,500 3,000 years ago and I decided1:12:33I'm gonna sell you to the Ishmaelites and that just works out they I get the money you get to be a slave and they take you away I don't really understand how that works I can't figure out how1:12:42people weren't just selling each other all the time but maybe if your family you can do it1:12:52so they're they sold him and Reuben returned to the pit and behold Joseph was not there and Reuben rent his1:13:01clothes so Reubens very upset about this and he returned unto his brothers and said the child is not and I where shall I go and they conspired they took Joseph's1:13:10coat and killed a kid of the goats and dipped the coat in the blood that's interesting too because blood is actually another color right so he's got this coat of many colors and blood is1:13:21definitely a color and so this is the addition in some sense of the color of blood to Joseph's coat and I would say it's probably a necessary color because1:13:32I don't think that you're serious enough till your coat has been dipped in blood that can happen in many ways and they sent the coat of many colors and they brought it to their father and said so1:13:43they lied to him it's very very nasty business this they they sell his son to slavery they claim that he's dead they lied to him they they put him into an1:13:53extreme state of grief there's a lot of hatred underneath that right tremendous amount of hatred for Joseph and also for Jacob this we have found know now1:14:05whether it be thy sons coat or not and he knew it he said it's my son's coat and evil beast has devoured him Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces and1:14:15Jacob tore his clothes and put sackcloth on his loins and mourned for many days and all his sons and daughters rose up to comfort him but he refused to be comforted and he said I'll go down unto1:14:24my grave mourning my son does his father wept for him so that's Jacob collapsing1:14:34at the news and the Midianites sold Joseph into Egypt unto Potiphar an1:14:44officer of Pharaohs and captain of the guard and Joseph was brought down to Egypt and port afar an officer of Pharaoh captain of the guard and Egyptian bought him of the hands of the1:14:53Ishmaelites which had brought him down thither so now he's a slave so now you'd think well that would be this is a man1:15:02who has a lot of reason to be irritated at the structure of reality right he's gone from being the favorite to being betrayed by all of his brothers that's1:15:11pretty rough and then he's being transformed into a slave and now he's being he's being sold to work as a slave so you'd think that that would corrupt1:15:20his character because you know one of the things I think this is the case anyways I think people are always looking for an excuse to have their character corrupted because if1:15:29your character is corrupted then you get to lie and you get to cheat you get to steal and you get to betray and you get to act resentfully and you get to do nothing and that's all easy it's easier1:15:38to lie than to tell the truth it's easier to do nothing than to do something so there's always part of you thinking well I need a justification for being useless and horrible because1:15:47that'd be a lot less work and so then if something terrible comes along you think AHA that's just exactly the excuse that1:15:56I was waiting for and then out all that comes you know Solzhenitsyn when he was in the concentration camps in Russia watching how people behaved you know he1:16:08said that there were people that were put in the camps who immediately became trustees or guards and they were even more vicious than the people who had been hired as guards and his idea was1:16:17that they had collected all that he called it foul Ness if I remember correctly around them in normal life but1:16:27they didn't have the opportunity to express it but as soon as you gave them the opportunity it was like there it was right away and so so one of the messages1:16:37that seems to echo through these old testament stories is that just because something terrible happens to you doesn't mean that you get to be that you1:16:47get to wander off the path and make things worse and maybe it doesn't matter how terrible it is that what happens to you that's a tough call you know because1:16:57you see people now and then in life who they've really got it rough man like 50 bad things are happening to them at the same time and you think oh it's no wonder if you were bitter and resentful1:17:06and hostile be like yeah no wonder but then you meet people and Solzhenitsyn again talked about this in the Gulag Archipelago he said he met lots of people in the North Lodz1:17:15he met enough people to impress him in the concentration camp system who didn't allow their misfortunes to corrupt them and that's something because maybe the1:17:25only real misfortune is to become corrupted that's a really useful thing to think you know maybe the rest of it maybe the rest of it is trivial in1:17:35comparison I know that's a rough thing because you can be in very harsh circumstances but I do think there's something to that and the Lord was with Joseph and he was a prosperous man and he was in the house1:17:45of his master the Egyptian and his master saw that the Lord was with him and that Lord made all that he did to prosper in his hand so that's an echo of the idea that we encountered earlier about walking with God right so Adam1:17:56walked with God before he ate the fruit with Eve and then he wouldn't walk with God and then Noah walked with God and Abraham walked with God and so the idea is well that's that alignment with the1:18:06highest ideal I think it's something like that and you know we could think about that as a metaphysical claim as well but I don't think it is I mean I've1:18:16got thousands of letters now in the last year from people who have told me that they were in a pit that's exactly right1:18:26and that they decided that they were going to try to put their lives together and that it worked and so that's really1:18:36something you know when they write surprised it's like well I decided that I was gonna work hard at what I was doing and I wasn't gonna lie any more than absolutely necessary I thought I'd give it a try for a few months you know1:18:46and all sorts of good things started to happen to me it's like maybe that's how the world works now obviously it doesn't work like that all the time right1:18:55because you can get sliced off at the knees I mean there's an arbitrary element to existence that that you can't wish away but that doesn't mean that1:19:04there are it doesn't mean that there aren't bad strategies and good strategies and so I do think that one of1:19:14the most fundamental existential questions is like if things aren't going well for you and your life is are you absolutely certain that you're doing absolutely everything you can to put1:19:23things in order because if you're not then you shouldn't complain because you don't know to what degree you're actually contributing or even causing the circumstance now that's a very1:19:33annoying thing to think and I'm not trying to blame the victim you know I know that people end up with lung cancer because they were exposed to asbestos you know and I'm not trying to although I also know too that if you1:19:43have lung cancer because you've been exposed to asbestos that can be a tragedy or it can be hell and to some degree that depends on how you conduct yourself so I mean I know that's pretty gloomy1:19:53possibilities right but so anyway so Joseph is a slave but it turns out that he's uh he hasn't sacrificed the1:20:03integrity of his character and so it turns out that being it turns out that he's not a slave it's just that everyone around him thinks he's a slave but he's not so that's pretty interesting he was1:20:16a goodly person and well favored well so he's a good guy and he's an impressive specimen as well this is pretty interesting given the current political1:20:25climate I would say and it came to pass after these things that his master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph and she said lie with me that means that1:20:35actually has two meanings right but he refused and said unto his master's wife1:20:45behold my master does not know what's with me in the house and he's committed all that he has to my hand there's no1:20:55one greater in this house than I neither hath he kept back anything for me but you because you are his wife how then can I do this great wickedness1:21:04wickedness and sin against God and it came to pass as she spake to Joseph day by day that he hearkened not unto her to1:21:14lie by her or be with her it's being sexually harassed Joseph and it came to pass well its rounds right I mean look look at the painting and it came to pass1:21:31about this time that Joseph went into the house to do his business and there was none of the men of the house there with in and she caught him by his garment saying lie with me and he left1:21:41his garment in her hand and fled and got him out so that's so kind of embarrassing for poor Joseph I would say and a bit on the suspicious side and it1:21:51came to pass when she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and was fled forth that she called unto the men of her house and spake unto them see see he hath brought in a Hebrew to mark us1:22:01he came in unto you lie with me and I cried with a loud voice so what is it hell hath no fury like a woman scorned that's the proper1:22:12commentary on that and it came to pass when he heard that I lifted up my voice and cried that he left his garment with me and fled and got himself out and it1:22:21came to pass when his master heard the words of his wife so that's the farro which she spake unto him saying after this manner did thy servant to me his wrath was kindled and joseph's master1:22:31took him and put him in prison a place where the Kings prisoners were was were bound and he was there in the prison well that sort of sucks it's like first1:22:41his brothers betray him and throw him in a pit and then he gets made a slave which is probably better than being in the pit and then he becomes sort of like King slaves so that's working out pretty1:22:50well and now someone lies about him he gets betrayed again and now it's into the prison with him and so it's this it's this again right it's the same thing it's Sisyphus up with the rock and1:23:01then down and it's order chaos order chaos and then you have to think well are you the order or you the chaos or you the thing that's moving between them1:23:11because that's the right thing to be because otherwise you're just order and that's a really bad idea or you're just chaos and that's a really bad idea you can be the thing that's dynamically1:23:21mediating between them and that's what he's doing but the Lord was with Joseph and showed him mercy and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison1:23:31that's no easy thing to do I would think you know it's like you're thrown in prison and now the jailer likes you now how exactly are you going to manage that1:23:40it's a good thing to think about because you might think well if you were really in dire straits how is it that you should conduct yourself so that you have the highest probability of having things1:23:49work out and it's not saying well Joseph took over the thumbscrew you know and started using that on the other prisoners that that's not the indication1:23:58here at all it's that he's doing something he's acting like a person who isn't a prisoner even though he's in the prison just like he was acting like1:24:07someone who wasn't a slave when he was a slave and so it makes you wonder who you can be1:24:18despite the fact that other people think that you're whatever you appear to be and the keeper of the prison committed to Joseph's hand all the prisoners that were in the prison and whatsoever they1:24:28did there he was the doer of it the keeper of the prison looked not to anything that was under his hand because the Lord was with him and that which he did the Lord made it to prosper so it's1:24:40a repeat its a repeat of exactly what happened when he was the slave of the Pharaoh except it's one rung deeper into hell so to speak right so it's slave1:24:49Pharaoh and here it's prisoner jail master but it doesn't matter the same thing happens so now Joseph is imprisonment the Pharaoh has a fit one day of peak and throws the chief of his1:25:00Butler's into prison and the chief of his Baker's and they have a dream each of them and Joseph interprets the dreams seems to be something that he can1:25:10do and he tells the butler that his dream means that the Pharaoh was going to forgive him and put him back in his1:25:19position and he tells the baker that the Pharaoh isn't going to forgive him and that he's going to take off his head and hang him in a tree which was rather1:25:29rough dream but that is what huh that's what happens so anyways that the Baker or the butler goes free and Joseph says look you know maybe you could just keep in mind the fact that I did you a bit of1:25:41a favor here and told you something that was accurate but the chief didn't really remember once he once he was freed interpreting dreams in prison and so now1:25:55the Pharaoh has a dream and he actually has two dreams so it's another one of those doubled motifs so the ideas these are really important dreams because they1:26:04came in a pair and behold there came out of the river seven well-favored kind and fat flesh so cattle and they fed the men1:26:14Oh meadow and behold seven other cattle came up after the Mount of the river ill-favored and lean fleshed starving and stood by the other cows on the brink1:26:24of the river and the ill-favored and lean flesh I did eat up the seven well-favored and fat so Pharaoh awoke hey fair enough1:26:34it's pretty nasty dream and then he has another dream to hit it home and he slept and dreamt the second time and behold seven years of corn came up upon1:26:45one stalk rankin good and behold seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind sprung up after them and the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full1:26:54ears and Pharaoh awoke and beheld it was a dream and then it says a little later and for that the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice it is because the thing is1:27:03established by God and God will shortly bring it to pass it's interesting you know because one of the better theories about dreams is that they're part of the1:27:12way that the right and left hemisphere communicate or maybe the nonverbal part of the brain communicates with the verbal brand verbal part of the brain and so the nonverbal part of the brain1:27:23which is less differentiated and thinks more globally is looking for patterns and anomalies in the world things that don't fit well with the current way of1:27:33conceptualizing the world things that make you anxious and uncertain and those are things you haven't mastered right so they don't fit well into your conceptualization of the world by1:27:42definition because if you had mastered them they wouldn't make you anxious nervous and so the the nonverbal parts of your brain are like an alarm system they're looking around for places where1:27:52you're probably wrong and then they put those in images and try to conceptualize them so that you can update your model of reality to take them into account but1:28:02that also produces a fair bit of negative emotion especially at night and so so we know that we know if you1:28:12deprive people of dreams that they go insane very rapidly animals as well necessary part of mental equilibrium the way you do that with rats in case you1:28:21want to know is that you've got rats that you want to drive insane this is how you do it so you put the rat on a like a pedestal that's pretty small and then when you1:28:31fall it's surrounded by water and then when he falls asleep his nose hits the water then he wakes up and so you can deprive the rat of sleep and that doesn't the rats don't respond to1:28:41very well after some period of time so that's one of the ways that that's been discovered but anyways the dream does seem to be an update mechanism and so if1:28:52if you have a very powerful dream like a nightmare especially if it's repeating it's like something is trying to hammer on the door that needs to be let in and1:29:01often you don't know how to let it in that's that's a problem so but then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph because he had talked to his his Butler and they1:29:12brought him hastily out of the dungeon and Joseph shaved himself and changed his clothes and came in unto Pharaoh I guess he didn't want a shark Pharaoh with how people dressed in the prison1:29:21and Pharaoh said unto Joseph I've dreamed a dream and there's none that can interpret it I've heard say of thee that you could understand a dream to interpret it and Joseph said it's not me1:29:30God will give Pharaoh an answer of peace it's so Jacob isn't taking credit for his ability to interpret dreams which1:29:39also indicates quite interestingly there's there's nothing that despite the fact that he's successful incompetent he's not narcissistic like if he happens1:29:48to have this gift he regards it as a gift and not as something that you know renounced his favor it's just something that he happens to be able to do and so that's that's a hallmark of someone1:29:58who's got a pretty well put-together personality as far as I'm concerned because you know people have gifts that they didn't really earn those would be1:30:08your talents your intelligence your good looks if you happen to have good looks etc and they're not there's no sense being all puffed up about that because1:30:17it's it's great it's luck of the draw though and the proper attitude is to note that it's luck of the draw to be grateful for it it's quite a fine1:30:31painting that one behold there come seven years of great plenty throughout the island of Egypt and then there shall1:30:40arise after them seven years of famine and all the plenty shall be forgotten and the famine shall consume the land and the Plenty shall not be known in the land by reason of that famine following1:30:49issue for it shall be very Grievous so now we to that Jacob he can interpret dreams but he's also the sort of person who can1:30:58look into the future and think this is sort of what Adam was called on to do when he got kicked out of the garden of paradise is you're going to be able to1:31:07conceptualize that even if things are going well now that that doesn't mean that they're going to go well into the future and so he's the aunt and not the1:31:16grasshopper right in the grasshopper and the ant story it's like everything's good but you should wake the hell up and you should test to see how things can go wrong and you can see if your systems1:31:26can survive them things going wrong and which is something that I think we could all hearken to because I think we do a very bad job in the modern world of1:31:36testing to see if our systems can go wrong okay so the Pharaoh was pretty impressed by this dream interpretation1:31:45and pretty worried about it and I guess he's a reasonable person despite the fact that he put Joseph in jail I guess he didn't have much choice now therefore let Pharaoh look for a man dis discreet1:31:56and wise and set him over the land of Egypt let Pharaoh do this and let him appoint officers over the land this is what Joseph is saying and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the1:32:06seven plenteous years and let them gather all the food of those good years that come and lay up corn under the hand of Pharaoh and let them keep food in the1:32:15cities and just like that Joseph is restored to his position so Pharaoh said1:32:24unto Joseph I am Pharaoh and without thee shall no man lift up his hand or foot in all of the land of Egypt and so he comes out of the prison and he really1:32:34in some sense as far as I'm concerned he actually occupies a position that's higher than the position of the Pharaoh depends on how you look at it because the Pharaoh has relegated himself to1:32:43ceremonial status right Joseph has all the responsibilities makes all the decisions so de-facto he's the pharaoh he doesn't get the glory precisely1:32:53although he's not doing too bad for himself not there's a lesson in that too I wrote these rules for Quora a long time ago and one of them I've written1:33:02them into this some of them into this book you guys got a pamphlet about today one of the rules that I didn't write about was um note that responsive note that1:33:12opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated which is really interesting I think I mean I've seen people in their jobs they say things like well my the guy I work with doesn't1:33:22do any work it's like well you could do it I mean I know there's limits to that but one of the things you can do at work is make yourself indispensable I mean1:33:32you might get the cane types against you if you do that but there's something to be said for being indispensable because when people start to be dispensed with1:33:41you probably won't be one of them or even if you are then the fact that you're indispensable just means you can go somewhere else and be indispensable there and that's just as useful so it's1:33:53very very difficult to permanently put down someone who's really good at doing things because they can just go off and do them somewhere else and one of the1:34:03ways that you get like that is to take responsibility when someone else is failing to do so and you think well I shouldn't have to do that that's one way of thinking about it another way of1:34:13thinking about it is oh good I get to do that and the seven years of plenty estas that was in the land of Egypt were ended and the seven years of dearth began to1:34:22come according as joseph has said and the dearth was in all the lands well that's an archetypal story right in the1:34:33archetypal story it's the business cycle story it's a little harsher when you're starving obviously but that's not the point the point is is that sometimes1:34:42things are getting good and sometimes things are getting bad and that's you can be sure that that's the case that's gonna happen to you and so the wise person takes stock of the fact that1:34:53things are going to get bad is this is the same thing that happens with Noah it's like assume the flood cuz it's gonna happen and you think well it's a1:35:03hell of a world that has floods it's like not if you have a boat right it it helps a lot if you if there's a flood and you have a boat it's like you can float on the flood and then it's not1:35:13such a problem and so if you refuse to look not the fact that things are going to be going downhill bad1:35:23and that you're going to be in a pit at some point you and your family perhaps then when it happens it will be as bad as it possibly can be but if you're1:35:34awake and alert to that possibility then you can mitigate it and the dearth was1:35:44in all the lands but in the land of Egypt there was bread and when the land of Egypt was famished the people cried to Pharaoh for bread and Pharaoh said unto the Egyptians go to Joseph what he1:35:54says to you to do you do that and the famine was all over the face of the earth and Joe Joseph opened up the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians and the famine waxed sore in the land of1:36:05Egypt and all the countries came into Egypt to buy to Joseph to buy corn because the famine was sore in all the lands now when Jacob saw that there was1:36:16corn in Egypt Jacob said unto his sons why are you standing around looking at each other he said I've heard that there's corn in Egypt get down there and buy from by for1:36:28us so that we may live and not die it's a pretty straightforward advice that and Joseph's ten brothers went down to buy corn in Egypt but Benjamin Joseph's1:36:38brother so that's the youngest one right the only one left it's the one that was younger than Joseph the only youngest one and also rachel's other son but Jeb1:36:47Benjamin Joseph's brother Jacob didn't send because he was worried that something bad would happen to him which kind of indicates to me that maybe Jacob1:36:57was a bit suspicious about what had happened to Joseph the last time he sent all the brothers on a adventure and Joseph was the governor over all the1:37:07land and and he it was that sold to all the people of the land and Joseph's brothers came and bowed down themselves before him with their faces to the earth well there's the dream now the thing is1:37:19too is that one question you have in your life is who should you bow down to and you might say no one that's not1:37:28exactly the right answer because that means that you don't have an ideal because you bow down to your ideal that's what makes it an ideal and if you don't have an ideal then what the hell are you do so you have to bow down to something1:37:38and so what happens here is well the brothers are bowing down to the person who's so bloody resilient and competent that they can take themselves out of a prison and become the ruler of1:37:48the land that happened to vaclav havel right in czechoslovakia it also happened to Mandela in South Africa like these things actually happen it's really1:37:58something so you god only knows what you might learn in prison so so they bow down to1:38:08Joseph and properly so you know he's he is even without his coat he's still the person with the coat of many colors and Joseph saw his brothers and he knew them1:38:17but he made them so strange unto them it's a number of years have passed and he spoke roughly unto them and he said unto them where do you come from and they said from the land of Canaan to buy1:38:27food and Joseph knew whose brothers were but they didn't know who he was and they came back to Jacob their father and told1:38:36him all that befell him and said the man whose Lord of the country spoke roughly to us and took us for spies and we said to him where were true men1:38:46honest men we're not spies we be twelve brothers sons of our fathers one is not and the youngest is this day with our Father in the land of Canaan and the man1:38:57said here's how I'll know that you're honest men leave one of the brothers here with me and take some food for the famine of your households and be gone and then bring your youngest brother to1:39:07me then I'll know that you're not spies but that you're honest men and I'll deliver the other brother and he shall trade in the land so you don't have to1:39:17starve to death and it came to pass as they emptied their sacks that behold every man's bundle of money was in his sock and when both they and their father saw the bundles of money they were1:39:26afraid so they had bought food from Joseph and he gave them the food and then he put all their money back and their socks which I could imagine would worry them to some1:39:35degree and Jacob said me you have already believed of my children Joseph is not as Simeon is not now you'll take Benjamin Benjamin away all these things1:39:45are against me and Reuben spake unto his father saying slay my two sons if bring him not to thee deliver him into my hand and I will bring him to the again and he and he said no my son shall1:39:57not go down with you for his brother is dead and he's left alone if mischief befall him by the way in the which you shall go then you shall bring down my great gray hairs with sorrow to the1:40:07grave now there's a hint see what happens in the last part of the Jacob storage the Joseph's story is and this is associated with the idea of putting1:40:17your house in order your individual house in order and then putting your family's house in order let's say reversed a little bit in this story because Joseph puts himself together and then he puts the state of Egypt in order1:40:28which is really quite interesting because Egypt is the canonical tyranny right in the Old Testament and so the idea is very very clear here that the1:40:37person who wears the coat of many colors can put the tyranny right and then the next extension is well he has to put his family right now you know generally the1:40:46progression would be put yourself right then put your family right then put the state right something like that it doesn't really hit if you can do it in a different order that's probably ok too but so so that's what happens at the end1:40:57of the story is that you know Joseph is doing pretty damn well and so is the state that he serves but that isn't good enough for him he wants his family to be1:41:07functional and put together properly even though they did terrible things to him and that's very interesting because1:41:16once someone does terrible things to you then the logical thing or a logical thing to think is well go to hell in a handbasket you know like you deserve1:41:25exactly what you get but it's not a very productive attitude especially if you're1:41:34around people that you have to be around you know so like if it's your family and you go have a family dinner and one of you punches the other and then the other1:41:44punches you back and then that's like the family dinner for the next thirty years it doesn't seem to be very productive even if you're the person who happened to get in the last blow because1:41:53you're gonna have to put up with them at minimum it might be nice to just let what you can go go and work to make towards making things better1:42:03have to get rid of the idea of revenge and resentment and all those things that you carry along but but it's probably1:42:13better to think about how your family could be if it was really functioning well and then just a money Ringley at that no no that's not easy I mean people1:42:22are very screw in there's no end to the depths of Pathology within families but of course this story states that very1:42:31clearly I mean they tried to kill him they've sold him into slavery it's it's a pathological family let's put it that way and but Joseph's attitude is well we1:42:43got to set this right not least because of his father but it isn't only because of his father as you see and as the story unfolds and the famine was sore in the land and it came to pass when they1:42:53had eaten up the corn which they had brought out of Egypt their father said unto them go again and buy us a little food and Judah spake unto him saying the1:43:03man did solemnly protest unto us you not see you will not see my face except your brother be with you they can't go back to Egypt without Benjamin and they said1:43:12the man asked us straightly of our state and of her kindred saying is your father yet alive have you another brother and we told him according to the tenor of those words could we know that he would1:43:23say bring your brother down and Judah said unto Israel his father send the loud with me and will arise and go that we may live and not die both we and vow and also our little ones I will be1:43:33surety for him my hand shall they'll require him if I bring him not unto thee and set them before thee then let me bear the blame forever well so Judah who1:43:45played a pretty dismal role in the original selling Joseph into slavery seems to obviously have learned something by this point since he's1:43:55willing to put himself on the line you know to take responsibility for the situation and to put himself on the line and to stand in for Benjamin so he's making himself into a sacrificial object1:44:06of sorts and so the game that Joseph's playing cuz he's sort of teasing his brothers but he's also1:44:15testing them the game that he's playing is tuefel is one is have you bloody well learned anything or are you just as corrupt and useless as you were before that's game number one in game number1:44:24two is maybe if I poke and prod you and put you into a relatively difficult and mysterious situation I can get you to clue the hell in and the Dorp some1:44:34responsibilities and we can move this whole mess forward and so that seems to be happening so Judah is taking responsibility and Reuben did that as well and the men took presence and they1:44:44took double money in their hand and Benjamin and rose up and went down to Egypt and stood before Joseph and when Joseph saw Benjamin with them he said to the ruler of his house bring these men1:44:53home and slay and make ready food for these men shall dine with me at noon and the men man did as Joseph bade and the man brought the men into Joseph's house1:45:03and when Joseph came home they brought him the presents which was in their hand and bowed themselves again to him to the earth and he asked them of their welfare1:45:13and said is your father well the old man of whom you spake is whom you spake is he yet alive and they answered thy servant our Father is in good health he's yet alive and they bowed down their1:45:23heads and made obeisance and he lifted up his eyes and saw his brother Benjamin his mother's son and said is this your1:45:34younger brother of whom you spake unto me and he said God be gracious unto thee my son and Joseph made haste for his bowels did yearn upon his brother and he1:45:44saw it where to weep and he entered into his chamber and wept there and he washed his face and went out and refrained himself and said set on the bread and they sat before them now he plays1:45:55another trick on his brother so he has them all sit at the table but he lines them up according to age and so he's trying to what is he trying to do start1:46:05to freak them out fundamentally and so it and he manages that because they have no idea how in the world they could possibly he could possibly pull something like that off they think it's1:46:14magic and the men marvelled at one another and he took and sent messes unto them from before him but Benjamin's mess was five times as much as any of theirs1:46:24so what's he doing well he's testing his brothers again the fact that when he was the child Joseph that he got more meant that his brothers1:46:35got terribly jealous and then murderous right and so now he's doing the same thing with Benjamin he's thinking okay well I'll give this kid more mm-hmm then he is share you know what how these1:46:48reprobates behave and see if they've learned anything and so and he commanded the steward of his house saying fill the men's sock with food as much as they can1:46:57carry and put every money man's money in the sock as well and put my cup the silver cup in the sacks mouth of the youngest and his corn money and the1:47:07steward did according to the word that Joseph had spoken as soon as the morning was light the men were sent away along with their transportation the cup is1:47:19found in Benjamin's sack well so Benjamin is kind of young and Joseph sends out people to find out where the1:47:29cup has gone and they find it in Benjamin's in Benjamin's sock and they're very upset about this they said that a harsh punishment would befall1:47:39whoever had the cup in his sock they rent their clothes and laid it every man his house and returned to this city and Judah and his brethren came to Joseph's house for he was they yet there and they1:47:49fell before him on the ground very unhappy and apologetic and Joseph said unto them what deed is this that you have done ha ha ha don't you know1:47:58that a man like I can certainly divine I know what's going on and Judah said what shall we say what shall we speak or how can we possibly clear ourselves God1:48:08found out the iniquity of thy servants behold we are your servants both we and also he with whom the cup is found and he said God forbid that I should do so1:48:19but the man in whose cup and whose hand the cup has found he shall be my servant and as for you get you up in peace to your father it's the discovery of the1:48:32cup Judis says now therefore when I come to1:48:41this servant thy father my father and the loud be not with us and seeing that his life is bound up in the lads life it shall come to pass when he sees that the lad is not with us that he will die and1:48:52the servants shall bring down the gray hairs of thy servant or father with sorrow to the grave for thy servant became surety for the lad unto my father saying if I bring him not unto thee then1:49:03I shall bear the blame to my father forever now therefore I pray thee let me stay instead of the lad and let the lad go with his brothers for how shall I go1:49:13up to my brother and the loud be not with me lest peradventure I shall see the evil that will come on my father ok so what's1:49:22happened well they learned a lesson so now Judah again is willing to stand in the place of Benjamin and become a slave himself and so now Joseph has1:49:34determined that his brothers have developed their character to the point where reconciliation might be possible you know it says you should forgive and1:49:45forget but the conditions for that are quite are quite specific you know if you're if you have a dispute with someone and1:49:55they've wronged you in some sense and they apologize the question is what's the apology well it's a it's layout of a rationale it's something like as far as1:50:06I can tell here's the reasons I did this horrible thing and here's what I've learned from it and here's what I'm gonna do to try not to do it again and would you give me1:50:15another crack at it that's the proper repentance right and then you forgive because you're an idiot too and you'll probably do something stupid and maybe1:50:24you'd like the same kind of break at some point and and besides if we all held each other completely to account at all possible times for everything then it'd just be hopeless because there1:50:34would be no room for error so the forgiveness which Joseph is showing is wise forgiveness he's not gonna put himself out on the line for1:50:44people who haven't learned so that the same stupid thing can happen again so that they can continue to spread misery wherever they go oh he's gonna find out if they've clued in a little bit and then if so then they1:50:54can move on with putting a family together and so that breaks him up he says Joseph could not refrain himself before all of them that stood by him and1:51:03he cried and then he said get every man away from me so all the people except1:51:12for Joseph's brother left and there stood no man with him well Joseph made himself known unto his brothers and Joseph said I'm Joseph is my father1:51:21still alive and his brothers could not answer for they were troubled at his presence it's like yeah understatement1:51:33of the decade there mmm when Joseph said unto his brothers come nearer to me I pray you and they came nearer and he said I am Joseph your brother who you sold into Egypt but1:51:43don't be grieved or angry with yourself that you sold me hither for God did send me before you to preserve life so now it was not you that sent me here but God1:51:53and he's made me a father to Pharaoh and Lord of all his house and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt hurry and go to my father and say unto Him thus say thy son Joseph God has made1:52:05me Lord of all GE gypped come down unto me and Terry nod and thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen and thou shalt be1:52:14near unto me thou and thy children and their children's children and thy flocks and they herds and all that thou hast and I there I will nourish you for yet there are five years of famine lest thou1:52:24and I household and all that thou hast come to poverty so that's the other thing that another bit of a hint it's a bread hint here who's the what's the1:52:38most reliable source of bread well it isn't bread itself it's whatever it is that gives rise to bread and that's what Joseph is in this story he's the force1:52:47that gives ride rise to nourishment that's an Joseph is often considered a type of Christ which means like a precursor in some sense that's that's1:52:57one way of thinking about it and you can see that echoed right there it's like well what do you store up for famine you stir up character that's1:53:07the best way through now that doesn't mean you don't also store up bread andd they went out of Egypt and came into the1:53:16land of Canaan unto Jacob and told him Josephus is still alive and he's governor and Jacob's heart fainted for he didn't believe them they told him all the words of Joseph which he said to1:53:25them and when he saw all the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry him the spirit of Jacob their father revived and Israel said it is enough Joseph my son is yet alive I will go and see him1:53:35before I die and Israel took his journey with all that he had and came to Beersheba and offered sacrifices unto the God of his father Isaac and God spake unto Israel in the visions of the1:53:45night and said Jacob and he said here am i he said I am God the God of thy father don't fear to go to eat down into Egypt for I will make you a great nation there1:53:55and so that's how they Israelites end up in Egypt I will go down with the into Egypt and I will also surely bring the up again and Jacob shall put his hand1:54:05upon thy eyes die dies and Jacob rose up from Beersheba and the sons of Israel carried Jacob their father and their little ones and their wives in the wagons which Pharaoh had sent to carry him so the families now all united in1:54:16the proper state of being that joseph has arranged and they took their cattle and their goods it's so interesting too because of course Joseph isn't even he's1:54:25a foreigner as well as being a former slave and prisoner foreigner slave and prisoner and yet he ends up ruling Egypt sure surely because of the force of his1:54:36character and competence and that's really something to think about and they took their cattle because that story there is that there isn't anything stronger than that doesn't matter what1:54:46the circumstances are that there isn't a force that's more powerful than that and I don't think that that's naive in fact1:54:56I think it's the exact opposite of naive no matter where you are you can generally make things better if that's what you want to do and unless you're1:55:05inside in that place that's really hell itself not usually is something that elevates you and elevates the people around you and you can do that wherever1:55:15you are because there isn't a place that sews all that you can't do that that's the message of the prison and they took their cattle and their goods which they had gotten in the land of Canaan and1:55:24came into Egypt Jacob and all his seed with him and he sent Judah before him unto Joseph to direct his face unto1:55:33Gorshin and they came into the land of gaussian and Joseph made ready his chariot and went to meet Israel his father and presented himself to him and fell on his neck and wept on his neck a1:55:43good while and Israel said I can now die because I've seen your face because you're still alive and Pharaoh spake unto Joseph saying thy1:55:55father and thy brethren are come unto thee and the land of Egypt is before thee and the best of the land your father and brothers can dwell in the land of gaash and let them dwell and if1:56:04there now know any man of activity among them then make them rulers over my cattle gives them a job and Joseph brought in Jacob is farther and set him before Pharaoh and Jacob blessed Pharaoh1:56:15that's a very interesting little turn of events because you'd expect the opposite under those circumstances so it appears1:56:24that Jacob was a man of relatively great self possession because that's not it you wouldn't bless Queen Elizabeth in all likelihood su had a lot of gall and1:56:35pharaoh said unto Jacob how old are you and Jacob said I'm a hundred and thirty years whew and evil have been the days of the years of my life and I've not1:56:44attained unto the days of the years of my love the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage Jacob blessed the Pharaoh and went out from before Pharaoh and Israel dwelt in the land of1:56:54Egypt in the country of Gaussian and grew and multiplied exceedingly and Jacob lived in the land of Egypt 17 years so the whole age of Jacob was 1471:57:04years and the time drew nigh that Israel must die and he called his son Joseph and said unto Him if I have now found grace in it in thy sight put I pray thee1:57:15the hand under my thigh and deal kindly and truly with me bury me not I pray thee in Egypt but I will lie with my fathers and thou shall carry me out of1:57:25Egypt and bury me in their burying place and Joseph said I will do as you have said and it came to pass after these things1:57:34that one told Joseph behold thy father is sick and he took with him his two sons Manasseh and Ephraim and one told Jacob and said behold thy son and one1:57:43told Jacob and said behold thy son Joseph cometh unto thee and his real strength in himself and sat upon the bed and he Israel said unto Joseph I'd not1:57:52thought to see your face and lo God also showed me your children and Joseph brought them out from between his knees and bowed himself with his face to the1:58:02earth and Joseph took them both Ephraim in his right hand towards Israel's left hand and menace' and his left hand toward Israel's right hand and brought them near unto Him and Israel stretched1:58:12out his right hand and laid it upon ephram's head who was the younger and his left hand upon manases head guiding his hands purposefully for manna so was the firstborn and when Joseph saw that1:58:22his father laid his right hand on the head of Ephraim it displeased him and he held up his father's hand to remove it from Ephraim's head unto manases head and joseph said unto his father not not1:58:33so my father for this is the firstborn put the right hand upon his head head and his father refused and said I know it my son I know it he shall also become1:58:42a people and he shall also be great but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he and his seed shall become a multitude of Nations another repeat of the same thing that happens1:58:52continually it says when when God wants to intervene in human affairs what he does is invert tradition it's something like that and so that's a sign that that1:59:02there's something new and special going on and that gives precedence to the younger child rather than the older child precedents to what is new rather than what's traditional of course1:59:11sometimes that's necessary because tradition is insufficient and sometimes something new has to come into being in order to update it and Jacob called together his sons and said gather1:59:21together so that I can tell you that which shall befall you in the last days gather yourself together and here you sons of Jacob and hearken unto Israel your father Reuben I'm not going to go1:59:32through all 12 of these Reuben thou art my firstborn my might and the beginning of my strength the excellency of dignity and the excellency of power now the1:59:43stories interesting here because Jacob blesses Joseph's sons before he blesses his own sons and so what he's doing is placing1:59:55the rights of the firstborn into the sons of his favorite son and then he goes to his sons and so that has implications for the way the biblical2:00:05stories lay themselves out from thenceforward the excellency of dignity and the excellency of power unstable as water thou shalt not excel because thou2:00:15wentest up to thy father's bed then defiled it he went up to my couch you may remember that Reuben slept with his father's cucum concubine Simeon and Levi2:00:27are brethren instruments of cruelty are in their habitations stop painting there what happened with Simeon and Levi was that somebody lay with their sister2:00:41Dinah and then offered to marry her and then head and then became circumcised because that was part of the deal and then held her older men circumcised and2:00:50then Simeon and Levi went in when they were recovering and killed them all and then Jacob and all his people had to leave because all that irritated their2:01:00relatives so see me Simeon and Levi are brethren instruments of Cruelty are in2:01:09their habitations o my soul come not thou into their secret unto their assembly mine honor be not thou United for in their anger they slew a man and in their self self will they dig down a2:01:19wall cursed be their anger for it was fierce and their route for it was cruel I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel Judah thou art he whom my2:01:29brethren shall praise thy hand shall be in the neck of mine enemies thy father's children shall bow down before thee Judah is a lion's whelp from the prey my2:01:38son thou art gone up he stooped down he couched as a lion and as an old lion who shall rouse him up the scepter shall not depart from Judah nor a lawgiver from2:01:48between his feet until shiloh come and unto him shall the gathering of the people be Joseph a fruitful bough even a fruitful bough2:01:59by a well whose branch has run over the wall the archers have sorely grieved him and shot at him and hated him but his bull abode in strength and the arms of2:02:08his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob for thence is the shepherd the stone of Israel even by2:02:17the god of life farther who shall help thee and by their almighty he shall bless thee with the blessings of heavens above blessings of the deep that lieth under blessings of the beasts breasts2:02:26and of the womb the blessings of thy father have prevailed above the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills they shall be on the head of Joseph and2:02:36on the crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren all these are the twelve tribes of Israel and this is it that their father spake unto them and2:02:45blessed them everyone according to his blessing he blessed them so that what we see here is an echo in some sense of what happens in the Mesopotamian2:02:54creation story wind in the Mesopotamian creation story is the dragon of chaos timeout and her consort AB su freshwater2:03:08and saltwater respectively and their mingled together and and that combination of chaos and order gives rise to the first Assembly of the2:03:17ancient gods and then the ancient gods kill app soo casually and foolishly and enraged time at with their foolishness2:03:26and ignorance and she comes back with a vengeance in the meantime and then she produces this huge army of monsters and2:03:35puts King knew the worst of the monsters at its head and then decides she's going to take out her creation and so that's a little warning from 3,000 years ago about foolishly undermining your2:03:46tradition so anyways the gods in their frenzy go out and try to fight against timeout and they come back with her2:03:55tails between their legs continually but then a new God appears on the scene and that's Marduk he's got eyes all the way around his head and he can speak words of magic and they know that there's2:04:07something new about this newest God it his capacity for vision in this capacity for articulate speech and so they say well why don't you go out and try to2:04:16deal with the chaos and mardik says yeah ok no problem but here's the deal you elect me talk God and now I determine2:04:25the destiny of the world and so they're desperate because like timeout is coming to get them that's chaos with the worst of all possible monsters they're probably thinking he's not gonna win2:04:34anyways and so they agree and out he goes and he confronts time out who's the goddess of chaos he cuts her into pieces and he makes the world out of her pieces2:04:45and one of his name's is he who makes ingenious things out of the combat with taya math which is so interesting that's such a remarkable that's a remarkable2:04:56bit of nomenclature so who's should be at the pinnacle the force that sees and speaks and goes out to confront chaos voluntarily you know how many years it2:05:07took people to figure that out that's like the pinnacle discovery of humanity that's what that is it's echoed here you know you see Simeon2:05:16and Levi they're too angry the other brothers they all have flaws and faults of various sorts and so they're not elevated to the highest place but Joseph2:05:25because he has his coat of many colors and because he lands on his feet no matter where he goes and because he's not resentful and bitter and malevolent and genocide 'el and and he's not2:05:36shaking his fist at the sky or yelling at God because of Trump let's say then he's the he's the right he's the right2:05:45representative of the 12 tribes and so that's brilliant it's a brilliant story all these are the twelve tribes of2:05:54Israel and this is it that their fathers spake unto them and blessed them every one according to his blessing he blessed them and when Jacob had made an end of commanding his son so it's the last2:06:04thing he does to state he knows that these are the twelve tribes that will progress into the future of this people2:06:14and now he's trying it the last thing he does is to try to hierarchically organized their relative virtues as an indication of what has been learned2:06:24and when jacob has made an end of commanding his sons he gathered up his feet into the bed and yielded up the ghost and was gathered unto his people and joseph fell upon his father's face2:06:34and wept upon him and kissed him and Joseph commanded his servants to the physicians to embalm his father and the physicians embalmed Israel when the days2:06:43of his mourning were passed Joseph spake unto the house of Pharaoh saying if now I have found grace in your eyes speak I pray you in the ears of Pharaoh saying2:06:52my father made me swear saying lo I die in my grave which I have digged for me in the land of Canaan there shalt thou bury me now therefore let me go up I2:07:02pray thee and bury my father and I will come again and Pharaoh said go up and bury thy father according as he made thee swear for his sons carried him into2:07:11the land of Canaan and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah which Abraham bought with the field for a possession of the burying place of Ephraim the head before Mamre and Joseph returned unto2:07:22Egypt he and his brethren and all that went up to him and that all and all that went up with him to burry his father after he is buried after he had buried2:07:31his father and when Joseph's brethren saw that their father was dead they said Joseph will now hate us and will2:07:40certainly pay back to us all the evil which we did unto him and they sent a messenger saying my father did command before he died saying for shall ye say2:07:51unto Joseph forgive I pray thee now the trespass of thy brethren and their sin pretty snively really for they did unto the evil and now we pray they forgive the trespass of the servants of the God2:08:01of thy father and Joseph wept when they spake unto him and his brethren also went and fell down before his face and they said Behold we be thy servants and2:08:11Joseph said unto them fear not for am I in the place of God but as for you you thought evil against me but God meant it2:08:20unto good to bring to pass as it is this day to save much people alive now2:08:29therefore fear ye not I will nourish you and your little ones any comfort of them and spake kindly unto them2:08:39so the the idea there is that there is no evil so evil that good cannot triumph2:08:50over it and Joseph dwelt in Egypt he and his father's house and Joseph lived 110 years and Joseph saw ephram's children2:09:00of the third generation the children also of marker the son of menace' were brought up upon Joseph's knees and Joseph said unto his brethren I die and2:09:10God will surely visit you and bring you out of this land unto the land where he swear to Abraham to Isaac and Jacob and Joseph took an oath of the children of2:09:19Israel saying God will surely visit you and show and you shall carry my bones from hence so Joseph died being a hundred and ten years old and they embalmed him and he2:09:29was put into a coffin in Egypt and that's Genesis so2:09:52so thank you all for persevering2:10:15[Music]2:10:24thank you thank you well this has been very worthwhile as far as I'm concerned I learned an awful lot and so I'm very much looking forward to continuing with2:10:33it and thank you all very much for your support and your rapt attention and your seriousness in this endeavor and your care and all of that it's really being a2:10:42privilege to be able to do this it's a completely surreal thing to manage and so far you know I think about five2:10:51million people have watched it so that seems to be a very good thing2:11:05okay so I'm gonna ask the questioners if you've asked a question in the last three sessions please don't ask a2:11:14question today because I I never get through everyone and so I'd like to have some questions from people that I haven't answered questions from before if that's okay hi professor Peterson2:11:26just a 2-second thank you very much from my community in the Jewish community so many people have been inspired you by you to be better people and I wouldn't be able to speak to you without saying2:11:35that so thank you very much a couple of things the first thing I wanted to do is make a quick comment that you might find interesting that in the Jewish astrological calendar we read the2:11:46'really cycle of the the five books of Moses and it just so happens that we are reading this part of the of the Torah story school and synchronistic yeah2:11:55which brings me into a question I want to ask you about which is one question with two parts about your knowledge of Hebrew because if you look at the Torah2:12:04scrolls that you find in a synagogue there are no vowels there are no sentences there it is it is chaos chaos and order is trying to be bought into it2:12:13I'm wondering how knowledge of you knowledgeable are you of the Hebrew which has many layers of I'm staggering the ignorant of it so you know I read a2:12:23lot of commentaries right I'm trying to zero in on the like with each of the phrases that we went through today I probably looked at ten different2:12:32commentaries and so and then I have this underlying psychoanalytic knowledge that it's sort of like if you have a bunch of2:12:42different templates to look at things through and then something shines through all those templates at the same time that's very unlikely and so then you can you know a coincidence is one2:12:55thing but five coincidences that's no longer a coincidence that's something else and so I think I'm hoping that despite the fact that there's many many things that I don't know that there's2:13:05enough things that I do know to kind of weave my way through this with some degree of utility if not certainty yeah cuz I just which is the second part2:13:14which I guess maybe you don't know but the the majestic the Jewish oral stories that date back almost as long as these stories which fill in a lot of mind-blowing ly crazy random so2:13:25many details about these stories and I was just wondering if you had encountered any of them before I've encountered some of them but again it's it's well as you know it's a very very rich tradition and so I haven't2:13:36encountered enough of it were you thinking of anything in specific specifically in relationship to this story not in particular I actually forgot it I was I was intending to bring2:13:46you a book of majestic story that's a hell of a thing to say now to say that2:13:55but yeah maybe for the exodus version I'll bring you this all right all right that would be good yeah okay hi dr. Peterson I would just like to ask2:14:07you to please talk about what you called a psychic death also known as an ego death okay sorry say that again would you please talk about what you refer to2:14:17as a psychic death also called an ego death that's what happens when someone who loves you betrays you right so2:14:27imagine that like the world is complicated beyond comprehension right and you only see a very little bit of it and the way you structure your2:14:36understanding is you make assumptions about things and they're simplifying assumptions so if you trust someone you reduce their complexity massively right2:14:46because like let's say we were married then there's a whole bunch of ways that you're going to act that are going to be simpler okay so then I can tolerate2:14:56being around you in some sense because you're not everything at once now those simplifying structures are2:15:06hierarchically assembled and some of them are far more important than others Trust is one of them especially trust in loved ones family members which is why2:15:15betrayal by a family member is really catastrophic because it you know it destabilizes your past right all the memories you have it destabilizes your present it destabilizes your future it2:15:25shakes your faith in human beings including yourself and everything collapses and that's an ego death and so now underneath the ego as far as2:15:36Jung was concerned was another structure that he called the self and the self is the thing that remains constant across ego deaths but it's it's deeper and less2:15:48personal it's archetypal and it's the thing that the Eagle collapses into when it collapses and then that rebuilds the ego something like that across time but2:15:59that's when an ego death is now there's variants of that because you can have a voluntary or involuntary ego death and a voluntary ego death is when you learn a2:16:09bunch and you're willing to let go so that would be your own emulation it's like you're lighting you're a Phoenix and your lighting yourself on fire that's a much better idea even though it2:16:19can still be really harsh the involuntary ego deaths they're really hard on people people will do almost anything to stop that from happening which is partly why they fight to2:16:30maintain their group fostered axiomatic simplifications it's not surprising because it's very you'd lose your like2:16:40that ego death is a journey into the underworld or it's a collapse into chaos and that's not so bad if you do it purposefully but in the Pinocchio story for example that's exemplified by2:16:50Pinocchio going down to the depths to rescue his father from the whale now he does that voluntarily but a damn near kills it right I mean first of all he hardly gets out of the whale second he2:17:00actually drowns and dies but he comes back to life so even if you do it voluntarily it's still life it's just2:17:09better than doing it involuntarily which is the other alternative so that's what it is you bet hello Doctor Buddhism2:17:22so I've been listening to back to all of these biblical lectures for the second time now and I wanted to show you an observation I came upon because I was2:17:32trying to find a question that you haven't been asked before which is harder than doing my ryerson exams that's for sure so so I've noticed I think you're2:17:42getting funnier oh yes oh no I think Michael Coren said that this week I think but the word he used was bizarre I think actually I'm feeling better so2:17:53that's I actually have a sense of humor it's it's hard to believe that but so it sort of comes back when I'm not feeling like I'm going to die at any moment so yeah I basically noticed one you're2:18:05making more attempts at jokes so that's great thank you thank you too those2:18:16jokes are landing more often all right but then there's this third element which I think was what Steve Martin quit because of which is that I think the2:18:25audience is anticipating jokes more and they're actually you know I've noticed people laughing more at things that aren't intending to be jokes so I was just wondering what you make of that and2:18:35they're intended I'm hoping they're intended just because I keep a straight face doesn't mean they're not intended to be jokes so yeah no it's good look2:18:44one of the things is like it's and I try to keep this and the wild goal probably about five years ago that even when you're dealing with really serious matters that if you're not handling it2:18:54with a light touch you're not an expert at it you know what a master out it and you think well there are some things that are so deep and dark that you can't handle it with a light touch and that's2:19:04actually not true you can that doesn't mean you make light of them it doesn't mean anything like that it's that you don't it's minimal necessary force it's2:19:14something like that you don't hit it any harder than you have to and it's a it's an art when you're discussing serious matters and so well one of the up shots2:19:23of that is that because we're discussing serious Madison because serious matters are being discussed in the ultra large right now it would be really good if everybody could keep their sense of2:19:32humor you know and I see positive signs of that like there's a lot of satirical activity on the net you know and that could easily catalyze into horror mob2:19:41but it isn't it is it is you know that's happening to some degree but a lot of its satire in comedy and as long as we can keep a sense of humor about this2:19:50then I think well we're not as close to disaster as we might be and so what one of the things that I have found rather ominous is that2:19:59there are comedians first of all being persecuted for under free speech restriction legislation which i think is absolutely appalling but also that there2:20:08are comedians now who won't perform on university campuses John Cleese won't Seinfeld that's like well you know how offensive he is it's no wonder that I2:20:18mean he's like the straightest nicest comedian you could possibly imagine he won't perform on college campuses I think louis c.k won't perform on or anywhere else but it's a bad sign but no2:20:32humor humor is good and it's interesting because I've been kind of watching how I'm represented on the web weirdly enough and there's all these memes that2:20:42have emerged I don't know thousands of the bloody things and most of them are comical and that's good like people are are there hat there whatever it is that2:20:54they're doing I don't know what the hell it is but it's being done with a relatively light touch and that's really really good that's how it should be you got to have a sense of humor I mean it's one of the2:21:03things that makes life bearable so or maybe even better than bearable so you bet2:21:15hello dr. Peterson just want to say what a great lecture series and this is lesson this year so merry Christmas to2:21:26you and your family thank you thank you don't get too enthusiastic about that I2:21:35wrote you an essay of a question and then I used the lecture of the essay writing guide on it's like 2:30 to narrow it down to just a few pages a few2:21:45lines and then during this at this particular lecture like the zig zag slide manifest again and I thought I basically just had all my questions2:21:56answered so basically I just I want to ask the idea of your you've made a2:22:07lecture that was on YouTube many years ago and you keep referring to Cain and Abel and the the death of Abel by Cain2:22:16and the curse in it and I think well that that was the that was a single brother two brothers conflict but but2:22:25here we have in the sense of Jacob the twelve there was one who was one who's good one who was an able archetype and2:22:34there were twelve eleven that came after him so that I don't know maybe there's something about the division or no2:22:44that's a good observation I didn't thought about that yeah well I mean there's a bit of variability because Reuben and Reuben isn't quite as bad as the rest but yeah I would say it's probably easier for the2:22:54Cain side to multiply luckily it's not as powerful because it doesn't do anything like it yes yes and you know2:23:06you know there's young was often included accused of manichaean isn't I'm not pronouncing that properly but there was a there was a variant of Christian2:23:16dogma that held that good and evil were separate metaphysical realities and that they were battling for the for governance of the cosmos something like2:23:25that but they both had an independent and the classical Christian idea which one out over that was that no that good was real but evil was the absence of2:23:34good now that produced all sorts of the absence of good produces all sorts of consequences and it is interesting to read young because he does get kind of2:23:43Manichean in his discussions and I think it was partly because he was so concerned about what happened in Nazi Germany and then with cold war afterwards you know because evil seemed2:23:52to be a palpable force but I don't think that it's as powerful as good but I do think it's easier for it to multiply2:24:01because it's what's easier path it's easy to be resentful and hostile and bitter and and do nothing that's easy it's horrible and it's hard on people2:24:12but it doesn't require a tremendous amount of faith or effort so maybe that is why it's multiplied in the final story in Genesis yeah and I've been reading ahead and for my own based on2:24:23the interest of the president presented stories and I I keyed in on a few other books and chapters in the Bible like first Corinthians 13 which is the love2:24:33chapter and that cycles through the idea of I can have all things in life knowledge power but it's all passing and2:24:44now and forever our hope faith hope and love and and of course love triumphs over all yeah well the love issue see I've been saying I thought a lot about2:24:54the relationship between love and truth because I've thought and talked a lot more about truth and I think partly that's because love is a word that you can hardly even say because it's been so2:25:04it's like it's being dragged behind a car through mud puddles it's something like that but so sorry let me just finish it lab rating this idea but I2:25:13think that the the love idea is associated with for me at least with what I discussed at the beginning of this lecture with regards to faith I2:25:23think you have to make a decision about what your attitude towards being is going to be and the proper attitude in my estimation is that you're working for2:25:33its betterment you know and so maybe maybe you have the same attitude towards being as you do towards someone that you love like a son2:25:42or a daughter or wife that you want things to be better and that so that's your aim so the aim is basically the aim is motivated by love you want things to2:25:54be better because I think that's a good definition of love like if you really care for someone you can tell because you want things to be better for them and then I think truth is nested inside2:26:04that because I think that truth is the best servant of love it's something like that so I've been struggling with an2:26:16idea recently that I was thinking maybe you'd be able to help me out with basically in a recent interview you talked about how myth is meant to reconcile inherent contradictions in2:26:27reality right but but I'm sort of stuck between two mythological or psychoanalytic ideas that I think are2:26:36both really important but they seem to have a inherent contradiction within them that I've been trying to figure out so on one hand you have this idea that there's times in your life where you2:26:46have to identify things in yourself that are insufficient or there's a problem somehow that you have to kind of have a controlled burn or like a Phoenix like2:26:55transformation where you discard part of yourself that doesn't fit or is not working but then on the other hand you have talked about this this Union idea2:27:05where as you become really when you get older you mature by reincorporating things about yourself that you lost when2:27:14you were younger or that you know you're trying to integrate your shadow or you're trying to find parts of your personality that that maybe you've been rejecting and trying to figure out how2:27:23to bring them into into the folder in the hole so he's got this quote that I really like which is I'd rather behold and good right right so so on one hand2:27:33you may identify something as a problem and you want to get rid of it or burn it off but then on the other hand it seems like the the path to being stronger is2:27:44to figure out how to put everything together so there's that there's a one of the things Jung wrote about in his works on alchemy was2:27:53an explanation of the prime alchemical dictum which was solve a coagula which meant dissolve and integrate right so so2:28:03imagine this imagine that imagine you had a fairly hostile father who was not very well controlled in his aggression2:28:13decent person other than that but let's say that and so your reaction is I'm never going to be aggressive and so you've built a like a moral structure2:28:22that's part of your personality and there's possibility floating around outside of that did you you've denied an2:28:31ethical you've denied any ethical what would you say you've stripped the idea of aggression of any ethical utility2:28:41whatsoever okay so what happens this burns off and then that comes back up now you still have to integrate it so it's associated in some sense with2:28:50Nietzsche's ideas morality as cowardice because one of nature's most trenchant critiques of traditional morality let's2:29:00say is that most of what passes for morality isn't morality it's just cowardice it's not that I'm a good person and I don't hurt you it's that2:29:09I'm afraid to hurt you and because I don't want to admit that I'm afraid to hurt you and then I say I'm moral because then I can mask my essential fear and cowardice in a guise of2:29:19morality and that happens far more often than you would think because harmless and moral are by no means the same thing so some of what you're burning off you2:29:29can sit and this is where Freud was such a genius I think is because he concentrated on aggression and sexuality which are perhaps the two most difficult parts of a personality to integrate said2:29:39that the the hyper simp2:29:48fied morality stops you from tapping into deeper recesses of your psyche and it's partly because there are primal2:29:57forces it's not surprising that you don't want to have anything to do with them that you stay away from situations where they might make themselves manifest but the problem is by denying2:30:06the worst in yourself in that manner suppressing it you preclude the possibility of the best because no one can be a good person without integrating their capacity for aggression because2:30:17without that capacity of a progression you cannot say no because no means if you really say it no means there isn't anything that you can do to me that will2:30:28make me change my mind or or conversely it means I will play for higher stakes than you will and unless you've got your2:30:37aggression integrated there isn't a chance you can say that and if you did no one would take you seriously because they'd know it was just a show so one of2:30:47the most useful things that Jung did I think was to work on this idea of the integration of the shadow because he was really interested in the idea of evil right especially working with trying to2:30:56parcel out what happened in Nazi Germany and during the Second World War what do you do with the part of you that's aggressive and and potentially malevolent do you just crush it that's2:31:06the super-ego response in some sense do you just put it behind you so to speak is that a possibility or do you admit to its existence and bring it into the game2:31:15and that's see for Freud in some sense morality was super-ego clamping down on the it'd and they were fundamentally2:31:25opposed both young and Piaget had a different idea and I think they were right it's like no no you invite the bad guys out to play and so you're an2:31:35aggressive hockey player but it's disciplined aggression that makes you gives you access to the whole source of energy you wouldn't otherwise have and2:31:45then with regards to sexuality it's like well untrammeled promiscuity doesn't constitute a virtue but neither does unavoidable virginity right in fact I2:31:55think that's worse because it also masks itself with virtue it's like well you should be able to you should be able to do things that you2:32:05wouldn't do that's that's like the definition of a genuinely moral person they could do it but they don't and that2:32:14that's not cowardice and so that's you burn off the things that get in the way of that integration so when you say dissolve and integrate it'd be a good2:32:24way to sort of bring the two ideas together that the burning off and the difficult process is necessary because the elements of yourself are structured2:32:34together in a rigid way that is not working properly and that's what happens to Geppetto in the belly of the whale he's so caught in his presuppositions2:32:43that he can't escape right and so Pinocchio represents the new force so it's very interesting so when you watch Pinocchio try to rescue him the first thing Geppetto does is confuse Pinocchio2:32:53with a fish because he wants something to eat but Pinocchio is better than something to eat because he could rescue him so he doesn't need to eat and then Pinocchio wants to make a fire in2:33:02Geppetto objects because he's gonna burn up all the furniture it's like we don't need the damn furniture if we're getting out of the whale you know and so so Geppetto and and he's old so that that2:33:12that's that that's the rigid structure that's the old year that has to die off before the new year can be born it's a forest fire that allows for new growth and and that's how those things are put2:33:22together and to see and it's useful to know too because if you burn something off you might think well there's nothing left it's like that's not true if it's dead wood then you have room for new2:33:32growth and you want to be doing that on a fairly regular basis that's the that's that's the snake that sheds its skin and transforms itself right that's that's2:33:42the death and resurrection from a psychological perspective it's exactly the same idea now we don't know the upper limit to that right because we don't know what a person would be like2:33:51if they let everything that they could let go let go and only let in what was seemly let's say but you can see that's2:34:02funny we don't know that to some degree you can see people vary from you can see people start to do that without that's not an rare experience2:34:13and people improve very rapidly they can improve their lives very rapidly a lot of its low-hanging fruit like if you just stop doing really stupid things2:34:22that you know are stupid your life improves a lot so and it frees you up it also means there's a there's an element there that's also associated with pride2:34:32because people tend to take pride in who they are and that's a bad idea because that stops you from becoming who you could be because if you're proud of who2:34:42you are you won't let that go when it's necessary you won't step away from it you know and then you end up being your own parody something like that that's2:34:51also a very bad idea you want to be continually stepping away from your previous self and so big and I guess part of that too is that you you have to2:35:00decide you know are you are you order or you chaos or you the process that mediates between them and if you're the process that mediates between them you you are the thing that transforms and2:35:11that's the right attitude for human being because that's what we are we're the thing that voluntarily confronts chaos and transforms that's what we are2:35:21and so for better or worse you know that's our deepest biological essence you might say and so you can let things go if you know that there's more growth2:35:31to come so2:35:41one more thank you for your time and thank you for spending time with us hey my pleasure so if I could since we are2:35:51at the end of Genesis I like the opportunity to challenge or at least have you take another look at your position you've held with regards to2:36:00Cain's reflection on the murder of evil I bring this up because it's actually a part of Genesis that has bothered me for a while and it's not like because not as2:36:09straightforward as its presented usually and it's really I've been wrestling with it so in this series as well as in a couple of your maps of meaning lectures2:36:18you summarized that something to the effect of Cain coming to the conclusion that what he did leads to a punishment which is more than he believes he can face which I believe to be born out of a2:36:28natural reading of a specific translation choices incorrectly made or enter a innocently made by editors just for readability sake so in Genesis 4:132:36:39Cain does not say my punishment is greater than I can bear he actually says he meets my sin is greater than I can2:36:49bear which is this a.m. which is to say it's not his past actions we just say it's not his past sections its futures consequences which it's just past action2:37:00it's not his future consequences which he regrets for him to say our own iniquity or sin that is too much for him to bear as a reflection on the reality of his corruption and not a plea of2:37:10Mercy to the deity to spare him mmm okay well that's that seems to be a deeper interpretation I would say and I think it's more that's the same line of2:37:19reasoning that Dostoevsky pursued in crime and punishment right because in crime and punishment Raskolnikov gets away with murder and then he cannot2:37:28stand it he cannot stand that he did it because he's no longer the same person but even more he cannot stand that he got away with it so that's more in keeping with with that2:37:38interpretation so this also is reflected in the falling verse and 4:14 where he states the consequences of his actions mainly that God's presence will hot be2:37:47hidden from him and that he will be killed the verse opens was the word hane which means indeed more or less and to note the sense of acceptance and2:37:56not a complaint it is the difference between saying oh no well God now hide his face from me and will I be hunted versus of course God will hide his face for me and I will be hunted and killed2:38:06which I've been wrestling with and I've taken a way to possibly mean that there are sins that we can do that will just2:38:15push us too far well okay there there there are well okay so one of the well one of the things that you see in post-traumatic post-traumatic stress2:38:25disorder situations for example is that people view themselves doing something so terrible they don't know how to put it right so that and so you could say2:38:35under those circumstances the face of God is hidden from them because they cannot they cannot atone for it they can't reconcile themselves to it it's2:38:45there all the time and they can't see anything good beyond it it's hell essentially and so I mean sometimes when you're working with people with post-traumatic stress disorder you know2:38:55you you kind of in initiate them into a philosophy of good and evil so that they can see when Joseph talks to his brothers and they've got all this guilt2:39:05right and and he doesn't want them to have more guilt than necessary to fix themselves because it just burdens them otherwise he says look don't forget yeah2:39:14yeah it was you but it's also God's doing and I had a client once who who had obsessive-compulsive disorder and he's a very smart guy he also happened2:39:24to work in a radioactive lab that had a lot of radioactive materials which wasn't the best place for someone with OCD and he was worried that he would2:39:33make some mistake this is very common with OCD that would result in someone's suffering which you will you'll do that and it wasn't until I could get him to2:39:43conceptualize himself and his life in part as a force of nature that he was able to reconcile himself to the possibility that an error on his part2:39:53would produce catastrophic consequences but people often find themselves in situations where they just they cannot reconcile themselves to what they've2:40:02done and that it makes sense to me that that the interpretation that you're describing that that makes them that makes plenty of sense from a psychological perspective2:40:12there are sins that will push us like just beyond our limit that are too far but there are also no consequences to2:40:21our actions that are devoid of a truth we can accept and learn from and this is what I've kind of dealt out of this bit with Cain and Abel so if this is the case why then does it take us so long2:40:31and with so much self - now before we accept personal responsibility when faced with tragedy especially when it's self inflicted well I I don't think you2:40:44want to underestimate the contribution of just sheer difficulty like you know let's say you you you you're grieving2:40:56because someone close to you died it's like well it isn't just that you've lost them although that's a big part of it it's that you have to rebuild yourself2:41:05and it's really hard to do that so and it is sort of proportional to the significance of your error so if you commit an error and then you recognize2:41:14that it's an error if it's a sort of surface error it's like well you can just touch up the paint but sometimes the whole under structure is just rotten2:41:24and then you don't know what to do and then so that's one problems just sheer bloody difficulty and I see this with2:41:33people very often it's like they're at a point in their divorce let's say and they don't know what to do they cannot solve the problem it's too complicated2:41:42they just don't have the resources and maybe they've squandered some of their resources as well but sometimes they just don't have the resources and then if you add to that error and sin and2:41:51malevolence and blindness and all those other things people there's a guy named Thomas SAS who wrote this really interesting article in the 1960s a book actually called the myth of mental2:42:01illness and it was classic reading for clinical psychologists when I was training and the reason for that was is that SAS pointed out and this is true is2:42:12that mmm-hmm lots of times if you're a psychotherapist people don't come to you because they have mental illnesses they had come to you because they have insoluble2:42:21problems in their life you know like maybe they've had a two-year affair at work their wife is alcoholic and they2:42:31have a very and their father has Alzheimer's disease it's like they just don't know what to do it's too much now you know they shouldn't have had the affair so there's a moral issue and2:42:41maybe they should have intervened in the alcoholism in the family maybe they used their wives alcoholism as an excuse to have the affair you know like these things get very tangled it's just it's2:42:51so bloody complicated that people can't untangle it so and I would say that's in keeping with the interpretation that you laid forth with regards to cain is it2:43:00sounds like that's one of the reasons why it's so useful to read multiple translations right because nuances matter it sounds to me from that2:43:10description that he actually woke up at least briefly and noticed what he did and said there's no coming back from this and and it is you can easily get2:43:20places that you do not know how to come back from now you know they say well all things are possible with God and there's always the possibility of redemption no matter how serious the sin but I'll tell2:43:31you sometimes people have no idea how to get back from where they went well and you can understand often why people2:43:40wouldn't do that right yeah well that's a funny thing because one of the things Carl Rogers said too about psychotherapy is that you can't do psychotherapy with someone who hasn't recognized that they2:43:50have a problem so that it's a massive thing to recognize that you have a problem and it does open the door perhaps to recovery but it also means2:43:59that you've recognized that you have a problem and that can be very very it's the desert right you're out of the tyranny but you're in the desert and the sun's beating down on you and there's no2:44:08necessary reason to presume that you're going to survive so think you have goodnight and stay thank you all2:44:22you0:00:00The Death and Resurrection of Christ: A Commentary in Five Parts
0:00:00 [Music]0:00:13today I want to present to you some of the things I've been thinking and writing about as Easter approached I'm going to do this in five separate parts which hopefully will make up a coherent0:00:24whole I'm going to read all of this because it's complicated part one the nature of experience there are two ways of looking at the world as0:00:35a place of things and as a forum for action because we are living beings and0:00:44must make our way pragmatically in the world the second way of looking has to take precedence this means that the world as0:00:54a place of things is nested inside the world as a forum for action this means that our conceptualization of the world0:01:03as objective must remain subordinate to our conceptualization of the world as a place of being this is from the first0:01:15part of my book maps of meaning quote the world can be validly construed as forum for action or place of things the0:01:28former manner of interpretation more primordial and less clearly understood finds its expression in the arts or humanities in ritual drama literature0:01:40and mythology of the world as forum for action is a place of value a place where all things have meaning this meaning0:01:51which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction is implication for action or at a higher level of analysis0:02:00implications for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action the latter manner of0:02:09interpretation the world as place of things finds its formal expression in the methods and theories of science science allows for increasingly precise0:02:20determination of the consensually validate able properties of things and for if utilization of precisely determined0:02:29things as tools once the direction such use is to take has been determined through application of more fundamental narrative processes no complete world0:02:41picture can be generated without use of both modes of construal the fact that one mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of0:02:51their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated adherents of the mythological worldview tend to regard the statements of their Creed's0:03:01as indistinguishable from empirical fact even though such statements were generally formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged0:03:12those who by contrast accept the scientific perspective who assume that it is or might become complete forget0:03:21that an impassable gulf currently divides what is from what should be i wrote this a little later it's also0:03:31relevant as introduction to what we're going to discuss in a bit the world can be validly construed as a forum for action as well as a place of things we0:03:44describe the world as a place of things using the formal methods of science the techniques of narrative however myth literature and drama portray the world0:03:54as a forum for action the two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their0:04:04respective domains the domain of the former scientific domain is the objective world what is from the0:04:14perspective of inter subjective perception the domain of the latter drama and narrative is the world of value what is and what should be from0:04:26the perspective of emotion and action the world as a forum for action presents itself in two stories the normal story I0:04:38was at point-a and I was going to point B and the revolutionary story I was at point a and0:04:48while going to point B something entirely unexpected and earth-shattering happened this meant I had to abandon my0:04:57story question my assumptions a lot of my old beliefs to die and be reborn anew0:05:07the second story which is deeper is essentially religious part to some axioms of the Christian revolutionary0:05:17story number one to decide that and then enact the proposition that being is good0:05:26despite its tragedy and malevolence number two to work in consequence for the continual and eternal improvement of0:05:36that being and to know that as love number three to do such work in truth0:05:46number four to let everything inadequate burn off in that pursuit and to welcome its replacement by what is better number0:05:58five to know that as the sacred imitation of Christ number six to understand that although Christ's0:06:07sacrifice redeemed us all the work still has to be done number seven to accept0:06:16that work as the sacred meaning of life number eight to strive toward the heavenly City on the hill in that manner0:06:29part three narratives and sacrifice from my new book twelve rules for life rule0:06:38seven pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient every man for himself and0:06:47the devil take the hindmost as the old proverb hasn't why not simply take everything you can get whenever the opportunity0:06:56arises why not determine to live in that manner or is there an alternative and if0:07:05so why should we bother with it our ancestors worked out very sophisticated answers to such questions but we still don't understand them very0:07:16well this is because they are in large part still implicit manifest primarily in ritual and myth and as of yet0:07:25incompletely articulated we act them out and represent them in stories but were not yet wise enough to formulate them0:07:34explicitly we're still chimps in a troop or wolves in a pack we know how to behave we know who's who and why we've0:07:44learned that through experience our knowledge has been shaped by the interaction with others we've established predictable routines and patterns of behavior but we don't really0:07:54understand them or know where they originated they've evolved over great expanses of time but we didn't and still don't understand what it all meant the0:08:06biblical narrative of Paradise and the fall is one such story fabricated by our collective imagination working over the centuries it provides a profound account0:08:16of the nature of being and points the way to a mode of conceptualization at action well matched to that nature in the Garden of Eden prior to the dawn of0:08:27self-consciousness so goes the story human beings were sinless our primordial parents Adam and Eve walked with God0:08:36then tempted by the snake the first couple ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil discovered death and vulnerability and turned away0:08:45from God mankind was exiled from paradise and began its effortful mortal existence the idea of sacrifice enters0:08:56soon afterward beginning with the account of Cain and Abel and developing through the Abrahamic adventures and the Exodus after much contemplation0:09:05struggling humanity learns that God's favor could be gained and his wrath averted through proper sacrifice and also that bloody murder might be motivated among0:09:16those unwilling or unable to succeed in this manner the delay of gratification when engaging in sacrifice our forefathers began to act out what would0:09:27be considered a proposition if it were stated in words that something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the0:09:36present recall if you will that the necessity for work is one of the curses placed by God upon Adam and his descendants in consequence of original0:09:47sin adam's waking to the fundamental constraints of his being his vulnerability his eventual death is equivalent to his discovery of the0:09:58future the future that's where you go to die hopefully not too soon your demise might be staved off through work through0:10:08the sacrifice of the now to gain benefit later it is for this reason among others no doubt that the concept of sacrifice0:10:18is introduced in the biblical chapter immediately following the drama of the fall there's little difference between sacrifice and work they're also both0:10:30uniquely human sometimes animals act as if they're working but they are really only following the dictates of their nature beavers build dams they do so0:10:41because they are beavers beavers build dams they don't think yeah but I'd rather be on a beach in Mexico with my girlfriend while they're doing it0:10:52prosaically such sacrifice work is delay of gratification but that's a very mundane phrase to describe something of0:11:01soul-shattering significance the discovery that gratification could be delayed was simultaneously the discovery of time and with it causality at least0:11:12the causal force of voluntary human action long ago in the dim mists of time we began to realize that reality was0:11:21struck as if it could be bargained with we learned that behaving properly now in the present regulating our impulses0:11:30considering the plight of others could bring rewards in the future in a time and place that did not yet exist we0:11:39began to inhibit control and organize our immediate impulses so that we could stop interfering with other people and our future selves doing so was0:11:50indistinguishable from organizing society the discovery of the causal relationship between our efforts today and the quality of tomorrow motivated0:12:00the social contract the organization that enables today's work to be stored reliably mostly in the form of promises0:12:09from others understanding is often acted out before it can be articulated just as0:12:18a child acts out what it means to be mother or father before being able to give a spoken account of what those roles mean the act of making a ritual0:12:28sacrifice to God was an early and sophisticated enactment of the idea of the usefulness of delay there is a long0:12:38conceptual journey between merely feasting hungrily and learning to set aside some extra meat smoked by the fire for the end of the day or for someone0:12:48who isn't present it takes a long time to learn to keep anything later for yourself or to share it with someone else and those are very much the same0:12:58thing as in the former case you are sharing with your future self it is much easier and far more likely to selfishly0:13:07and immediately wolf down everything in sight there are similar long journeys between every leap and sophistication with regards to delay and its0:13:18conceptualization short-term sharing storing away for the future representation of that storage in the form of records and later in the form of0:13:28currency and ultimately the saving of money in a bank or other social institution some conceptualizations had to serve as0:13:38intermediaries or the full range of our practices and ideas surrounding sacrifice and work and their representation could have never emerged0:13:48our ancestors acted out a drama a fiction they personified the force that governs fate as a spirit that can be0:13:57bargained with traded with as if it were another human being and the amazing thing is that it worked this was in part0:14:07because the future is largely composed of other human beings often precisely those who have watched and evaluated and appraised the tiniest details of your0:14:17past behavior it's not very far from that to God sitting above on high tracking your every move and writing it0:14:26down for further reference in a big book here's a productive symbolic idea the future is a judgmental father that's a0:14:38good start but two additional archetypal foundational questions arose because of the discovery of sacrifice of work both0:14:47have to do with the ultimate extension of the logic of work which is sacrifice now to gain later first question what0:14:59must be sacrificed small sacrifices may be sufficient to solve small singular problems but it is possible that larger0:15:10more comprehensive sacrifices might solve an array of large and complex problems all at the same time that's0:15:20harder but it might be better adapting to the necessary discipline of medical school will for example fatally0:15:29interfere with the licensee estoppel core undergraduate party animal giving that up is a sacrifice but a physician0:15:39can to quote George w really put food on his family that's a lot of trouble dispensed with over a very long period0:15:49of time so sacrifices are necessary to improve the future and larger sacrifices can be better second question0:16:00set of related questions really we've already established the basic principle sacrifice will improve the future but a0:16:11principle once established has to be fleshed out it's full extension or significance has to be understood what0:16:21is implied by the idea that sacrifice will improve the future in the most extreme and final of cases where does that basic principle find its limits we0:16:33must ask to begin what would be the largest most effective most pleasing of all possible sacrifices and then how0:16:43good might the best possible future be if the most effective sacrifice could be made the biblical story of Cain and Abel0:16:54Adam and Eve's sons immediately follows the story of the expulsion from paradise as mentioned previously Cain and Abel0:17:03are really the first humans since their parents were made directly by God and not born in the standard manner Cain and Abel live in history not in Eden they0:17:15must work they must make sacrifices to please God and they do so with altar and proper ritual but things get complicated0:17:25Abel's offerings please God but Cain's do not Abel is rewarded many times over but Cain is not it's not precisely clear0:17:37why although the text strongly hints that Cain's heart is just not in it maybe the quality of what came put forward was low0:17:46maybe his spirit was begrudging or maybe God was vexed for some secret reasons of his own and all of this is realistic0:17:55including the texts vagueness of explanation not all sacrifices are of equal quality furthermore it often appears0:18:04that sacrifices of apparently high quality are not rewarded with a better future and it's not clear why why isn't0:18:13God happy what would have to change to make him so those are difficult questions and everyone asks them all the0:18:24time even if they don't notice asking such questions is indistinguishable from thinking the realization that pleasure0:18:35could be usefully for stalled dawned on us with great difficulty it runs absolutely contrary to our ancient fundamental animal instincts0:18:44which demand immediate satisfaction particularly under conditions of deprivation which are both inevitable and commonplace and to complicate the0:18:55matter such delay only becomes useful when civilization has stabilized itself enough to guarantee the existence of the delayed reward in the future if0:19:05everything you save will be destroyed or worse stolen there's no point in saving it is for this reason that a wolf will0:19:15down 20 pounds of raw meat in a single meal he isn't thinking man I hate it when I binge I should save some of this for next week so how was it that those0:19:26two impossible and necessarily simultaneous accomplishments delay and the stabilization of society into the future could possibly have manifested0:19:35themselves here is a developmental progression from animal to human it's wrong no doubt in the details but it's0:19:45sufficiently correct for our purposes in theme first there's excess food large carcasses mammoths or other massive0:19:55herbivores might provide that we ate a lot of mammoths maybe all of them with a large animal there's some left for later0:20:04after a kill that's accidental at first but eventually the utility of for later starts to be appreciated0:20:14some provisional notion of sacrifice develops at the same time if I leave some even if I want it now I won't have0:20:24to be hungry later that provisional notion develops to the next level if I leave some for later I won't have to go0:20:34hungry and neither will those I care for and then to the next I can't possibly eat all of this mammoth but I can't0:20:43store the rest for too long either maybe I should feed some to other people maybe they'll remember and feed me some0:20:52of their mammoths when they have some and I have none then I'll get some mammoths now and some mammoths later that's a good deal and maybe those I'm0:21:04sharing with will come to trust me more generally maybe then we could trade forever in such a manner0:21:13mammoth becomes future mammoth and future mammoth becomes personal reputation that's the emergence of the0:21:22social contract to share does not mean to give away something you value and get nothing back that is instead only what0:21:31every child who refuses to share fears it means to share means properly to0:21:40initiate the process of trade a child who can't share who can't trade can't have any friends because having friends0:21:49is a form of trade Benjamin Franklin once suggested that a newcomer to a neighbourhood asked a new neighbor to do him or her a favor citing this old maxim0:22:01he that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged in Franklin's opinion asking someone for0:22:13something not too extreme obviously was the most useful and immediate invitation to social interaction and trade such0:22:23asking on the part of the newcomer provided the neighbor with an opportunity to show him or herself as a good person at first encounter it also meant that0:22:34the latter could now ask the former for a favor in return because of the debt incurred increasing their mutual familiarity and trust in that manner0:22:45both parties could overcome their natural hesitancy and mutual fear of the stranger it is better to have something0:22:54than nothing it's better yet to share generously to something you have it's even better than that however to become0:23:04widely known for generous sharing that's something that lasts that's something that's reliable and at this point of0:23:14abstraction we can observe how the groundwork for the conceptions reliable honest and generous have been laid the0:23:24basis for an articulated morality has been put in place the productive truthful sharer is the prototype for the0:23:33good citizen and the good man we can see in this matter how from the simple notion that leftovers are a good idea0:23:42the highest moral principles might emerge it's as if something like the following happened as humanity developed0:23:52first were the endless tens or hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of written history and drama during this time the twin practices of0:24:03delay and exchange begin to emerge slowly and painfully then they become represented in metaphorical abstraction0:24:13as rituals and tales of sacrifice told in a manner such as this it's as if0:24:22there's a powerful figure in the sky who sees all and is judging you giving up something you value seems to make him0:24:31happy and you want to make him happy because all hell breaks loose if you don't so practice sacrificing and0:24:41gerri until you become expert at it and things will go well for you no one said any of this at least not so0:24:50plainly and directly but it was implicit in the practice and then in the stories action came first as it had to as the0:25:00animals we once were could act but could not think implicit unrecognized value came first as the actions that preceded0:25:10thought embodied value but did not make that value explicit people watched the successful succeed and the unsuccessful0:25:20fail for thousands and thousands of years we thought it over and drew a conclusion the successful among us delay0:25:29gratification the successful among us bargain with the future a great idea begins to emerge taking ever more0:25:39clearly articulated form in ever more clearly articulated stories what's the difference between the successful and0:25:48the unsuccessful the successful sacrifice things get better as the successful practice their sacrifices the0:25:58questions become increasingly precise and simultaneously broader what is the greatest possible sacrifice for the0:26:07greatest possible good and the answers become increasingly deeper and profound the god of Western0:26:17tradition like so many gods requires sacrifice we've already examined why but sometimes he goes even further he0:26:29demands not only sacrifice but the sacrifice of precisely what is loved best this is most starkly portrayed and0:26:38most confusingly evident in the story of Abraham and Isaac Abraham beloved of God long wanted a son and God promised him0:26:49exactly that after many delays and under the apparently impossible conditions of old age and the long barren wife but not so long afterward0:27:00when the miraculously born Isaac is still a child God turns around and an unreasonable and apparently barbaric fashion demands that his faithful0:27:10servant offer his son as a sacrifice the story ends happily God sends an angel to stay Abraham's obedient hand and accepts a0:27:20ram in Isaac's stead that's a good thing but it doesn't really address the issue at hand why is God's going further necessary why0:27:33does he why does life impose such demands we'll start our analysis with a0:27:42truism stark self-evident and understated sometimes things do not go0:27:51well that seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals but here's the rub0:28:02sometimes when things are not going well it's not the world that's the cause the cause is instead that which is currently0:28:11most valued subjectively and personally why because the world is revealed to an0:28:20indeterminate degree through the template of your values thus if the world you are seeing is not the world0:28:30you want it's time to examine your values it's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions it's time to let0:28:41go it might even be time to sacrifice what you love best so that you can become who you might become instead of staying who you are there's an old and0:28:53possibly apocryphal story about how to catch a monkey that illustrates this set of ideas very well first you must find a0:29:02large narrow neck jar just barely wide enough and ammeter at the top for a monkey to put its hand inside then you must fill the0:29:12jar partway with rocks so it is too heavy for a monkey to carry then you must scatter some treats attractive to monkeys near the jar to attract one and0:29:21put some more inside the jar a monkey will come along reach into the narrow opening and grab while the grabbing is0:29:30good but now we won't be able to extract his fist now full of treats from the jar not without unclenching his hand not0:29:40without relinquishing what he already has and that's just what he won't do the monkey capture can then walk over to the jar and pick up the monkey the animal0:29:52will not sacrifice the part to preserve the whole something valuable given up ensures future prosperity something0:30:03valuable sacrificed pleases the Lord what is most valuable and best0:30:12sacrificed or what is at least emblematic of that a choice cut of meat the best animal in a flock a most valued0:30:21possession what's above even though something intensely personal and painful to give up that symbolized perhaps in0:30:33God's insistence on circumcision as part of Abraham's sacrificial routine where the part is offered symbolically to0:30:42redeem the whole let's beyond that what pertains more closely to the whole person rather than to the part what0:30:52constitutes the ultimate sacrifice for the gain of the ultimate prize it's a close race between child and self the0:31:03sacrifice of the mother offering her child to the world is exemplified profoundly by Michelangelo's great sculpture the pie Aida Michelangelo0:31:12crafted married cradling the nearly naked body of her adult son crucified and ruined its her fault it was through her that he0:31:23entered the world and it's great drama of being is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world every woman0:31:33asks herself that question some say no and they have their reasons Mary answers yes voluntarily knowing0:31:42full well what's to come as do all mothers if they allow themselves to see it's an act of supreme courage when it's0:31:51undertaken voluntarily in turn Mary's son Christ offers himself to God and the world to betrayal torture and death to0:32:03the very point of despair on the cross where he cries out those terrible words from Matthew 27:46 my God my God why0:32:15hast thou forsaken me that is the archetypal story of the man who gives his all for the sake of the better who0:32:26offers up his life for the advancement of being who allows God's will to become manifest fully within the confines of a0:32:35single mortal life that is the model for the Honorable man in Christ's case however as he sacrifices himself God his0:32:47father is simultaneously sacrificing his son it is for this reason that the Christian sacrificial drama of son and0:32:57self is archetypal it's a story at the limit where nothing more extreme nothing greater can be imagined that's the very0:33:08definition of archetypal and that's the core of what constitutes religious pain and suffering define the world of that0:33:19there can be no doubt sacrifice can hold pain and suffering in abeyance to a greater or lesser degree and greater0:33:29sacrifices can do that more effectively than lesser there can be no doubt everyone holds this knowledge in their souls0:33:39thus the person who wishes to alleviate suffering who wishes to rectify the flaws in being who wants to bring about the best of all possible futures who0:33:50wants to create heaven on earth will make the greatest of sacrifices of self and of child of everything that is loved0:33:59to live a life aimed at the good he will forego expediency he will pursue the path of ultimate meaning and he will in0:34:09that manner bring salvation to the ever desperate world part 4 from my blog on0:34:19the Ark of the Covenant the cathedral and the cross Easter message one abridged from Wikipedia the Ark of the0:34:31Covenant was a lidded gold-leafed wooden chest containing the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments according to0:34:40various texts within the Hebrew Bible it also contained Aaron's rod and a part of manna God was said to have spoken with0:34:49Moses from between the two cherubim on the Ark's cover the biblical account states that the ark was created a year0:34:58after the Israelite exodus from Egypt according to a pattern given to Moses by God at the foot of Mount Sinai0:35:07thereafter the gold-plated acacia chest was carried by its staves while enroute by the Levites in advance of the people0:35:16went on the march towards the promised land or at the head of the Israelite army in transport the Ark was concealed0:35:25under a large veil made of skins and blue cloth carefully hidden even from the eyes of the priests and the Levites who carried it when at rest0:35:35a portable building the tabernacle meaning residence or dwelling place was set up to house the Ark it was built of0:35:44woven layers of curtains along with 40 eight boards clad with polished gold standing like vertical blinds Solomon's0:35:53Temple in Jerusalem superseded it as the dwelling place of God some 300 years later commentary there has to be a0:36:04bridge between the finite and the infinite there has to be a place where the ephemeral meets the eternal there0:36:13has to be a bridge between the knowable and the unknowable and there has to be bedrock at the foundation the Ark which0:36:25is the portal to God is to be carried on the shoulders of those who are holy it is not to be touched to touch the Ark is0:36:34to risk death there are holy things that cannot be touched except at mortal risk those things that cannot be touched are0:36:43at the very foundation of the community the Ark must be placed at the center of the temple the temple must be placed at0:36:54the center of the community the community must be arranged around what is untouchable and unshakeable the0:37:03untouchable and unshakable is what is axiomatic the people following the Ark have determined to journey together0:37:12toward the eternal promised land the city arranged properly around the Ark of the Covenant is eternal Jerusalem0:37:23something must be axiomatic or everything shakes and Falls the axiomatic cannot be expressed fully in words instead the axiomatic untouchable0:37:36and unshakable is what makes communication in words possible the axiomatic is a spirit a process a living0:37:46force its manifestations however are concrete that is the transformation of the Spirit into matter that is the0:37:55generation of the tablets of stone the Ark of the Covenant contains the rules that are derived in the first0:38:04order from the axiomatic principle that principle is the spirit that made the rules manifest that spirit is the0:38:13ultimate inhabitant of the ark and the rules the result of its action that spirit is the creative logos the Ark of0:38:22the Covenant and the temple are replaced by the cathedral at the center of the community the cathedral is the cross in0:38:31architectural form the cross is where the transformation takes place the transformation is the incorporation of the body of Christ that incorporation is0:38:42a dramatic ritual is the embodiment of the decision not to believe in Christ but to act him out which is to believe0:38:52in a much deeper manner than to merely believe Christ is he who transcends death by voluntarily accepting death0:39:02Christ is he who rejects the kingdoms of this world for the kingdom of God Christ is he who speaks the truth that creates0:39:11the habitable order that is good from the chaos of potential that exists prior to the materialization of reality Christ0:39:21is he who wields potential as the sword that Cleaves death Christ is he whose radical acceptance of the conditions of0:39:31life defeats the hatred bitterness and vengefulness that the tragedy and malevolence that taints being otherwise produces without the acceptance of death0:39:43bitterness rules and hell triumphs Christ is the potential of man and woman it is said that man and woman alike are0:39:54made in the image of God and that God is he who uses the eternal logos to generate habitable order from the chaos of potential this is the axiom this is0:40:05the diamond at the center of the world this is the spirit in the arc that is untouchable this is the bedroom of the culture that brings peace and0:40:15prosperity and that respects the dignity of man this is the great truth this is the responsibility whose acceptance allows each of us to live despite the0:40:25catastrophic fragility of our limited being our likeness to God gives each of us a value that transcends the finite0:40:35individual and society alike are charged with the ethical demand to respect that value this is not only the presumption that grounds the idea of the rights of0:40:45man it is the presumption that lays upon each of us the ultimate responsibility that is the inevitable corollary of those rights face the chaos of the0:40:57future employ the logos of which you are a part to transform that chaos into the habitable order that is good speak the0:41:07truth embody the truth accept impossibly the limitations that make being possible0:41:16dispense in that manner with resentment hatred and the desire for infinite and unbounded vengeance and all the cruelty and evil that accompanies it0:41:26pick up the cross of your tragedy and betrayal accept its terrible weight hoist it onto your shoulders and0:41:35struggle impossibly upward toward the kingdom of God on the hill the alternative is death and hell part 5 the0:41:47psychological meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ Easter message - this is a somewhat extended and altered0:41:57version of a commentary that I wrote for the London Sunday Times Magazine in the0:42:06beginning only the king was sovereign then the nobles became sovereign then with the Greeks all men became sovereign0:42:17then came the Christian Revolution and every individual male/female beggarman tax collector prostitute0:42:26thief became so impossibly equally sovereign then our cultural and legal systems wrapped themselves tightly0:42:35around that ultimately unlikely narrative of individual sovereignty and made it their central unshakeable pillar now we all give each other the respect0:42:46of individual citizens who are sovereign without remembering or noticing that we are simultaneously accepting the proposition that every singular one of0:42:56us is a divine center of logos a divine center of the eternal word that brings habitable order into being through the voluntary truthful confrontation with0:43:07chaos and the unknown and if any one of us is not treated in this manner if anyone no matter how powerful reacts to any of us no matter how downtrodden0:43:18as if our free will is ilusory or our role in choosing the outcomes of our lives non-existent then we get offended and angry and agitated and insulted and0:43:29rightly so our spectacularly and miraculously functional Western legal systems are predicated on the acceptance of the intrinsic value of the individual0:43:40predicated on the idea that each person can step forward voluntarily accept the burden of being transformed positively in consequence and share the results of0:43:50that transformation with everyone else it is in that manner that each of us pushes everything away from the abyss and a bit more heavenward is the0:44:01apparent necessity for such insanely high regard and illusion it is certain that it is at least functional and therefore not so obviously illusory it0:44:12is also equally certain that we have not outlined any more viable materialistic alternative you might well ask is the0:44:22hypothesis of intrinsic human value justified is our apparent ability to face the as of yet on manifest future and decide on the nature of its0:44:32realization in the present genuine and real is it true despite its prehensile ility that we are free0:44:41conscious beings and then our conscious freedom plays a role in constructing the cosmos it could merely be as the cynics0:44:50and reductionists hold that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of materialistic processes that there is no free will or at least none of any0:44:59genuine import that there is no accompanying moral responsibility or freely chosen destiny there are however valid and not so0:45:08simply dispensed with reasons to avoid too premature and casual acceptance of such conclusions even the greatest of us0:45:17do not understand consciousness not a bit much less comprehend the role it plays in being we have no idea currently0:45:26seriously no idea how the material substrate of the brain produces the awareness and more the self-awareness that seems so vital to the existence of0:45:37the cosmos if there is no center of experience to experience something anything then it is very difficult to say in what manner that something or0:45:47anything exists reality requires an observer and as far as we can tell that observer is consciousness even more so0:45:58self-consciousness our awareness our self-awareness appears to confront the unformed potential of the future and to0:46:07cast it into the concrete reality of the present our consciousness acts on possibility like the logos of the farther acted on the pre cosmogonic0:46:16chaos at the beginning of time it is in that manner that we are made in the image of God and we all demand to be treated as if that were true and who0:46:28would dare to deny that such a demand is made for valid and perhaps even ultimately valid reasons consider the evidence from our actions when you treat0:46:39yourself as if you matter then you thrive when you treat those around you as if they are inhabited by a spark of divinity then your relationships0:46:48stabilize and grow some Dainius lee when we produce society's predicated on the great idea of the inherent value of each individual from0:46:59saint to criminal then men become free and productive and capable of living the meaningful lives that lend dignity to the tragedy of their limited existences0:47:10and when we fail to do so then our society's degenerate into the tyrannical and murderous tribal structures that seem to exist as the only certainly0:47:21manifest alternative is this not all indicative of the existence of some profound truth obviously we are0:47:30constrained and severely so by the manner of our corporeal being we are subject to deterministic rules in a0:47:39seriously profound manner we do not have the power to shape things in any old way whatsoever at any time or place but we0:47:48can certainly and demonstrably and apparently willfully advance in the direction of our imagination and in quite a staggering and compelling manner0:47:57is this not indicative of who we genuinely are is this not a perhaps the primal existential truth we are in0:48:10danger in the west of abandoning our culture of leaving our great foundational stories to die on the altar of our inquisitiveness cynicism and0:48:19carelessness of degenerating into nihilism or returning in a reactionary manner to an archaic and destructive tribalism of the right or the left it0:48:29matters not these twin dread paths will not lead us to where we would want to be if we decided to be conscious and careful such abandonment will weaken us0:48:41fatally as individuals it will lay us open to possession by all manner of demonic conceptual alternatives it will0:48:50make us vulnerable to our enemies within and without it is psychologically true that each of us should open ourselves up to the tragedy of being it is0:49:00psychologically true that should pick up our tragic burdens and crosses die continually and renew our souls continually it may0:49:10be more than psychologically true as well it may be a truth of cosmic significance that is the death and resurrection celebrated by Easter and it0:49:21is time for us to wake up become conscious and recognize it as such it is not possible to encapsulate within any finite written account the total import0:49:31of the idea of Christ's death and rebirth the impossible claim of the bodily resurrection of one man conjoined with the notion that this event was both0:49:41of world redeeming and cosmic significance simply cannot be understood once and for all within any singular frame of interpretation even for0:49:51die-hard atheists of the scientific type think Richard Dawkins and sam Harris a great mystery remains why has this strange and thoroughly0:50:01implausible story exercised such immense impact it is because each life is a tragedy tainted by malevolence it is0:50:10because life is suffering as we all are each of us vulnerable and ignorant made all too frequently bitter resentful and angry because of just that and more than0:50:21willing to make things worse in that anger but we all admire courage and the accompanying willingness to abide by the truth no matter how terrible in the face0:50:31of that suffering we all recognize in such courage and truth at least by our admiration of it an antidote to the catastrophe of life we all know that in0:50:41the absence of such courage and truth mere catastrophe degenerates all too frequently into hell imagine that acceptance of vulnerability0:50:51and ignorance is the precondition for growth imagine that confrontation with the terrible unknown with its paralyzing manifestations of tragedy and0:51:01malevolence is necessary to catalyze both wisdom and maturity imagine finally that human consciousness plays some0:51:10central as of yet poorly understood role in the reality of the cosmos at least as necessary observer imagine all of that0:51:20then ask yourself what is the absolute hypothetical limit of human attainment when vulnerability and ignorance are fully and completely accepted when the0:51:31unknown is squarely confronted and when consciousness is given its due as the very center of the world that's Christ's acceptance of the0:51:40crucifix that's his willingness to be betrayed subject to the evil of his closest companions and the state and his embrace of brokenness and death it is pure truth0:51:52that even a small leaven of humility and courage engenders resilience progress and growth it is pure truth that0:52:01resentful rejection of the price of finite being multiplies suffering endlessly and unnecessarily what is the0:52:10ultimate expression of those truths taken to their final conclusion who is to say who we are and what we might be capable of achieving if we develop the0:52:19courage to accept our terrible fates live in truth and stumble uphill this is the question posed by Christianity in0:52:28its very essence would you put everything you have and everything you are on the line so that you could learn to conduct yourself in the best possible0:52:37manner would you be willing to allow who you might be to continually and painfully triumph over who you currently are in the most ancient religious0:52:48language would you sacrifice what you love most to God to find out who and what you are we are in the final0:52:59analysis neither structure nor chaos each of us is instead best understood as a process as a living dynamic process as the very0:53:09process by which what we know what we know so insufficiently is transformed into what could yet be that is the0:53:18process by which our continued forward movement through life is constantly and inevitably depend to understand that and to welcome it0:53:28that is voluntary acceptance of the necessity of eternal transformation as an alternative to nihilistic despair or desperate and fatal identification with0:53:39the state this is the idea enacted during the ceremony of the Christian Eucharist incorporation of the body of0:53:48Christ is the symbolic transformation of the participant not into a believer of a set of facts religious though those facts may appear but into the act of0:53:58imitator of Christ into the person willing to undergo whatever death is necessary to bring about the next and better state of being into the person0:54:07willing to embrace his or her confrontation with the tragedy and malevolence of life to learn from that process of embrace and to move one step0:54:16closer in consequence to the eternally receiving City of God the idea of the dying and resurrecting God is one of the oldest ideas of0:54:25mankind widespread and exceptionally variant in its forms it forms part of the set of presuppositions that underlie the most ancient shamanic rituals0:54:35carried over perhaps from the Stone Age itself it is echoed in the foundational stories of ancient Mesopotamia Egypt and0:54:44Greece it manifests itself in allegorical forms in the figure of the Phoenix for example which immolates itself regains its youthful form and0:54:54rises in triumph from the ashes it recurs repeatedly in the tropes of popular culture as well bringing even those entirely devoid of religious0:55:04education under the spell Marvel's iconic Ironman plummets like Icarus from sky to ground after saving the world0:55:13from demonic serpentine other world forces and then arises from his death the child wizard Harry Potter must ultimately die and be reborn to defeat0:55:24Voldemort a very thinly disguised Satan all of that creative variation on a theme speaks of a deep in eradicable and0:55:34eternally re-emergence psychological reality we all see this in our day to day lives and we all know it because we see it a0:55:44small failure a small disappointment frustration or disenchantment engenders within us a small death a small descent into the underworld a small requirement0:55:55for rebirth a large failure produces a proportionately large catastrophe and transformation when you are compelled to0:56:05talk to someone because you face divorce or the failure of a treasured ambition or the illness or death of someone close you are walking yourself through the0:56:14eternal narrative stability crisis death transformation rebirth that's the story0:56:23of our lives that's the fall and the re-establishment of paradise the idea that the Savior is the figure who dies and resurrects is a0:56:33representation in dramatic or narrative form of the brute fact that psychological progress indeed learning itself requires continual death and0:56:43rebirth of lesser and greater magnitude if you are engaged in the serious interpersonal conflict or argument or facing a true crisis in your life the0:56:53new information confronting you cannot be incorporated without the oh so painful demise of your previous conceptions and all of the resistance0:57:03comprehension of that pain necessarily entails that's part and parcel of the process so famously described as assimilation and accommodation by the0:57:14great developmental psychologist John Piaget we each confront the world with a set of pre-conceptual ization x' whose function is simultaneously to0:57:24delimit and render pragmatic are varied perceptions thoughts and actions in the absence of this a priori0:57:33we simply cannot function nonetheless it is still insufficient no one ever knows enough and what we each do not yet know0:57:42will at some moment of crisis become a vital importance when something new and Hydra like confronts us and shakes us to our core what is old0:57:52anachronistic within must therefore immolate itself and die it is very rare indeed to learn something profound without suffering the0:58:01terrible pain of - dreams and the soul shaking terror of uncertainty and doubt this means that none of us should0:58:10identify in the most fundamental sense with what we currently know and presume means as well that we should all come to understand that so that we do not remain0:58:20confused about who we are this means that it is never sufficient to be conservative or to identify with the past or to become ideologically or0:58:29dogmatically committed or to remain stubbornly anachronistic and unchanged the environment transforms headlong around us and we all must run as fast as0:58:40we can as Ellis's Red Queen well knew just to stay in the same place it is not sufficient either to abandon tradition0:58:49and structure entirely in a headlong and irresponsible rush towards the anomalous and revolutionary structure is insufficient but it is still necessary0:58:59and the ethical requirement for respecting and maintaining it is still of paramount importance as well similarly avoid falling prey to the0:59:10temptation of identifying with the chaotic depressing anxiety ridden and nihilism inducing state of affairs engendered by the terrible confrontation0:59:20with the genuinely unknown even when thrust into the underworld by the dread events of our life we must not characterize ourselves as permanent inhabitants of that dark and dread place0:59:31lest we lose hope despair and seek revenge to progress psychologically you must let go sacrifice time and again in0:59:42the face of success of obstacles you must abandon those things that and often those people who are impeding your progress despite the fact that you may0:59:52have held them very close to your heart when you're wrong when you've missed the mark when you've sinned because that is the meaning of sin you must let the part1:00:01of you that is wrong and aiming improperly die then you must allow the new spirit manifesting itself within to spring to life that new1:00:11spirit that's the terrible information contained in whatever error you committed in living conjunction with the now transformed structures you1:00:21originally employed to frame the situation that new spirit it's a manifestation as well and in other words of the potential within you that had not1:00:31yet been called forth by the previous travails of your life Christ is symbolically the way and the1:00:41truth of life and no one comes to the Father except through him embracing the process of voluntary death and rebirth that is identical with psychological1:00:51development means determining to move forward and upward despite the horrors of life it means as well symbolically speaking rejuvenating the dead father or1:01:02rescuing him from stagnation and deterioration in the eternal underworld forthright individual confrontation with1:01:11the unknown renews the individual but also catalyzes cultural revitalization this is the essence of Christian ritual1:01:20and belief articulated as a psychological principle we must identify with that part of ourselves that is always stretching beyond what we currently know and has the faith to let1:01:31go of old certainties so that new patterns of being can be brought into place it is through identification with the process symbolized by Easter that we1:01:41are each redeemed and our culture revivified and salvaged we are all the slaves of Pharisees and lawyers of those who place Dogma above spirit at the cost1:01:52of spirit we are all subject to betrayal by ourselves and by all those who surround us we are all facing extinction in the most torturous of manners but1:02:03there is a spirit within us with sufficient courage to confront the true horrors of existence forthrightly to allow the transformation even death that1:02:13such confrontation catalyzes to occur and to leap forward renewed how is it that life might prevail in the1:02:22face of death and hell with arms open embracing its fate we are all fallen creatures and we all know it we are all1:02:32separated from what should be and thrown into the world of death and despair we are all brutally crucified on the cross that is the reality of life itself to1:02:43rebel against that fate merely worsens it transforming what could be mere tragedy into something indistinguishable from hell to argue bitterly and despair1:02:54around the deathbed of a loved one to take a single example is to turn all the pain of death and loss into something far worse to accept instead is that1:03:05simultaneously to transcend it's certainly courage and truth and perhaps even love and these three forces are something to behold1:03:14are they more powerful than despair and the desire for vengeance that is the Christian suggestion and the Christian command to act out the proposition that1:03:26courage and truth and love are more powerful than death and despair and to accept what transpires as a consequence that is Easter and the death and1:03:36resurrection of Christ we forget or remain blind to such things at our great peril